Dan Disney

Either, Orpheus Dan Disney

"Dan Disney's highly original either, Orpheus remakes the villanelle. The
'sound-swarms' in this contemporary 'orphic' work riff laterally on received
poetic and philosophical ideas and incorporate fascinating shreds of thinking
and saying. Rainer Maria Rilke and Soren Kierkegaard are the presiding
spirits in the volume, and Disney is also in discussion about divergent ways
of seeing and understanding with writers from all over the globe. This
inventive poetry explores culture, authenticity and translation, and quizzes
the lyric modes of apostrophe and song." - Paul Hetherington

"Dan Disney's either, Orpheus arrives with the force of a tropical weather
event to deliver a series of pulsating shocks to the languages of everyday
life. Neither strictly poetic nor purely philosophical, these deliriously
pedagogical poems summon Rilke, Levertov, Ashbery, Sartre, Kierkegaard,
Cage and multitudinous others to reconsider what we thought we knew of
authorship, form, religion, phenomenology and love. For Disney, the proper
response to Bloom's anxiety of influence is 'a godless both/and' in which a
series of 'elegiac anthroposcenes' transforms the labyrinth of solitude into
the kinds of worlds that we 'non-residents' might want to inhabit. Hospitable,
demanding, festive and fearless, either, Orpheus passes through 'where
previously it was not evident that anyone could find a passage". - Fiona Hile