The five-poem sequence that concludes Tim Lilburn’s first collection Names of God (1986) embodies fundamental aspects of his poetics and an early version of the intensely contemplative desire that characterizes so much of his later work. A series of Gedankenexperimente on the nature of God, the cosmos, light, mind, and matter, these early poems metaphorically entwine related aspects of quantum physics and apophatic theology, particularly as regards the dualistic nature and the indeterminacy of matter, consciousness, and language.
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