whereabouts 

Edward Carson’s whereabouts might have been doomed to hopeless abstraction from the get-go. These heady poems exploring philosophies of cognition offer readers few concrete images, but Carson nevertheless manages to provoke a moving narrative climax, with the mind as map or landscape functioning as an extended metaphor that finds expression in myriad binaries: near and far, subject and object, and, ultimately, male and female. 

The opening poems are very tight, with Carson’s syntax and line breaks evoking synaptic gates as they pivot quickly into each sub-clause: “this brain / its aporia // unfolding / the map // of its being / into another.” The poet pushes deeper into cognitive science in the second section, with poems that draw their titles from the different regions of the brain, as in “Left Lingual Gyrus Occipital Lobe,” and that explore in greater depth themes such as the problem of world and mental representation: “what we think of as things are // without doubt the give and take between a / thing and its thought but can never be the // thought or thing itself.” The introduction of a second speaker—who is both lover and intellectual opponent—in the book’s third section opens up the internal cognitive processes these poems explore, putting them into fruitful dialogue. Though the terrain in which this conversation unfolds—binary sex and gender—feels out of step with our time (“she says a man dwells / within one life whereas a woman lives in / several more but seldom one of her own”), the poems nevertheless resonate (“so speak with me she says and say you / feel this shimmering pressure binding us / iridescent in its fearful intimacy”). Read as personal reflections that draw on Carson’s lived experience in a heterosexual relationship, the poems in whereabouts offer a fascinating peek into a mind at work, one that is perpetually seeking to escape itself, to find union both with the world and with another mind.