Wonderful Investigations Essays, Meditations, Tales

by Beachy-Quick, Dan

• ISBN13: 9781571313270
• ISBN10: 1571313273
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2012-04-03
• Publisher: Milkweed Editions

Summary

Over the course of six critically acclaimed books—including a compelling meditation on Moby-Dick—Dan Beachy-Quick has established himself as “one of America’s most significant young poets” (Lyn Hejinian).

In Wonderful Investigations, Beachy-Quick broaches “a hazy line, a faulty boundary” between our daily world and one rich with wonder; a magical world in which, through his work as a writer, Beachy-Quick participates with a singular combination of critical intelligence and lyricism. Touching on the works of Emerson, Thoreau, Proust, and Plato, among others, Beachy-Quick outlines the problem of duality in modern thought—the separation of the mind and body, word and referent, intelligence and mystery, human and natural—and makes the case for a fuller kind of nature poetry, one that strives to overcome this false separation, and to celebrate the notion that “wonder is the fact that the world has never ceased to be real.”

Author Biography

Dan Beachy-Quick is the author of four acclaimed collections of poems: North True South Bright (Alice James, 2003), Spell (Ahsahta, 2004), Mulberry (Tupelo, 2006), and, most recently, This Nest, Swift Passerine (Tupelo, 2009). In 2008, Milkweed Editions published his first work of nonfiction, A Whaler’s Dictionary. He completed his MFA in poetry at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and is the recipient of a Lannan Foundation residency among many other honors. Beachy-Quick previously taught in the Writing Program at the School of Art Institute of Chicago, and is currently an associate professor of English at Colorado State University.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. xv
Four Essays
The Hut of Poetry	p. 3
The Laurel Crown	p. 19
The Indweller's Aversion	p. 31
The Nightingale's Drought, the Nightingale's Draught	p. 63
Interlude: Meditations
Typhonic Meditation	p. 97
On Verdant Themes	p. 101
Meditations in the Hut	p. 111
Four Tales
The Song Inside the Bird Song	p. 127
The Children, the Woods	p. 135
A Point That Flows	p. 157
Apology for the Astrolabe	p. 179
Epilogue: Puzzle and Music Box	p. 201
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