Book of a Thousand Eyes

Lyn Hejinian recently received the 66th Fellowship from The Academy of American Poets for distinguished poetic achievement at mid-career. She lives in Berkeley, California.

"For Lyn Hejinian the concept "everything" or "everything living" is the greatest seduction. In this book of tales, poems, polemics, lullabies, treatises, asides (the behavior of birds, the behavior of ghosts; the dramas of capital, species, percipient individual), "everything" is captive to life and continuation is queen. Like Scheherazade's ploy, to which it more than nods, The Book of a Thousand Eyes spins out scene after moral after speculation merely for the payoff one wakes to daily--the privilege of beginning again. "Nothing has been proved," of course, but the combined exhilaration and outrage of what experience means in the language of the twenty-first century is robustly nailed in this book. "Sleep," Hejinian says, "can't put interpretation to rest"--far from it; regardless of which consciousness these antic and anti-summary works probe, they propose the very opposite of rest. Hejinian's sallies are at once pragmatic, mysterious, and an utter delight to read." --Jean Day, author, The I and the You "A third of the way into The Book of a Thousand Eyes comes the question, "Isn't sleep fitted to this world?" And the easy answer--abundantly Yes--both masks and unveils the bigger shape. (As the Earl of Anglesey noted, "To this Rhetorical Question the Commons pray they may Answer by another Question.") The devil's in the details every night, all night. Lyn Hejinian knows that familiarity breeds the predictable but she knows as well that--and how--"contact produces uncertainty." So this is a brilliantly uncertain book, a book of practical and fantastic connection, connection as multiple and as hopeless as love might be, connection as big and leggy as the night is long. Here, the old bifurcations and faultless authorities are broken down into a continuous waking hour. Waking?--owl-like, magnificent, traveling. Continuous?--"Our sleep has no conclusion." This book is night itself." --C. S. Giscombe, author, Prairie Style