Vel

Author: P. Inman

Publisher: O Books (1995)

Vel makes it clear once again that without Peter Inman’s work a whole register of our language would not exist. It comes to us via his uniquely musical intelligence, his compound mind’s ear, opening a range from “suth. pitted. light. stream.” to “forks of ponders” to “Their / every brink of mouth.” This work is as uncompromised and incompressible in its lush detail as all linguistic weather beyond dichotomies of sense/nonsense. What Tractarian Wittgensteins might say must be passed over in silence, Inman’s work realizes as the possibility of a third term, n e w sense. When I read “teak of near eskimo” and “he couldn’t hide the mind blanch / ed past,” I marvel.

—Joan Retallack