The Thinking Root - (Seedbank) by Dan Beachy-Quick (Paperback)

About the Book

"From acclaimed poet and translator Dan Beachy-Quick comes this new addition to the Seedbank series: a warm, vivid translation of the earliest Greek intellects, inviting us to reconsider writing, and thinking, as a way of living meaningfully in the world"--

Book Synopsis

Acclaimed poet and translator Dan Beachy-Quick offers this newest addition to the Seedbank series: a warm, vivid rendering of the earliest Greek intellects, inviting us to reconsider writing, and thinking, as a way of living meaningfully in the world.

"We have lost our sense of thinking as the experience that keeps us in the world," writes Beachy-Quick, and the figures rendered in The Thinking Root--Heraclitus, Anaximander, Empedocles, Parmenides, and others--are among the first examples we have in Western civilization of thinkers who used writing as to record their impressions of a world where intuition and observation, and spirit and nature, have yet to be estranged. In these pages, we find clear-eyed ideas searching for shapes and forms with which to order the world, and to reveal our life in flux.

Drawn from "words that think," these ancient Greek texts are fresh and alive in the hands of Beachy-Quick, who translates with the empathy of one who knows that "a word is its own form of life." In aphorisms, axioms, vignettes, and anecdotes, these first theories of the world articulate a relationship to the world that precedes our story of its making, a world where "the beginning and the end are in common."

A remarkable collection from one of our most accomplished poets, The Thinking Root renders a primary apprehension of life amidst life, a vision that echoes our gaze upon the stars.

Review Quotes

Praise for The Thinking Root

"The Thinking Root offers so much to ponder and savor."--Rain Taxi Review of Books

Praise for the Seedbank Series

"Milkweed's Seedbank series is one of the most exciting and visionary projects in contemporary publishing. Taking the long view, these volumes run parallel to the much-hyped books of the moment to demonstrate the possibility and hope inherent in all great literature."--Stephen Sparks, Point Reyes Books

"Through its cultural-linguistic contribution to narrative diversity, Milkweed's Seedbank series is a vital tool in imagining the futures possible for humanity beyond the anthropocene. Bringing works from Greek, K'iche', German, Russian (and more!) whose authors are deeply rooted in their homelands, each voice encountered has resonated with me on a seemingly cellular level--shifting and changing both who I am and can be. I will continue to press these books into the hands of compassionate readers and cannot wait to share the forthcoming titles in the project!"--Erin Pineda, 27th Letter Books

"Milkweed as a publishing house has long been championing literary works both fictitious and true to life centered around culture, nature, and environmentalism. The Seedbank series serves as both a marvelous introduction to the books Milkweed provides and as a collection of essential stories that ought to be on everyone's radar. The words behind these front covers highlight life-changing experiences, knowledge, and ways of life from communities that are seldom otherwise heard from in the publishing world through an authentic cultural lens. What I've read from the Seedbank line is phenomenal, and I look forward to spending time with future works in the series."--Andrew King, Secret Garden Books

Praise for Stone-Garland

"As part of the publisher's 'Seedbank' series, aiming to preserve endangered literatures, the poet Beachy-Quick offers a modern gloss on six ancient Greeks."--New York Times Book Review, "New & Noteworthy Poetry"

"Sixth-century BCE Greek lyric poets Alcman, Theognis, Simonides, Anacreon/Anacreonata, Archilochus, and Callimachus are beautifully translated by Beachy-Quick in this memorable and edifying collection, which presents excavated fragments meant to be sung or recited to music . . . This skillfully achieved collection is a necessary contribution to ancient translation."--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"[A] thoughtfully collected anthology of poems of the ancients--poems that despite their age sing with a fresh vibrancy. Beachy-Quick is both translator and guide through the stone ruins and his insightful and beautiful introductions to each poet are a joy in and of themselves. Part of Milkweed's Seedbank Series that aims to preserve and bring ancient, historical, and contemporary works from cultures around the world to readers, Stone-Garland is a collection to cherish."--Book Riot, "Best Fall 2020 Books in Translation"

"To me, every book by Beachy-Quick feels like a beacon amid the chaos of contemporary life . . . [offering] new coordinates to triangulate one's uncertain position in deep time."--Srikanth Reddy, BOMB Magazine

