PROSTHESIS : : CAESAREA

"I speak not, I trace not, I breathe not thy name” begins a section from Byron’s “Stanzas for Music.” This is the one part from the Hebrew Melodies that he suppressed, allowing the other poems to be set to music by Isaac Nathan. This strange model, the model of absence, stands behind Susan Gevirtz’s CAESAREA: Herod’s City as metamodel, containing and generating a structure of strange models. It silently introduces and permits, 'like the night,' the many intersecting and merging arms or armatures ('the woman’s hundred arms'—Thrall, Gevirtz) that create the multiple rhythms, tones and trajectories of Gevirtz’s long poem. -- Norma Cole, from "For Susan Gevirtz's CAESAREA: Herod's City" in How2 (V.1, no. 6)