The Caveat Onus: Book One

Interweaving I Ching hexagrammatic measures, Mayan calendar arithmetic & totem animals, and an unwobbling axis mundi as line of flight, the complex architectonics of this superb cyclical poem create a counter-word, an act of sympathetic magic, a harnessing of the destructively chaotic energies of hurricane Katrina. Begun eight months before the storm, then moving through the days & weeks that followed, and now paralleling the rebuilding of the city of New Orleans, Dave Brinks’ Caveat Onus series is a major poetic and shamanic enactment, as powerful, poetically innovative, and vital in its way as were Charles Olson’s admonitions to Gloucester in the Maximus Poems. -Pierre Joris