Bryan Sentes writes with a rare breadth of sensibility and style: bardic declamation and intimate lyric, ironic oracle and tart satire, incantatory deconstructions and romantic nature hymns. In this, his first full-length collection of poetry, subjects ranging from the chopping block of History to childhood memories, from Meister Eckhart to flying saucers, are rendered in a manner no less unsettling and exhilarating than the world around us.
Grand Gnostic Central is a poetic and philosophical work resolutely bent on wringing a delirious lucidity from the white noise at the start of the new Millennium...
where
The stars are all arranged in such a way
As to suggest an endless emptiness
Or heavens full of foreign deities.
Bryan Sentes was born and raised in Regina, Saskatchewan, where he studied both Continental and Anglo-American philosophy. Since 1986, he has lived in Montreal, where he studied literature until 1990. Presently, he divides his time between Europe and Montreal, teaching, translating, writing, and performing his poetry. Already familiar to readers in Europe, his poems have appeared in periodicals, anthologies, and three chapbooks, Budapest Suites, Gloze, and On the Phantom Air Ship Mystery. Grand Gnostic Central and other poems is selected from over ten years' work.
"...skill and professional polish.... captures that rare, spontaneous chemistry of language finding language."
— The Montreal Gazette
"...a strong sense of the mind's quest for transcendental meaning.... Sentes is a mature artist with serious things to say."
— Canadian Book Review Annual
"Ironic , sometimes satiric, Sentes' verse is philosophical and attuned to the nuances of rare and pivotal moments in time."
— Rampike
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