Mosaic Orpheus

'Uncertain as always whether this republic is past saving or whether some of us still tread the perilous path of the future part of me just meditates on the new and more flourishing wildlife that is improving Point Reyes ten years after the Mount Vision fire From the glories of the Tang Dynasty I recall only one date: the year the usurper An Lushan drove both Wang Wei and Du Fu far from the corrupt court into the mountains where for the first time they were free to write the only poems we remember' - excerpt from "The Tao of 9/11". Working always to connect the polemical to the personal, Peter Dale Scott's political poems - from the tear gas of Berkeley protests in the 1960s to the problems of Thai forest monks in an era of drug-trafficking and deforestation - are a process of self-questioning. Self-questioning also marks his meditation poems, including a sequence on the death of his first wife. In opposition to contemporary poems of studied meaninglessness, Scott increasingly recognizes a compulsion in himself to radically reaffirm traditional rejections of the external world and turn to the refuges of poets before him, the enduring commonplaces that are more than cliches.