Driving into the Dreamtime

DRIVING INTO THE DREAMTIME is a richly-textured assemblage of poems, a number of which have won prizes and awards, while others have appeared in various journals and anthologies. The book has four sections, which are I. Driving Into the Dreamtime (new lyric and narrative poems); II. What Must Arise (selected lyric poems from Beagle's 2017 collection, with many newly revised); III. Rumi and the Year of Meteors (a new 12-poem sequence of lyric narratives); IV. Verses from the Multiverse (new, and mostly lengthier poems, drawing upon various mythological and literary sources. CRITICAL PRAISE FOR DONALD BEAGLE'S POETRY winner of the HOPWOOD AWARD, the JOHN BRUBAKER AWARD, and the GAIL O'DAY AWARD FOR OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT IN POETRY. WHAT MUST ARISE is worth the wait, an achievement both impressive and hugely enjoyable. Donald Beagle has the rare ability to involve the reader with the poem, revealing that things of which we hadn't been aware deeply matter to us. This book will surely be among the outstanding titles of its year--if not, indeed, of its century.
--X. J. Kennedy, in Against the Grain. The Rumi / Meteors poem-sequence by Donald Beagle is distinctively original, yet conveys a deeply-felt familiarity. These are poems in continual motion, orbiting a mysterious point where emotion, intuition, and perception converge.
--W. S. Merwin, in The Pool Magazine, California Institute of the Arts. "I spent pleasant hours lost in Beagle's landscapes and melodies. 'On Performing Bach's Dorian Toccata' to me is an immediate extravagance, a breathtakingly complex, fugal journey into the minds of the composer, performer, and worlds of Bach and us alike. The triptych of musical poems from Hydrogen Jukebox to Bruckner to Bach is extraordinary, and I am lost in the reverie and embrace of the snow and paths of the Poets' Walk in the second, while the first captures ...the cosmogonic and 'hypertrophic high-tech... psychological state' (in Ginz's words) of the work ... There were, of course, other paths I took, swimming out with the poet into the night and death with the jellyfish, visiting Sullivan's Island and its sandpiper calligraphy, the story of the monks and the shroud as altarcloth....but for now, here on 'the frontier of winter' these songs leave me caught up in 'the evasive meter / of ecstatic poetry.'
--Michael Joyce, Professor of Creative Writing & Media Studies, Vassar College; in Against the Grain