Please note: In order to keep Hive up to date and provide users with the best features, we are no longer able to fully support Internet Explorer. The site is still available to you, however some sections of the site may appear broken. We would encourage you to move to a more modern browser like Firefox, Edge or Chrome in order to experience the site fully.

Supporting your high street Find out how »
The Five Quintets, Hardback Book

The Five Quintets Hardback

Hardback

Less than 10 available - usually despatched within 24 hours

Description

The Five Quintets is both poetry and cultural history.

It offers a sustained reflection on modernity - people and movements - in poetic meter.

Just as Dante, in his Divine Comedy, summed up the Middle Ages on the cusp of modernity, The Five Quintets takes stock of a late modern world on the cusp of the first-ever global century. Celebrated Irish poet Micheal O'Siadhail structures his Quintets to echo the Comedy.

Where Dante had a tripartite structure ( Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso), O'Siadhail has a five-part structure, with each quintet devoted to a discipline - the arts; economics; politics; science; and philosophy and theology.

Each quintet is also marked by a different form: sonnets interspersed by haikus (""saikus""), iambic pentameter, terza rima, and two other invented forms. The Five Quintets captivates even as it instructs, exploring the ever-changing flow of ideas and the individuals whose contributions elicited change and reflected their times.

The artists, economists, politicians, scientists, and philosophers O'Siadhail features lived complex lives, often full of contradictions.

Others, though deeply rooted in their context, transcended their time and place and pointed beyond themselves - even to us and to a time after modernity's reign. The ancient Horace commended literature that delivered ""profit with delight."" In The Five Quintets, Micheal O'Siadhail has done just that: he delights us in the present with his artistry, even as he reveals hidden treasures of our past and compels us toward the future.

Information

Other Formats

£28.44

Less than 10 available - usually despatched within 24 hours
Add to Basket
Sign in to add to wishlist
 
Free Home Delivery

on all orders

 
Pick up orders

from local bookshops

Information