Circle's Apprentice

Dan Beachy-Quick has produced six collections of solo or collaborative poetry and a unique prose companion to Moby Dick. In the process, this amazingly productive writer has become recognized as one of the nation’s most exciting dramatists of the mind in ferment, and of our urgent and ongoing connections with a tradition that extends back to the origins of literature.

After a series of book-length poems, Beachy-Quick’s new volume is as carefully structured as a suite of chamber music pieces, yet made of distinctly individual poems. Building upon the visceral and conceptual fascinations of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay, “Circles,” these poems trace patterned tensions to connections in existence on many levels, from molecular to millennial.

“Dan Beachy-Quick’s splendid new collection reveals the echoes between the measure of verse and the measure of time. If it is true, as Thoreau suggests, that the poem of creation is ongoing, this ambitious and prolific poet shows us that learning to listen for that music of daily life involves a lifetime. Circle’s Apprentice vividly reminds us that all our human life may be marked by ritual but is returned to us through song. ‘The minute gears mutely whir. / To put your ear / against it is to put your ear inside it.’”—Susan Howe