Fool

The Fool asks questions in Greta Stoddart’s fourth collection. When knowledge is ours at the tap of a key, what is it we’re accumulating, and is it at the expense of another, more intuitive, kind of knowing? What can we be trusted to know?

When knowledge is ours at the tap of a key, what is it we’re accumulating, and is it at the expense of another, more intuitive, kind of knowing?The word ‘fool’ derives from the Latin follis, one of whose meanings is ‘empty-headed person’. We can’t imagine such mindlessness but might it be possible that by ‘unknowing’ a thing we can start to see it properly? There’s a lot the fool doesn’t know – otherwise they wouldn’t be a fool. But can anyone be trusted to know anything? What can we be trusted to know?A certain apprehension runs through these poems; a low-level hum of discordance between inner and outer worlds, between the sceptical and the wondering mind. Ideas of belief and objective truth play out in various ways, often through lone figures, thinking aloud in a wilful kind of performance of being. Fool is Greta Stoddart’s fourth collection. Her third collection Alive Alive O was published by Bloodaxe in 2015.