Nothingness is often imagined as an absence. A Thing for Nothingness portrays it as a quiet gravity, drawing us toward what cannot be possessed or named. Shaped by paradox and sensuous imagery, these poems approach the threshold where silence begins to blossom.
In her foreword, editor Ingrid Wilson praises the elegance and beauty of the collection's language, while poet and composer Eliot Cardinaux observes how its poems render meaning "precarious" beneath the expanding mystery of nothingness.
Both intimate and expansive, A Thing for Nothingness moves between the personal and the metaphysical, exploring how language shapes our experience of reality. It is a collection for readers drawn to contemporary poetry concerned with language, meaning, and existence.
Nothingness is often imagined as an absence. A Thing for Nothingness portrays it as a quiet gravity, drawing us toward what cannot be possessed or named. Shaped by paradox and sensuous imagery, these poems approach the threshold where silence begins to blossom.
In her foreword, editor Ingrid Wilson praises the elegance and beauty of the collection's language, while poet and composer Eliot Cardinaux observes how its poems render meaning "precarious" beneath the expanding mystery of nothingness.
Both intimate and expansive, A Thing for Nothingness moves between the personal and the metaphysical, exploring how language shapes our experience of reality. It is a collection for readers drawn to contemporary poetry concerned with language, meaning, and existence.
‘Nothing will come of nothing,’ states King Lear in the eponymous Shakespeare play,[1] yet physicists would have us believe that the entire known universe came from exactly that.[2] Which begs the question, from what, exactly? Logically speaking, nothing is a complete lack of any thing, which makes the concept of nothingness something of a paradox. It’s an issue I raised with the author when discussing his chosen title. He explained it thus:
I’ve been particularly attached to A Thing for Nothingness because I’ve been working with the phrase as something intentionally multi-layered. On one level, “to have a thing for” suggests attraction, even desire for an object/person. So the title is implying a fascination with nothingness itself. On another level, the book itself becomes “a thing for nothingness”, an object, an offering to the void of death or nonexistence. And implicitly, the title also gestures toward poetry itself, the poem as “a thing” placed inside the void where no things are, something fragile and temporary attempting to speak inside that final silence.
And so, A Thing for Nothingness was born.
The poet’s ‘Dictum’ is set out in the opening passage of the book, which states his aims in no uncertain terms, ‘My voyage is a concentration of shadows amplifying the dominion of dust.’ (p. 13). He works towards the attainment of a Zen-like state of enlightenment:
if only I were empty of the world
then the world could speak
through me
and leave on the table
illuminated under the candle
the true meaning
of things. (‘The World has Another Name,’ p.18)
One of the principal themes of this collection is the nature of paradox itself. In the Blakeian prophetic poem, ‘The Mouth is Now Fire and All Knowledge has Become Ash,’ the poet states that:
2.1 Everything is independent of everything else.
2.11 This comment is deeply interconnected to its clause.
2.2 Reality is one unbounded whole.
(p.50)
In another examination of such paradoxes, ‘Nada’ (pp. 61-62) examines the way we attempt to give definition to the indefinable by cloaking it in language:
…I am thinner than meaninglessness.
I not only borrow bodies; I coat my nothingness with language.
The subsequent poem, ‘Epilogue to Poetics’, expounds this theme further:
Poetry is an exercise in distillation. An appropriation of the
universal, namely, to compress the universe into the right
word. It is mutiny against language, a futile revolution
against excess. (p.66)
Here we have echoes of Lao Tsu’s wisdom:
The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth.
The named is the mother of ten thousand things.[3]
The idea of the sexual act as one of both creation and annihilation, (yet another paradox) is examined in poems such as ‘Haste,’ ‘Transpersonal’ and ‘Lust of the Equinox.’
Word games abound in this book, for example in ‘Und Wound (or on the Verge of Vergesslichkeit)’ (p.92) which examines the meaning of (in)existence. This further underlines the fact that language in general, and poetry in particular, could be regarded as a futile attempt to describe the indescribable.
I do not want to give a running account of every poem, chapter and theme within this collection. Suffice it to say that there were three main factors which influenced my decision to publish Saborío’s work over the many other manuscript submissions I have received this year. One was, most certainly, the subject matter, as discussed above, which has always been of interest to me. The second was that the manuscript I received was a thing complete in itself, well thought-out and deftly executed. The third was the elegance and beauty of the language used, which is, in my opinion, the essence of true poetry. With this observation, I leave the reader to enjoy the collection, and let its conundrums and conclusions (or lack thereof) speak for themselves.
Ingrid Wilson, Editor
[1] King Lear (1.1.90)
[2] See, for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universe ‘Much of very earliest time is not understood. An intense period of expansion called cosmic inflation is postulated to explain many astronomical observations and set the initial conditions for the Lambda-CDM model.’
