Overview

so the long stretch of life / reveals its curvature / by those widely separated // moments when we are / brushed / by this awareness // of an other / that we do not know In his latest collection of poems, poet, deep state researcher, and radical medievalist Peter Dale Scott interrogates topics that have occupied his later thought and writing, such as moreness (our need, as humans, to be more than we are), minding, and enmindment (the generative synergy, engaging both hemispheres of our bicameral mind, of intellectual and spiritual enlightenment, now out of kilter). In pursuit of these themes, Scott’s voice ranges far, from engaging with poets of the past and, hopefully, the future to critiques of coercive political power, from elegies for important figures in his life – Leonard Cohen, Daniel Ellsberg, Czeslaw Milosz, and Robert Silvers – to fan letters for “minders” Chelsea Manning and Dr Christine Blasey Ford. Dreamcraft is a book that crosses distances and straddles boundaries, moving from whistleblower law to the mimetic properties of DNA, from “the entropic spread / of the drifting cosmos / after the big bang” to “the push of lawn grass / under foot.”

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Reviews

“That Scott’s oeuvre demands the engaged reader to consider and wrestle with the art of poetry, poetry and politics, investigative fact and visionary fiction is evidence of its sophisticated achievement. Such reflection, it has long seemed to me, is the condition for any understanding of poetry, worthy of the name, an understanding that needs precede any critical appraisal. This resistance to a ready assimilation to existing literary-aesthetic canons – despite the surface, apparently-prosaic transparency of the poetry – testifies to Scott’s poetry’s being poetry, making, creating works possessed of a novel uncanniness that adds something new, not merely accomplished, to the world of letters, if not the world-at-large.” Bryan Sentes

Author Information

Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and emeritus professor of English, University of California, Berkeley, is an award-winning poet, writer, and researcher. He is the author of many books, including Mosaic Orpheus.

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