Of Silence and Song

Midway through the journey of his life, Dan Beachy-Quick found himself without a path, unsure how to live well.Of Silence and Songfollows him through the forest of his experience, on a classical search for meaning in the world and in his particular, quiet life. In essays, fragments, marginalia, images, travel writing, and poetry, Beachy-Quick traces relationships and the identities through which he sees the world. As father and husband. As teacher and student. As citizen and scholar. And as poet and reader, wondering at the potential and limits of literature, and guided by his studies in ancient Greek. Of Silence and Songfinds its inferno-and its paradise-in moments both historically vast and nakedly intimate. Our world's disappearing bees, James Eagan Holmes, Columbine, and the persistent, unforgivable crime of slavery-these are the circles of hell Beachy-Quick wanders, but cannot escape. And yet he encounters redemption in the art of Marcel Duchamp, the pressed flowers in Emily Dickinson's Bible, and long walks with his youngest daughter, Iris. "The litany in hell is weeping, weeping," he writes, "but there are other litanies." Curious, earnest, and masterful,Of Silence and Songis an unforgettable exploration of the human soul.

About the Author :
Dan Beachy-Quick is the author of six collections of poems; two previous works of nonfiction; and a novel, among other projects. He is a contributing editor for the journals A Public Spaceand West Branch. His work has won the Colorado Book Award, and has been a finalist for the William Carlos Williams Prize and the PEN/USA Literary Award in Poetry. He is currently a Guggenheim Fellow and a Creative Fellow of the Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard University. He lives in Fort Collins, Colorado.

Review :
Praise for Of Silence and Song “It's an exciting thing when a writer of real originality and scope discovers a form that both focuses and liberates his gift. Dan Beachy-Quick is such a writer, and Of Silence and Song is such a book. One doesn't think to use the word ‘ennobling’ of many works of contemporary art, but this one is.”—Christian Wiman “Responding to the silence from which poetry arises, Dan Beachy-Quick is not afraid to follow the call of thought, wherever it may lead. This book situates itself beyond the noise of the times.”—Robert Pogue Harrison “‘I had a question,’ reflects Dan Beachy-Quick toward the end of his resonant volume, Of Silence and Song, ‘but I didn’t know what it was.’ Both silence and song, this anechoic orchestral work shows us, make of our world an open question. Through encyclopedic meditations that range from prehistoric cave art to the Higgs boson particle to the flowers that Emily Dickinson pressed between the leaves of her personal Bible, this adept of silence and song works his way toward what might be thought of as open answers. ‘Life,’ in his essayistic inquest, ‘is a critical form.’ Like John Cage—who once entered a sound-proof chamber only to find it pulsing with the noise of his own circulatory system—Beachy-Quick, too, hears the rumble of blood in our most silent places. Where does the music come from?  ‘I want to say our heart,’’ ventures this researcher into disquiet, ‘though I know the grammar is absurd.’”—Srikanth Reddy “You read here that, etymologically, ‘consider’ means ‘to examine the stars. To draw the connections between the distant points.’ If that is so, then Of Silence and Song is a clear night sky full of constellations. From the beanfields that Pythagoras would not enter to the verses of her Bible that Dickinson cut out, from his daughter Iris’s fear of the dark to the ‘tenth Muse seldom mentioned,’ from here to heliopause, Dan Beachy-Quick crosses great expanses in this book-length, acutely human consideration, flickering in the hunch that ‘question and answer are the same thing—one. . . just the disappearance of the other.’”—Brian Blanchfield Praise for A Whaler’s Dictionary “Essayistic, inventive, and frequently brilliant.”—Poetry Foundation “This is a rich, profound, fascinating book, the kind that widens the margins of everything we read, making room for new observations, more creative relationships all around: writer/reader, person/book, literature/life.”—Los Angeles Times “Wounded by a book, wounded by the force of idolatrous speech in Moby-Dick, Dan Beachy-Quick has mounted a kind of folly, a nautilus, enclosing the furtive wall of his own lyric sensibility. A Whaler's Dictionary reminds us why poets must sometimes measure their gifts against the calculus of prose, and why criticism by poets, unlike academic arguments, sometimes produces a flame which stands the test of time.”—Daniel Tiffany, author of Toy Medium and Puppet Wardrobe “This is a major work on the charged relationship that can come into being between text and reader, written by one of America’s most significant young poets.”—Lyn Hejinian, author of Saga/Circus and The Fatalist “A Whaler’s Dictionary manages to function as an oddly ideal work of criticism, breathing new life into Moby-Dick and showing how the novel subsists as an intricately living thing.”—Virginia Quarterly Review Praise for Wonderful Investigations “Wonderful Investigations juxtaposes four essays with three ‘meditations’ and four fable-like ‘tales’ to trace the tension between mind and body, between our inner and our outer lives. A poet, Dan Beachy-Quick is terrific with an image and relies on antecedents here from Plato to Thoreau to give his work a context and a depth.”—Los Angeles Times “‘Wonder as a point of concern denies its own consideration,’ writes Dan Beachy-Quick at the outset of this luminous and searching book. But every page of this book testifies to wonder’s ubiquity even as it honors that passion’s fugitive nature.”—Srikanth Reddy “Wonderful Investigations is Dan Beachy-Quick at top form, under cover of prose. The real wonders here are the four ‘tales’—fictions—which are perhaps his most accomplished and heartbreaking works yet. In them, Beachy-Quick reveals himself to be the true heir not of Blake or Shelley, nor even of his beloved Keats, but rather of Borges and George MacDonald. . . . Beachy-Quick makes a stride forward as one of the preeminent American visionaries of our moment.”—G. C. Waldrep “‘What can we find if we put our assumptions away?’ In this unique collection of utterly singular investigations—Emersonian in their profundity and Aesopian in their delight—Dan Beachy-Quick answers his own question with an account of wonder as our invitation to discover (or be reminded) ‘that reality’s border is loosely guarded.’”—H. L. Hix “Wonderful Investigations is a model of intense observation, of a mind reaching out as far as it can. Always Dan Beachy-Quick seems to write in metaphor, returning to the process of wonder, and why it’s so necessary, and then to the failure of language and poetry to ever truly take us where we want to go. . . . His reader cannot help but feel the same desire for that hazy line—cannot help but want to reach for it as well.”—Ploughshares “This is a book about reading. It offers the kinds of insights into the act that most of us never stop to indulge in, and for that we are eternally grateful. . . . The idea that reading offers a dream world, a parallel one, is familiar. But Dan Beachy-Quick takes this a step farther. Reading before sleep, reading books to children before they go to sleep, is a way to slide gently through a middle place and into forgetting.”—Los Angeles Review of Books “Dan Beachy-Quick’s sensitive and intimate approach to writing about writing seems an ideal antidote to the post-whateverist malaise of most literary criticism. He acknowledges theory but doesn’t get weighed down by it, nor is it his primary interest. . . . In a landscape that at times seems overpopulated with creative writers, we need more creative readers like Beachy-Quick.”—Rain Taxi