Peter Scott

Minding the Darkness is the final volume of Peter Dale Scott’s landmark trilogy Seculum. Following Coming to Jakarta and Listening to the Candle, it brings stunning, triumphant conclusion to a remarkable and sui generis poem. “There is nothing quite like these books,” as the American Book Review remarked: “Scott’s trilogy, only two-thirds completed as yet, is certain to be one of the most remarkable and challenging works of our rime.” Scott’s hypnotic epic poem concerns the political and the personal, and their darkly powerful relationships.…

Crossing Borders presents the shorter work of acclaimed poet Peter Dale Scott. Scott––who can “achieve the quiet authority of the best later Williams” (London Times Literary Supplement) and who is renowned for his two epic, book-length poems Coming to Jakarta and Listening to the Candle––appears here on an inviting new scale. Whether considering nature, death, love, memory, or the classical Chinese masters, each of the fifty-six poems of Crossing Borders yields large pleasures within a small compass.…

A sequel to Peter Dale Scott’s critically acclaimed long political poem Coming to Jakarta, Listening to the Candle is a booklength reflection on the poet’s life. Listening follows Jakarta as the second step in a projected trilogy: self-knowledge is more at issue than self-alienation; art perhaps overshadows politics; Rilke is more the poem’s guide than Pound. Like Jakarta, Listening to the Candle proves to be “almost hypnotically readable… [with] a seemingly digressive development that suddenly pulls tight as a net around the reader and the subject” (Alan Williamson, AGNI).…

A devastating revelation of violence, exploitation, and corrupt politics, Coming to Jakarta derives its title from the role played by the CIA, banks, and oil companies in the 1965 slaughter of more than half a million Indonesians. A former Canadian diplomat and now a scholar at the University of California, Peter Dale Scott has said that the poem “is triggered by what we know of the bloody Indonesian massacre… However it is not so much a narrative of exotic foreign murder as one person’s account of what it is like to live in the 20th century, possessing enough access to information and power to feel guilty about global human oppression, but not enough to deal with it.…