Stone-Garland - (Seedbank) (Paperback)

About the Book

"As part of the publisher's 'Seedbank' series, aiming to preserve endangered literatures, the poet Beachy-Quick offers a modern gloss on six ancient Greeks." --New York Times Book Review, "New & Noteworthy Poetry"

Book Synopsis

"As part of the publisher's 'Seedbank' series, aiming to preserve endangered literatures, the poet Beachy-Quick offers a modern gloss on six ancient Greeks."--New York Times Book Review, "New & Noteworthy Poetry"

Anthology. The Greek origins of the word gesture at a bouquet, a garland; "a flower-logic, a petal-theory, a blossom-word." In Stone-Garland, Dan Beachy-Quick brings the term back to its roots, linking together the lives and words of six singular ancient Greeks.

Simonides: honest servant to patrons. Anacreon: lustful singer, living on in the work of his acolytes. Archilochus: cruel critic, beloved of the Muses. Alcman: who took birds as his teachers. Theognis: chronicler of human excellence and vice. Callimachus: cosmopolitan head librarian at Alexandria. These are the poets who appear in these pages, sometimes in fragments, sometimes in sustained glimpses.

Drawing inspiration from the Greek Anthology, first drafted in the first century BC, Beachy-Quick presents translations filled with lovers and children, gods and insects, earth and water, ideas and ideals. Throughout, the line between the ancient and the contemporary blurs, and "the logic of how life should be lived decays wondrously into the more difficult possibilities of what life is."

Spare, earthy, lovely, Stone-Garland offers readers of the Seedbank series its lyric blossoms and subtle weave, a walk through a cemetery that is also a garden.

Review Quotes

"Milkweed's Seedbank series is one of the most exciting and visionary projects in contemporary publishing. Taking the long view, these volumes run parallel to the much-hyped books of the moment to demonstrate the possibility and hope inherent in all great literature." --Stephen Sparks, Point Reyes Books

"As part of the publisher's 'Seedbank' series, aiming to preserve endangered literatures, the poet Beachy-Quick offers a modern gloss on six ancient Greeks." --New York Times Book Review, "New & Noteworthy Poetry"

"Dan Beachy-Quick presents an inspired and intricately-constructed collection . . . [an] enchanting, death-defying project." --Poetry Daily

"Sixth-century BCE Greek lyric poets Alcman, Theognis, Simonides, Anacreon/Anacreonata, Archilochus, and Callimachus are beautifully translated by Beachy-Quick in this memorable and edifying collection, which presents excavated fragments meant to be sung or recited to music . . . This skillfully achieved collection is a necessary contribution to ancient translation." --Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

"To me, every book by Beachy-Quick feels like a beacon amid the chaos of contemporary life . . . [offering] new coordinates to triangulate one's uncertain position in deep time." --Srikanth Reddy, BOMB Magazine

"Beautiful and understated . . . Beachy-Quick's translations lean into the elegiac possibilities of these poems and poets . . . We grow old, as do our voices; we die; the best we can hope for is that the songs we sing will be picked up by others, turned into new forms, given new life, and that, for a moment, something of us might live again." --Words Without Borders

Praise for Of Song and Silence

"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, author of Gardens: An Essay on the Human

"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 bean fields 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, author of Proxies

"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, author of Every Riven Thing

Praise for Variations on Dawn and Dusk

Longlist, National Book Awards 2019 for Poetry

"A work of ekphrasis based on Robert Irwin's Untitled (Dawn to Dusk) set in the desert of Marfa, Tex., draws inspiration from the sun as it warms, cools, colors, and shifts, resulting in a series of poems whose patterns are informed by their subject: light."--Publishers Weekly

"In Variations on Dawn and Dusk what's spoken is almost sung, and what's sung is quickly lost, but what remains is a trace of presence as political as it is spiritual, reminding the reader that we're constituted by what passes through us, what we're open to. . . . But what a space, lit with such generosity and heart! It is aspirational, it is hopeful, it is not sentimental. It has a truly counter-cultural music that makes use of hums and whispers and silences. As I read Variations on Dawn and Dusk I almost felt as if my body unfroze. It simply delivers light."--Katie Peterson, author of The Accounts

"A true American metaphysical in the tradition of Emily Dickinson and Susan Howe, Beachy-Quick is our postmodern antinomian, suspicious not of a moribund faith but of the truth claims of consciousness itself. These fierce lyrics of existential grief display his preternatural attunement to thought at the moment it turns inward upon itself not for comfort but in grave confrontation."--Brian Teare, author of Doomstead Days

"Something quite literally ultimate transpires in these Variations on Dawn and Dusk, as Beachy-Quick has found a way to map the interstices--between quanta of light; between syllables; between the nearly inaudible sounds of colors upon surface. To my certain knowledge, no one has accomplished this since Dame Julian of Norwich. These quiet poems are a torrent of angels, and I cannot look away."--Donald Revell, author of The English Boat

About the Author

Dan Beachy-Quick is a poet, essayist, and translator. His books include Variations on Dawn and Dusk, which was longlisted for the National Book Awards. His work has been supported by the Lannan, Monfort, and Guggenheim Foundations. He is a University Distinguished Teaching Scholar at Colorado State University, where he teaches in the MFA program in creative writing.