Eunoia
CBC Books | CBC | Posted: March 6, 2017 2:52 PM | Last Updated: March 9, 2017
Christian Bök
Eunoia is a groundbreaking collection with a daring experiment at its core: the main part of the book consists of univocalic chapters, meaning that each chapter uses only one vowel repeatedly (see the excerpt below). It is a text that is both poetry and prose, completely compelling and original, and demonstrates the real personality of the English language.
Eunoia won the 2002 Griffin Poetry Prize.
From the book
Awkward grammar appals a craftsman. A Dada bard as daft as Tzara damns stagnant art and scrawls an alpha (a slapdash arc and a backward zag) that mars all stanzas and jams all ballads (what a scandal). A madcap vandal crafts a small black ankh — a hand-stamp that can stamp a wax pad and at last plant a mark that sparks an ars magna (an abstract art that charts a phrasal anagram). A pagan skald chants a dark saga (a Mahabharata), as a papal cabal blackballs all annals and tracts, all dramas and psalms: Kant and Kafka, Marx and Marat. A law as harsh as a fatwa bans all paragraphs that lack an A as a standard hallmark.
From Eunoia by Christian Bök ©2002. Published by Coach House Books.