"Nathaniel Mackey's poetry ambitiously continues an American bardic line that unfolds from Leaves of Grass to Pound's Cantos to H.D.'s Trilogy to Olson's The Maximus Poems, winds through the whole of Robert Duncan's work, and extends beyond all of these. Mackey's words go where music goes: a brilliant and major accomplishment."
Don Share - Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize Citation ... Read more"Mackey, winner of the 2006 National Book Award for poetry, “continues Nod House’s continuation of Splay Anthem and the work that came before it” as he extends two interwoven and ongoing serial poems: Song of Andoumboulou and “Mu.” Commanding in their cerebral and musical reach, the poems do not require knowledge of previous installments, though hints to the themes here are found in the collection’s title, which references the West African griot tradition and jazz trumpeter Kenny Dorham’s song “Blue Bossa.” Mackey’s epic mode is one in which place, time, and personae collide and shapeshift, rendering a definitive origin or conclusion somewhat irrelevant. [...] What exists always exists in relationship to its negation, opening an elastic space in which form and dissolution maintain a fast­ paced, flexible dialectic dance. Mackey tracks a knowledge “gone by the time we heard/ it, galactic light’s late arrival/ an acoustic stand­in, light­year­ like/ but shrunken. Moment’s remit/ an/ odd sonic perfume.” The book itself follows in this pattern of continual departures, sustained in Mackey’s remarkable erudition and singular lyric virtuosity."
Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) "Nathan Mackey's ongoing serial projects in poetry and prose over the past three and a half decades arrow among the great wonders of our literary moment."
Robert Polito - Poetry Foundation "Nathaniel Mackey is a poet of ongoingness involved in a king of spiritualist or cosmic pursuit."
Edward Hirsch - The Washington Post Show Less