Perhaps it is not a logical assumption that a collection of poems inspired by the philosophical musings in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Circles,” would be especially exciting. Intelligent, yes, but compelling? Whimsical? In Dan Beachy-Quick’s Circle’s Apprentice, he conjures forth poems out of Emerson’s concepts which become not only compelling, but romantic and wild.
You do not have to have read Emerson’s “Circles” to appreciate this collection; it delights all on its own. Its pleasures are, however, enhanced when Emerson’s wonderfully poetic phrases are fresh in the mind; it calls to its origins. Beachy-Quick’s epigraph from Emerson, wholly validated by what follows, gives an inspiring beginning to the collection: “Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning.”
Despite their quiet titles, these poems are thrilling in their pursuit of truth because they allow an exploration of uncertainty without elegy for meaning. They thrive in fruitful ambiguity where a constant reimagining, the drawing of more circles, gives sufficient satisfaction. In one poem, titled simply, “Poem,” the speaker invites:
Keep grinning at me as I fill the blanks in,
Keep following me from room to room:
The fingerprints were on my face
Not on the mirror, but I wiped the mirror
Clean. Who smudged them …
In his final poem, he explains, “I am imagining this world but I’m inviting you in / So I can join you,” but Beachy-Quick creates many different worlds in Circle’s Apprentice. Each of the seven sections makes its own world which is not so much connected by a unifying theme, as by the internal logic of its music. The first series is composed of five “lullabies:” little songs that are filled with ghosts and graves and irony. Some, like the third “Lullaby,” produce the satisfying combination of philosophical ideas and a deceivingly fablelike narrative:
Before you say
“I see the lion,” the lion is gone,
and you’ll but see
starlings slip between bars to glean
seed from hay
There is a science and circularity to these poems, but they also contain the melancholy of old melodies, as can be seen in the “little ghost” child of his last “Lullaby,” who
breathes, inspired but alone—
a sediment
for memory, a fossil for a tome.
Beachy-Quick is unafraid to embrace the simple rhymes of words likehome, stone, bone, and alone because they do not support the entirety of the poem’s lyric pleasures.
After we leave the short, musical lines of the lullabies, we find longer, more meditative lines and eventually, as in “Fragile Elegy” and “Cave Beneath Volcano,” poems that are blown apart, their words scattered across the page. Some, like “The Ziggurat,” “Catalog,” and “Poem; or, The Artifacts,” are made of several sonnet-like stanzas stacked on top of each other. However, there is a reassuringly logical progression through these sections as the reader is taken from lullabies, in the first section, to “Tomb Figurines” in the last.
Despite its progression, once the reader has fallen down the rabbit hole, Circle’s Apprentice is by no means an easy read. At times, as in “The Ziggurat,” or “Catalog,” it feels as if Beachy-Quick tears ahead, only pausing long enough to implore the reader to catch up. The poems are driven by inventive images and music, and, at times, it appears as if internal logic must be sacrificed. Some even seem like fanciful lectures where the reader only gets every other word, and it feels like a test will commence as soon as the poem is done. Beachy-Quick seems aware of this, as in “Catalog,” where the speaker informs us:
Every poem
Contains a blessing it keeps hidden
The marrow inside the bone. To read
Includes ruin …
Circle’s Apprentice has that same self-awareness in writing that Emerson’s essay does. Though other truths are reached for, it is the act of writing itself that is never forgotten, as in “Demonstrative Lullaby”:
For example ivy twines by twinning
as do I when I write I study sameness
narcissus lazy drops petals for tears
and echo knows daisy in margins
silences virtue when she’s torn we see
“not me” doubles love into a page
While no poem seems to simply concern itself with the self-conscious creation of poetry, many contain elements of ars poetica: little reminders that the poet behind them is never far away. The question is always language and what it can do. There is a constant, and oddly heartening, inability for the various speakers to get beyond language and explore completely any one truth. One of the most successful poems which embodies this idea is another titled “Poem.” It begins:
The minute gears mutely whir. To put your ear
Against it is to put your ear inside it.
It does not tick. It isn’t a heart.
Images fill this poem as the speaker turns over this notion of how we seek and how we know:
Layla Benitez-James is an MFA candidate in poetry in the University of Houston's Creative Writing Program. Her work has appeared in Acentos Review, The San Antonio Express-News, and The San Antonio Current's flash fiction blog, among other places.
