OF SILENCE AND SONG, BY DAN BEACHY-QUICK
In Of Silence and Song, Dan Beachy-Quick presents meditations, essays, and other snippets: images, fragments, poems. The book’s pages are haunted by writers of the past, mostly poets, whose words mingle with Beachy-Quick’s own. He touches books they have touched, examines their minds by reading their journals, visits their houses to walks their steps, always looking to learn from them, “As the old masters who, to learn proportion and figure, drew studies of the masters before them, so poets in antiquity used to return to themes explored by those before them, truing their song by the measure of others’ singing.”
From the New Horizons probe at the edge of the solar system, to paleolithic cave paintings, with plenty of conversations with his daughter in between, Beachy-Quick covers a wide array of subjects with deft strokes, holding up both silence and song, both day and night, to examine their paradox. He measures the depth of knowledge by admitting what is unknown, struggles to express ideas that defy language, and searches for the boundaries of a poem on a page: “Sometimes I think it can be heard in no other way, that song—the one you cannot sing. And then I think, you can put your ear against anything, any made-thing, and hear that supernal vibration that is paradise, I mean the wind speaking, I mean the actual poem, the un-making one, the un-made one we can only glimpse by the making of our own.”
