Wonderful Investigations

Over the course of six critically acclaimed books—including a compelling meditation on Moby-Dick—Dan Beachy-Quick has established himself as “one of America’s most significant young poets” (Lyn Hejinian). In Wonderful Investigations, Beachy-Quick broaches “a hazy line, a faulty boundary” between our daily world and one rich with wonder; a magical world in which, through his work as a writer, Beachy-Quick participates with a singular combination of critical intelligence and lyricism. Touching on the works of Emerson, Thoreau, Proust, and Plato, among others, Beachy-Quick outlines the problem of duality in modern thought—the separation of the mind and body, word and referent, intelligence and mystery, human and natural—and makes the case for a fuller kind of nature poetry, one that strives to overcome this false separation, and to celebrate the notion that “wonder is the fact that the world has never ceased to be real.”