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In this book Patrick Mahony points up the difficulty of separating the poem, its contents as well as its linguistic form, from the poet. An in-depth reading of this volume provides ample evidence for the essential correctness of this thesis as it applies to Mahony himself. His immersion in language, his capacity to analyze it at an all but microscopic level, his creative capacity to extract meaning from its content and, more particularly, from its form, and his remarkable linguistic erudition all taken together strongly suggest that he is a person who, more than most, experiences the world through the word.
This manner of experiencing is the quality that so draws together the thirteen essays of this volume, separately published between 1974 and 1983, that they more cohesively comprise a book than might have been expected. The book is in two parts, the first an analysis of certain important psychoanalytic topics as discourse, and the second a very close reading of a number of significant literary works in order to search out their underlying "nuclear symbolic principle" to detail further how a semantic and syntactic analysis