The Five Quintets is both poetry and cultural history. It offers a sustained reflection on modernity--people and movements--in poetic meter. Just as Dante, in his Divine Comedy, summed up the Middle Ages on the cusp of modernity, The Five Quintets takes stock of a late modern world on the cusp of the first-ever global century.
Celebrated Irish poet Micheal O'Siadhail structures his Quintets to echo the Comedy. Where Dante had a tripartite structure ( Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso), O'Siadhail has a five-part structure, with each quintet devoted to a discipline--the arts; economics; politics; science; and philosophy and theology. Each quintet is also marked by a different form: sonnets interspersed by haikus ("saikus"), iambic pentameter, terza rima, and two other invented forms.
The Five Quintets captivates even as it instructs, exploring the ever-changing flow of ideas
