"The Resolved Soul and Created Pleasure" is not, he claims, "like the presumably later and essentially
unlyrical and unsingable Dialogue Between the Soul and the Body, which was certainly not written for music, distinctly and unmistakably Marvellian" (32).
The award-winning poet is decidedly (and uncharacteristically)
unlyrical here: The cluttered arcade humans have made of the world may be as entertaining and glossy as a picture book (once seemed), but it doesn't offer much in the way of real hope or consolation.
Each poem in Dawes's newest collection seeks the answers to life's most pertinent questions, merging lyric poetry with such seeming
unlyrical issues as politics, natural disasters, and social upheaval, Dawes has published over thirty books--more than half of them collections of poetry--in his career.
For a moment the narrator leaves his/her body (though not the body of the text) and imagines life without gravity; then, back with Elgin, dialogue is reported--a most
unlyrical dialogue that now, curiously, occurs without the usual signals, quotation marks:
Eric Stanley modifies Machan by emphasizing that 'Audelay is doubly blind and deaf, in body and in spirit' and that the trope underscores the sermonic quality of many poems ('The True Counsel of Conscience or The Ladder of Heaven: In Defense of John Audelay's
Unlyrical Lyrics', in Expedition nach der Wahrheit: Poems, Essays, and Papers in Honour of Theo Stemmler, ed.
The tension between Adrover and his bandoneon, his obvious pleasure in producing this
unlyrical but hauntingly compelling music, left the impression that the man and his instrument were the most passionate duo on stage.
Verbally incomprehensible, nasty, alienated,
unlyrical, misogynistic, violent, and racist, it seems to me the musical version of graffiti.