The 55th review 48th BOOK "Jeffrey Wainwright – The Reasoner"

This book is very good, this book has an amazing story that can interest the reader. And I have read this book more than once. You should read this book! By Rifaldi Fauzan

The world of Jeffrey Wainwright’s The Reasoner tends to be one underlined by controlled and self-assured impulses, whether the poems are dealing with generalised subjects and people or those drawn directly from his own sphere of experience. Reinscribed into the realm of writing, of a linguistic apprehension that likes to consider itself accomplished, completed, these subjects become possibly banal, and the poet readily accepts them as such.

In reality, the figure of the Reasoner implies, there is not much comfort to be found in the high-flung intellectual life; for the human mind, delineated by an awareness of the inevitability of its own limits, perhaps the best option is to absorb, and be absorbed by, the circumstances that surround us, as the 95 poems that make up the volume are wont to do.

There is no dominant “idea” in this collection, and that is largely its point: that the myth of stable meaning is insufficient to hold together a world as complex and unwieldy as the one inhabited by us, the tribe of complexity and unwieldiness:

At all times, the speaker – or assorted speakers – casts his eyes warily at suggestions of abiding “truths”. In fact, the first quarter or so of the collection abounds with simple questions with no simple answers. And yet, in the attempt to reconcile the larger unity that he has in mind, Wainwright is simultaneously drawn to and repelled by the central question of the modern condition: why not?  We see this in a poem such as “25”, where he remarks upon “Another ant, another purpose for its tentative forefoot. / But I know you would not have me turn away.” To a sentiment such as this, the poems in The Reasoner open up the discourse of possibility, of an unembarrassed celebration of equanimity.

The speaker in The Reasoner is inclined towards exposing a strong sense of the modern attitude, while admitting an affection towards it, and Wainwright fleshes this out with much confidence. Even the most spare of these poems still appear aligned with the loose trajectory of the collection – “Piero knows that even he does not see everything, / this is just one of many seeings / and without shadow he would be blind.” (“30”). And if the poems speak from the seeming shallowness of aphoristic constructions, they are nonetheless the product of meditative depth.