[3] Lao Tsu, Tao Te Ching (Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English, Wildwood House 1991, first published 1972)
:::A PURIFICATION OF VISION:::
DICTUM
I can tell you where I’m going because I’ve been wrestling with remembrance toward the soft constellation and I scream in a loud abstraction: I aim beyond the tedium of destinations, and I will tell you. Migrating like ink into the empty apartment while the warmth of the sun sinks into my bloated pool of blood. The craftsmanship of carving windows onto the pale walls of silence. My voyage is a concentration of shadows amplifying the dominion of dust. The dialect is a purification of vision, to observe the structures that remain hidden behind the brightness of fear. This is where I’m going, dragging behind me the image of the ocean. Because I’ve lifted the endless darkness that pulsated like an essence on the surface of the world. There is where I’m going, toward the requiem in the mirror, bottomless branching in a gigantic leap within.
BEHIND THE WORLD
I am organizing a trance.
First the trunk
of the lightest sound
rises.
A colorless vapor
emerging,
pregnant with whisper.
I detect the curve
and force the spiral
to occur.
It climbs
quickly
above the world.
The sound
accumulates
into cumulus.
The eye leaves
its strings,
nervously exiting
the existence of the skull.
A moth stands
above the pyramid.
Running wild,
the antelope accelerate
past all memories
of sand.
I am becoming lake.
Wide diaphanous pond
absorbing the cleanest
blue of the sky.
My language
travels as ripple.
My waters borrow
the shadow of birds
to draw deep dark
enigmas.
I am found.
Fish inking
my vast body
with effervescence.
A glimmer,
partly mine,
partly universal,
is both reflection
and perfection.
I am returning
to the fingers.
First to touch
a rock named
Earth.
Then to point
to the wave
that wields
my thoughts.
THE WORLD HAS ANOTHER NAME
If I speak of the candle
if the words If I speak
of the candle
are coming from me
then I’ve failed
as a writer
the words must come
from the world
effortlessly
the same way light comes
off the surface of the table
or the way the candle’s flame
burns a hole of brightness
in the center of the world
if I say the center of the world
I must be invisible to all the rest
of the world
because to speak of the world
you must be empty of it
if you intend to mention its core
if the candle burns a hole of brightness
in the center of the world
then I must be deaf to its language
so it can make a sound
a sound that exalts the light and shadow
the same light and shadow
that are at the core of things
those things that I cannot speak of
because I am too polluted by the world
if only I were empty of the world
then the world could speak
through me
and leave on the table
illuminated under the candle
the true meaning
of things.
Elegant, philosophical, and breathtakingly lyrical, Pablo Saborío's A Thing For Nothingness is the kind of collection that poets of his generation aspire to. But Saborío has actually succeeded in the challenging work of bringing together compelling central concerns and questions with masterful execution of the verse. This accomplishment, as we can see from the brilliance of Saborío's craft, results from experiencing poetry as an art of verbs—of doing, being, witnessing, accepting, and transforming in the paradoxical effort to define that which resists definition.
In a foreword to the collection, editor Ingrid Wilson traces (as best they can be traced) the projects of the book. Saborío has discovered images and arrangements that grapple with the paradoxes of true poetry, the art's attempt to explain, describe, or define the things that challenge such clarity or make clarity impossible. In the poem "Epilogue to Poetics," Saborío writes one of the most succinct essays on poetry in recent memory. He articulates poetry's work of "distillation" and its tension with and friction against the very language used to make it. G.K. Chesterton would delight in the consciousness of paradoxes here (but it is also clear that Saborío's preoccupation with them surpasses Chesterton's in complexity).
Unsurprisingly, much of the power of Saborío's work comes from his brilliant emphasis on the grammatical predicates. How could subjects made of nouns and their adjectives take center stage in a collection that so intentionally explores the challenges to definability? It is clear that movement, activity, feeling, observing, absorbing, and dreaming are the dynamic material that makes this collection so effective and affecting. And what's more, so many lines manifest this effort in playful ways—wordplay, witty line breaks, clever associations. While Saborío's work appears and is grand in its scope and accomplishment, there is no loss of pleasure in witnessing the ephemeral acrobatics of his lines.
A Thing For Nothingness is a must-read, though the reader should be prepared to approach the collection with openness and imagination. These poems should receive multiple readings, in part, so that the reader may catch all of the possibilities the poet has left us, but also to allow the music of this book to play in new iterations in our consciousness. Whether intentional or not, Saborío has managed to deliver a book that shows its reader both beautiful poetry and a vision of how poetic thinking works. Poets, especially, will find Saborío's work validating and exciting, if sometimes also envy-inducing (it's that good).