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.