The Fountain opens on the Viennese U-Bahn, emerging into startling winter sunlight. This image of subterranean eruption is one of many in the book, which returns obsessively to real and figurative fountains. Isaac Nowell’s fountain is a social and mythical locus, a place of memory and forgetting, the source to which history returns and is recycled. Roaming freely between classical and contemporary registers, Nowell’s twelve-line poems feel less like narratives or speeches than fragments of scenes or sensations. The movement of a lover’s hand in the dark, or the gradation of light at dawn, are points of momentary contact with that ‘one big wonderful dangerous accident’, life itself.

The Fountain opens on the Viennese U-Bahn, emerging into startling winter sunlight. This image of subterranean eruption is one of many in the book, which returns obsessively to real and figurative fountains. Isaac Nowell’s fountain is a social and mythical locus, a place of memory and forgetting, the source to which history returns and is recycled. Roaming freely between classical and contemporary registers, Nowell’s twelve-line poems feel less like narratives or speeches than fragments of scenes or sensations. The movement of a lover’s hand in the dark, or the gradation of light at dawn, are points of momentary contact with that ‘one big wonderful dangerous accident’, life itself.