The Five Quintets
MICHEAL O’SIADHAIL
(BAYLOR UNIVERSITY PRESS, 381 pp, £30.99)
Tablet bookshop price £27.89 • Tel 020 7799 4064

Has the spirit of our age entered a bewildered senility? A series of political, social and environmental events engendering publications with titles like How Democracy Ends suggests an ­unravelling of long-held assumptions and the disassembling of a shared social and intellectual landscape. Can anyone save us from drowning in the Hellespont of such catastrophic cultural dementia?

Micheal O’Siadhail’s The Five Quintets may offer an answer. In this extraordinary poem cycle, O’Siadhail reflects on the contemporary world in an outworking of his unfashionable conviction that poetry belongs in the public sphere. How, he asks, can a deep engagement with the sources of modernity resource a vision of our future? Each of the five quintets divides into five cantos that treat different aspects of who we are. In “Making”, O’Siadhail explores artistic creativity – writers, poets and composers. In “Dealing”, he is in conversation with economists.