"Beachy-Quick presents an inspired and intricately-constructed collection . . . [an] enchanting, death-defying project."--Poetry Daily

"Beautiful and understated . . . Beachy-Quick's translations lean into the elegiac possibilities of these poems and poets. . . . We grow old, as do our voices; we die; the best we can hope for is that the songs we sing will be picked up by others, turned into new forms, given new life, and that, for a moment, something of us might live again."--Words Without Borders

Praise for Of Silence and Song

"Responding to the silence from which poetry arises, Beachy-Quick is not afraid to follow the call of thought, wherever it may lead. This book situates itself beyond the noise of the times."--Robert Pogue Harrison, author of Gardens: An Essay on the Human

"You read here that, etymologically, 'consider' means 'to examine the stars. To draw the connections between the distant points.' If that is so, then Of Silence and Song is a clear night sky full of constellations. From the beanfields that Pythagoras would not enter to the verses of her Bible that Dickinson cut out, from his daughter Iris's fear of the dark to the 'tenth Muse seldom mentioned, ' from here to heliopause, Beachy-Quick crosses great expanses in this book-length, acutely human consideration, flickering in the hunch that 'question and answer are the same thing--one. . . just the disappearance of the other.'"--Brian Blanchfield, author of Proxies

"It's an exciting thing when a writer of real originality and scope discovers a form that both focuses and liberates his gift. Beachy-Quick is such a writer, and Of Silence and Song is such a book. One doesn't think to use the word 'ennobling' of many works of contemporary art, but this one is."--Christian Wiman, author of My Bright Abyss

Praise for Wonderful Investigations

"Wonderful Investigations juxtaposes four essays with three 'meditations' and four fable-like 'tales' to trace the tension between mind and body, between our inner and our outer lives. A poet, Beachy-Quick is terrific with an image and relies on antecedents here from Plato to Thoreau to give his work a context and a depth."--Los Angeles Times

"Wonderful Investigations is a model of intense observation, of a mind reaching out as far as it can. Always Beachy-Quick seems to write in metaphor, returning to the process of wonder, and why it's so necessary, and then to the failure of language and poetry to ever truly take us where we want to go. . . . His reader cannot help but feel the same desire for that hazy line--cannot help but want to reach for it as well."--Ploughshares

"This is a book about reading. It offers the kinds of insights into the act that most of us never stop to indulge in, and for that we are eternally grateful. . . . The idea that reading offers a dream world, a parallel one, is familiar. But Beachy-Quick takes this a step farther. Reading before sleep, reading books to children before they go to sleep, is a way to slide gently through a middle place and into forgetting."--Los Angeles Review of Books

Praise for A Whaler's Dictionary

"Essayistic, inventive, and frequently brilliant."--Poetry Foundation

"This is a rich, profound, fascinating book, the kind that widens the margins of everything we read, making room for new observations, more creative relationships all around: writer/reader, person/book, literature/life."--Los Angeles Times

"Wounded by a book, wounded by the force of idolatrous speech in Moby-Dick, Beachy-Quick has mounted a kind of folly, a nautilus, enclosing the furtive wall of his own lyric sensibility. A Whaler's Dictionary reminds us why poets must sometimes measure their gifts against the calculus of prose, and why criticism by poets, unlike academic arguments, sometimes produces a flame which stands the test of time."--Daniel Tiffany, author of Infidel Poetics

"This is a major work on the charged relationship that can come into being between text and reader, written by one of America's most significant young poets."--Lyn Hejinian, author of My Life
"A Whaler's Dictionary manages to function as an oddly ideal work of criticism, breathing new life into Moby-Dick and showing how the novel subsists as an intricately living thing."--Virginia Quarterly Review

About the Author

Dan Beachy-Quick is the translator of The Thinking Root and Stone-Garland. He is also the author of nine collections of poems, three works of creative nonfiction, one novel, and a monograph on the work of John Keats. His work has been a winner of the Colorado Book Award, a finalist for the William Carlos Williams Prize and the PEN/USA Literary Award in Poetry, longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry, and included in the Best American Poetry anthology. The recipient of a Lannan Foundation residency, his work has been supported by the Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard University and the Guggenheim Foundation. He is a University Distinguished Teaching Scholar at Colorado State University, where he serves in the English department and teaches in the MFA program in creative writing.