The Hidden Eyes of Things.

Very pleased to announce the publication of The Hidden Eyes of Things, a new book-length poem out from the Cultural Society. You can order the book directly from the Cultural Society here; or you can order it from SPD.

The Hidden Eyes of Things completes the trilogy on poetry and consciousness begun in Phosphorescence of Thought (about the evolution of consciousness), and continued in Earth Is Best (about altered states of consciousness). The Hidden Eyes of Things explores the unconscious through the discipline of astrology.

I decided not to include in the book itself the list of all the books I consulted and used but include it here for anyone who might be interested.

THE HIDDEN EYES OF THINGS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

These are the books I consulted, borrowed and quoted from, and ruminated on over the long course of the composition of this poem.

Abu’l-Rayhan Muhammad Ibn Ahmad al-Biruni, The Book of Instruction in the Elements of the Art of Astrology, Astrology Classics 2006.

Robert Hinckley Allen, Star Names: Their Lore and Meaning. Dover 1963.

Tamsyn Barton, Ancient Astrology, Routledge 1994.

Austin Coppack and Daniel A. Schulke, The Celestial Art: Essays on Astrological Magic, Three Hands Press 2018.

Brian Cox, Wonders of the Solar System, Collins 2011.

Franz Cumont, Astrology and Religion among the Greeks and Romans, Dover 1960.

Dionysius (Pseudo-Dionysius), The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid, Classics of Western Spirituality 1987.

Marsilio Ficino, The Book of Life, trans. Charles Boer, Spring Publications 1980.

The Letters of Marsilio Ficino, volumes I-III, trans. members of the Language Department of the School of Economic Science, London, Gingko Press 1985.

Fred Gettings, The Arkana Dictionary of Astrology, Arkana 1985.

Fred Gettings, The Book of the Zodiac, Triune 1972.

Robert Graves, The Greek Myths, Penguin Classics 1960.

Robert Hand, Horoscope Symbols, Whitford Press, 1981.

James Hillman, A Terrible Love of War, Penguin 2004.

Homeric Hymns Homeric Apocrypha Lives of Homer, ed. and trans. Martin L. West, Loeb 2003.

Brian Innes, Horoscopes: How to Draw and Interpret Them, Arco 1978.

Carl Kerényi, Prometheus: Archetypal Image of Human Existence, trans. Ralph Manheim, Bollingen Series LXV.I 1963.

Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, trans. W.H.D.Rouse, Loeb 1992.

Manilius, Astronomica, trans. G.P. Goold, Loeb 1997.

Plotinus, The Enneads, trans. Stephan MacKenna, Pantheon 1969.

David A. Rothery, The Planets: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford 2010.

Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, Viking 2006.

Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, Faber and Faber 1958.

Earth Is Best.

My new book, Earth Is Best, will shortly be published by the Cultural Society. It’s a book of odes about mushrooms, mushroom foraging, altered states of consciousness, modern crises, and antique realities. It is a sequel to Phosphorescence of Thought. (In turn, it will one day be followed by its own sequel, The Hidden Eyes of Things, a planetary epic that approaches the unconscious through the discipline of astrology.) Earth Is Best takes its title from the opening three words of Pindar’s magnificent first Olympian Ode, elementally adjusted. The book, which features a gorgeous illustration of amanita muscaria by Todd Buck (below), was designed by Crisis.

Illustration by Todd Buck.

I will be launching Earth Is Best at a reading/performance at the Seminary Co-op Bookstore on Tuesday, November 12, 2019 at 6 p.m. I will be joined in the performance by Mark Booth, who will accompany the reading with improvised and found music.

The book will be available at the reading and, before too long, at the Cultural Society’s website. For the curious, here is a more detailed description of the book.

In a time of ecological crisis, Peter O’Leary finds in mushrooms “an elaborate pattern,” a circulation of energy, a strange Kingdom with the power to alter consciousness. From the opening line “Earth is best,” each proposition takes root in the terroir of soils, in the woods and meadows of the Upper Midwest and Pacific Northwest. On each foray, we find hidden systems bearing fruit, “crowning from the duff of white pines / and birch trees,” extending upward from “loam’s rich undying gloom.” Equally, these poems bloom from a rich mulch of linguistic inheritance, a compost of ancient texts and esoteric knowledge, searching out old words of exquisite exactitude and resonance. As readers, our attention quickens as we join the hunt, discovering elemental pleasures on every page, sometimes with the prickling onset of psychedelic consciousness. And like fungi, these poems work to break down false oppositions, returning us to a reciprocity between death and life, panic and joy, anxiety and euphoria, tocsin and cure.

Expansions of the Dazzling Darkness...

Last month, Thick and Dazzling Darkness: Religious Poetry in a Secular Age received a generous notice by Steven Toussaint, native of Chicago, citizen of New Zealand, and presently residing in Cambridge. Steven mentioned the book as part of the "Reading List" feature connected to Poetry magazine. Here is what he said:

"Do we have a functional grammar for theological reflection in poetry today? This question has served as a guiding principle in the choice of much of my reading lately. Peter O’Leary’s recent collection of critical essays, Thick and Dazzling Darkness: Religious Poetry in a Secular Age, is doubly ambitious. He not only conducts original, searching readings of nine contemporary poets—among them Geoffrey Hill, Fanny Howe, Robert Duncan, and Nathaniel Mackey—but also convincingly argues a “way forward for poetry” that would honor twentieth-century experimentation and pioneering, while at the same time refashioning a language within which intimations of anagogy and apocalypse might seriously contend. O’Leary’s definition of “religion” is capacious enough to include all manner of syncretism and heterodoxy and yet restrained enough to serve as a transformative (even troublesome) force in the poetry he examines. His critical style is refreshingly personal, even anecdotal."

On March 1, I delivered a talk on Thick and Dazzling Darkness for the Lumen Christi Institute at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. The talk was video recorded. You can watch all 82 minutes of the thing on YouTube. (The talk is forty-five minutes long; a half-hour of questions ensued.)

Thick and Dazzling Darkness/Lumen Christi

I also conducted an interview with Mark Franzen for the Lumen Christi podcast. Stay tuned for that!

New poems at the Cultural Society.

Four new poems of mine have been posted at the Cultural Society, two amanita odes from Earth Is Best, and two new lyrics, one about Nemesis, the other about Milton.

Live it up!