Dreamcraft

Peter Dale Scott

• Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN:
  9780228020981
• eBook ISBN:
  9780228021001
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Canadian Poetry
• Index: Literature

so the long stretch of life / reveals its curvature / by those widely separated // moments when we are / brushed / by this awareness // of an other / that we do not know

In his latest collection of poems, poet, deep state researcher, and radical medievalist Peter Dale Scott interrogates topics that have occupied his later thought and writing, such as moreness (our need, as humans, to be more than we are), minding, and enmindment (the generative synergy, engaging both hemispheres of our bicameral mind, of intellectual and spiritual enlightenment, now out of kilter).

In pursuit of these themes, Scott's voice ranges far, from engaging with poets of the past and, hopefully, the future to critiques of coercive political power, from elegies for important figures in his life – Leonard Cohen, Daniel Ellsberg, Czeslaw Milosz, and Robert Silvers – to fan letters for "minders" Chelsea Manning and Dr Christine Blasey Ford.

Dreamcraft is a book that crosses distances and straddles boundaries, moving from whistleblower law to the mimetic properties of DNA, from "the entropic spread / of the drifting cosmos / after the big bang" to "the push of lawn grass / under foot."

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Contents
• Presence
• Moreness
• Deep Movements
• Mythogenesis
• Windherding Once at Lachute
• Shiva Candle
• Bob Silvers and the Deep State
• What I See When I Go Out to Pick Up the Paper During Covid
• The Condition of Water
• Minding: To Chelsea Manning
• To Dr Christine Blasey Ford
• Dreaming My dna
• Speeding the Moon
• The Importance of a Garden
• Dreamcraft
• Becoming
• Enlightenment
• Red Rose on Table
• To Czeslaw Milosz
• The Forest of Wishing
• That Moment
• To My Daughter in Winnipeg
• Leonard and Peter
• For Leonard Cohen (1934–2016)
• Commissar and Yogi
• Epithalamium
• After Sixty-Four Years
• At the Aquarium
• A Ninety-Year-Old Rereads the Vita Nuova
• The First Time
• Eros at Ninety
• Pig
• The Ballad of Jake and Jayme
• Surprise
• Missing Canada
• Bless
• A Quinkling Manifesto
• Esprit de l’escalier
• Notes
• Acknowledgments