Michael McAloran

Of the Nothing of Michael McAloran

Here we are. In the eternal, modern dilemna to tell it as it is, to rip into and burn illusions and falsities, niceties and conventions. This is a book about difference in itself, the multiplied subject, the zonar and polar consciousnesses which roam, which know too much but can reconcile little. Raucous night grants the dead in their nothing. Intricate frames where part-sentences, 'apres l'apocalypse' images, partial rhymes and songs, bit-conversations, mingle in a polyphonic surge of voices-images. Which is the miraculous, not the mythological murderer with the jawbone of an ass, not the thirty pieces of silver, not any demiurge, just that this stream of consciousness exists, in the absence of any teleology or meaning, words that make themselves. A Beckett to tell us how we murdered and ate Godot before we waited aimlessly for him. There is Beckett here in the dusty sheets of a final room, the tremendous mound of futility the poet piles over humanity like a cromlech.