Review by Booklist Review
Beachy-Quick is a poet of artifacts, early American history, nature, and the culture of nature. His vibrant third collection opens with a contemplation of an ancient Chinese pot built of coiled clay, which leads to thoughts about how the silkworm's cocoon . . . is spun of a single thread, thus made the same way as the pot, just as text coils on a page. The silkworm feeds on mulberry leaves; what, then, feeds the poet? Beachy-Quick's finely spun and intricately woven lyrics mesh consciousness with sensuousness and achieve a literary photosynthesis. Trees are spokes in the wheels of traveling meditations on the transformations and cycles of life. As birds build nests, humans alter the living world: Sap: syrup. Pine: plank. Beachy-Quick's incantatory poems create a palimpsest of water, blood, and ink; veins in leaves, wings, and hands; spider webs, a silk scarf, swaddling cloth, and shroud. Tree rings hold time, pages are a book's leaves, people of the past have left their marks, and the poet is steeped in the transparent ever. --Donna Seaman Copyright 2006 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The prolific Beachy-Quick (Spell, 2004) returns to the familiar lyric territory of his arresting debut in this challenging third book: the intensifying, fragmenting and distorting powers of language as it relates self to world. In 18 untitled and highly personal poems sharing imagery and themes, plus a short prose introduction stating the book was written during "a year in which those whom I loved died," he tracks "[t]his world that through desire is seen," and manages to relate the caterpillar spinning and emerging from its cocoon to struggles in early American settlements, the minute expressions of love and the often invisible ebbing of loss. Onomatopoeic words ("calm the sentence the lake/ will calm/ breath gathers itself in a comma/ a comma informs the wave") and etymological explorations ("eagle at the root... borrowed from Old English egle... probably from aqua// water at the root of the bird") form a vivid associative chain. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Beachy-Quick's third collection (after Spell) reveals its author's idiosyncratic and changing worldview. Using repetition and wordplay, these poems dig inward to reveal hidden truths. I think: I am blood at oak, my hand/ A blood petal unfurled over oak,/ My desk, my wooded den, Beachy-Quick writes in Posterity, this me is Now--. Playful and at the same time filled with a melancholic loneliness, these works often echo e.e. cummings: we are not the woods if we/ whisper the woods/ quietly to ourselves we/ witness our hands/ walking into the forest. Readers will not be able to skim; much of the power of these poems resides in what they suggest rather than in what they spell out. Nature is a common thread, with each poem revealing a masterly painter's eye for visual details. Early American history, Chinese art, old diaries, a love relationship, and intense headaches are all subjects detailed. Despite the difficulty in connecting such disparate topics, Beachy-Quick has succeeded in weaving a collection that is whole and engaging. Recommended for most libraries.--Doris Lynch, Monroe Cty. P.L., Bloomington, IN (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
