Clarity or Death!

This poetry collection, whose title is taken from a letter by Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, addresses the desire for clarity in knowledge of the world, the universe, and oneself. Five poems are inspired by the work of physicist Richard Feynman, while others ponder infinity, numbers, and the 39-poem sequence "Mere Bagatelle," which explores the assertions of American philosopher Jerry Fodor. Erudite and challenging, yet never straying far from the personal, these poems explore the very nature of ideas and the various ways in which science, mathematics, art, and philosophy illuminate what it is to be human.

Jeffrey Wainwright is the author of the poetry collections Heart's Desire, Out of the Air, and The Red-Handed Pupil and two books of criticism, Acceptable Words: Essays on the Poetry of Geoffrey Hill and Poetry: The Basics. He is an English professor at Manchester Metropolitan University and a former professor at the University of Wales and Long Island University.

The coffee stain	p. 11
We may be able to reduce the number of different things, i-v	p. 12
The visible universe can only be of the kind that permits us	p. 17
The starling state of the universe must have been very highly ordered	p. 18
The universe is like a pool that has had a stone thrown into it	p. 19
All the ordered forms of energy in the universe would ultimately find themselves degraded	p. 20
Oh! Oh!	p. 21
There may be symmetrical universes but they are not ours	p. 22
A point is never alone, i-iv	p. 23
By categories do we maister [master] the world	p. 27
Facts: I bounce my ball	p. 28
We so love the laws	p. 29
Against those who refuse definitions	p. 30
What need we know of the workings of Nature in order to appreciate how consciousness may be a part of it?	p. 31
Faith in reason is the trust that the ultimate natures of things lie together in a harmony which excludes mere arbitrariness	p. 32
The abstraction of number is beautiful	p. 33
... and with the Indian figures 987654321 and zephira all calculations are democratically possible, i-iii	p. 34
The wall that separates the living from one another is no less opaque than the wall that separates the living from the dead	p. 37
Mere Bagatelle, 1-39	p. 39
Call death an observation, i-iii	p. 83
Acknowledgements	p. 87
Notes	p. 87
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