Poetry, the Geometry of the Living Substance: Four Essays on Ágnes Nemes Nagy

Poetry, the Geometry of the Living Substance is the first serious and sustained study in English of one of the most important Hungarian writers of the 20th century, the modernist poet Ágnes Nemes Nagy. The book captures the dual nature of poetry, as a discourse of the infinite and the abyssal, through close readings of her poetry and prose. These four essays draw parallels between Ágnes Nemes Nagy and other thinkers and theorists, such as Rilke, Celan, Heidegger, Derrida, Beckett and Blanchot. The monograph explores the poetic paradigm changes of Nemes Nagy in her whole work, including her collections of poems, essays on poetics and other posthumous miscellaneous fragments. Drawing indirect parallels between the fields of poetics and epistemology, the central focus of the book is the parergonal relation between language and the external world, the psyche and the objective environment, trauma and memory within the poetic space.