Fred Unwalla (Editor-in Chief, PIMS Publications) on Of Gazelles Unheard

"Amid small bitternesses and abandoned to the quotidian marketplace, I have heard the gazelles leaping walled dreams, wandering perfumed gardens, bending the voice into plangent ghazals. Here I have watched an instrument make a Copernican turn, translating a terrible presence into a tenable prescience; and here lyric demonstration, a devotion brimming with echo-words from other modalities, shows triumphantly but never jubilantly the incoherence of philosophers. Even with small inwardness of the original incandescence, I can read /e//xplosante-fixe/ in this baroque, and follow the /dérive/ from which all derivations spring. So how do I say, what a beautiful book you have given me in /Of Gazelles Unheard/! To refashion out of dark death a yielding obscurity that reading might mime is perhaps but a portentous description of all poetic labour. And yet, the body of the poet never found in its own death is here, in these reinstaurations, re-found anew and bequeathed the figure of a slender corpus of Callimachean measure and weight, poems of deep song, pondered and cunning. And at its heart, or end, a variorum for the philology that remains ushers new revelation: suddenly, in those blank spaces and lambent traces constellations learn to paginate thought like a throw of dice, almost abolishing chance. Thank you for this extraordinary gift: long may the powers from whence it issues flourish."