Watchfulness

by Peter O'Leary

Poetry. In WATCHFULNESS, Peter O'Leary delves into arcane, biblical and mystical texts as well as the art of iconic architecture to deliver a new poetry. Here the center is "concealed in concealment" wherewith a new composition can be, in Duncan's powerful phrase, "made loose." Reminiscent of both Robert Duncan's "Passages" and Ronald Johnson's Ark, these verses draw influence from the aether of poesis itself, thus charting a thoroughly contemporary and soulful terrain.

Genres: Poetry

100 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

Born in Detroit, 1968. Raised in Grosse Pointe Park, a suburb of Detroit,
educated in public schools there & then in a Catholic high school, De
LaSalle Collegiate, taught by the LaSallean Christian Brothers. Post-
secondary education at the University of Chicago, the College, earning
an AB in English literature in 1990, albeit with a one-year stint at Reed
College, in Portland, Oregon, to study poetry (with poet & classicist Jim
Powell). Three years of wage-slavery followed: eighteen months at a
correspondence high school on the South Side of Chicago, another
eighteen as a researcher at the City Colleges of Chicago. In 1993 began
studies at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, earning a
Master of Arts in Divinity in 1994 & a PhD in Divinity, specializing in
Religion & Literature, in 1999. In the midst of this, some movement:
notably, a period traveling in Greece in 1994, including a visit to the holy
island of Patmos where Orthodox iconography was discovered & a year
spent living in Vienna in 1997-8, where coffee & opera were discovered.
More notably & somewhat earlier, epistolary contact with poet Ronald
Johnson was initiated in 1992, followed by a few valuable meetings in
San Francisco. Mentored by RJ until his death, in 1998. Not before being
asked by the ailing poet to be his literary executor. This charge has
resulted in three books: To Do As Adam Did: Selected Poems (Talisman
House, 2000, The Shrubberies, a collection of last poems (Flood
Editions, 2001), and a reprinting of Radi os (Flood, 2005). As well as various archival tasks, ongoing. So far, two books of poetry: Watchfulness (Spuyten Duyvil, 2001) & Depth Theology (Georgia, 2006). Also one critical book, Gnostic Contagion:
Robert Duncan & the Poetry of Illness (Wesleyan, 2002). Since late
2001, following eighteen months in St. Louis, residency in Berwyn, a
working-class suburb on the west side of Chicago, in a house, with wife,
Rebecca Houze, an art historian, & two sons, Gabriel & Lucian. Teacher at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Reviews

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is O'Leary's first book. I find him somewhat less rhetorically engaging here than in his second book, Gnostic Contagion (a study of the poetry of Robert Duncan and Nathaniel Mackey), and his second collection of poems, Depth Theology. In these later two books O'Leary is concerned to teach his readers the tradition of religious poetry in which he works. In Watchfulness there is much brilliance of speculation and emendation, but also occasionally a procedure that, while speculative and brilliant, is also essentially emendative -- a privacy of correction. So, e.g., in "Gold," "Cenobites mine the sky | for blood of yellow flowers, a powder | whose veins flush ||like swallows through a dawn | they burn || in a crucible of tincture,| wood & egg turned || into a glimmering ash | of XPS." A cenobite is the member of a religious order; after that bit of information (which I get from a dictionary), a note in the back of the book tells us the acronym "XPS" is neologistic for Christ in the Orthodox church. Other than that, we're pretty much on our own. Very much worth one's time, then, Watchfulness also makes us work occasionally for more than our work rewards.

[John Adams · Rating 3 out of 5]

An odd poetic, but it enters beautifully mystical territory in sustained stretches.