SOURCE: Scroggins, Mark. “The Master of Speech and Speech Itself: Nathaniel Mackey's ‘Septet for the End of Time.’” Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, no. 9 (fall 1992): 44-7.

In the following essay, Scroggins discusses Mackey's chapbook, Septet for the End of Time, and draws comparisons between this work and the music of French composer Olivier Messaien's “Quatour pour la fin du Temps” (1941).

Nathaniel Mackey's Septet for the End of Time immediately confronts its reader with the order of numerology, and beyond that, the order of speech itself, the saying that incarnates the numbers. Its three epigraphs provide three possible numerological entries to the eight poems: that of the Dogon elder Ogotemmêli (as transcribed by Marcel Griaule, the French anthropologist), that of the Koran, and that of the Pyramid Texts of Unas. Others can be adduced: the seven stars, seven candlesticks, and seven seals of the Book...