The Four Horsemen.

I have a new book! It’s available for purchase through the Cultural Society website.

Here’s what Steven Toussaint says about the book:

Those in the know know that Peter O’Leary is the torchbearer of a rich if neglected poetic lineage: the “American Gnostic.” Through his critical and editorial labors, O’Leary has initiated poets and readers into the secret wisdom and apocalyptic promise transmitted unbrokenly from Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, down through Robert Duncan and Ronald Johnson, to contemporaries like Nathaniel Mackey, Joseph Donahue, and Pam Rehm. Those who read O’Leary’s poetry feel the wind and precipitation of a unique imaginarium peopled by dreamers, ascetics, birders, analysts, foragers, sorcerers—all of them watchers, watchful for God in his multiform emanations.

In The Four Horsemen, O’Leary turns his eye to Dante, Milton, Blake, and Whitman. His critical style is enthusiastic, quite literally “god-possessed.” His passwords are vision, power, and transmission. His reading is fired by conviction: that the revelatory imperatives of apocalyptic poetry flout our current cultural inertia and spiritual despair. The result is a book of true importance, which is less concerned with rewriting literary history than with seeing what happens when the shocking and destabilizing language of poets works on the souls of other poets, on O’Leary himself, over time, and then with following those lines of force wherever they lead. As rigorous as it is rapturous, The Four Horsemen is the best guide I know for how to live intensely with poetry.

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!