Cnuasach filíochta
“Tá an cnuasach seo tógtha ar dhúshraith thorthúil teanga. Tá sí chomh mór sin ar a thoil ag an bhfile – gach réim di – go bhfuil sé ar a chompord á síneadh amach, á lúbadh go cliste, á cur as a riocht (uaireanta ag bordáil ar bhealach greannmhar ar an áiféis), is ag spraoi léi go cruthaitheach… Tá a ghlór soiléir féin ag an bhfile seo, glór a aithneofar mar ghlór dúchasach Gaelach.” (Máire Ní Annracháin, Moltóir an Oireachtais)
Andreas Vogel’s poetry collection “Cuntas (Coiscéim, 2023) uses accountancy and higher mathematics as its unlikely organising principle. In it, the predictability, inevitability and sterility of the number is challenged by the lawless truculence, the dirty defiance of the word. This tension continues to run through the book as a struggle between different subjects, registers, voices and forms, sometimes in contradiction of each other, at other times in surprising harmony. There is both method and madness in the pervasive juxtaposition highly poetry-resistant matters (obscure scientific terminology, check lists, artificial intelligence, natural foolishness, war, pestilence and the NCT, and, again and again, digits and formulas) with some of the most intimate and existential concerns about survival, feeling safe the world, grief, tentative love and meaning. It is a literary experiment which tries to straddle Mount Parnassus and the Tech Lab (with some fun thrown in!); to face the threat in and to this world with the fragile resilience of human creativity and to prove the improbable possible. Sometimes numbers rhyme. And poetry does count.”
(Poetry Ireland Review 143)
