The House Seen from Nowhere

Keith Waldrop

2002 • 230 pp. • $15.00
ISBN: 9-780-972333108

In Keith Waldrop's The House Seen from Nowhere, we are invited into a meditational drift that explores the 'tense emptiness' of being . The construction of all that surrounds us, the carpentry, wavers between order and the instability of order, is manifest in syntax and etymology. In this house, which is all things--body, fortress, residence, logic, language, mortality--we find mirrors, echoes, and spirits: "the figures light/delineates not/the light itself." Where we might use Zeno's Paradox to understand the relation between the knower and the known, it is in Keith's house that we find the paradox of 'empty disctinctions,' the tension between asymmetrical opposites. The house exists "not to inclose but/to include//without redemption."

If transcendental immanence were possible, it would be because Keith Waldrop had invented it; he’s the only one who could.

— National Book Foundation

Waldrop's brilliance of wit and device, the serenity of judgement, the articulation of research and reflection … — all these delight, and convince anew that poetry is a vast, holistic science, a science of sciences, from which an adept like Waldrop brings results we've never heard before.

— Robert Kelly in Rain Taxi VI, 2 (Summer 2001)

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