Watchfulness by Peter O'Leary

In Watchfulness, Peter O’Leary delves into arcane, biblical and mystical texts
as well as the art of iconic architecture to deliver a new poetry. Here the center
is “concealed in concealment” wherewith a new composition can be, in Duncan’s
powerful phrase, “made loose.” Reminiscent of both Robert Duncan’s “Passages”
and Ronald Johnson’s Ark, these verses draw influence from the aether of poesis
itself, thus charting a thoroughly contemporary and soulful terrain.

Peter O’Leary’s poetry, all “Gold, myrrh-soot/and smoke,” emerges from an ancient
matrix of Eastern Orthodox, Islamic, and Jewish mysticism, and yet remains wholly
of our time and place. Like Robert Duncan and Ronald Johnson before him—or like
his Louis Sullivan, designing and building the Holy Trinity Russian Orthodox Cathedral
in Chicago, 1902—O’Leary seeks the immanence of lost or discredited wisdom traditions,
in order to restore for us a living sense of cosmos. An icon comprised of an alphabet,
Watchfulness, in its hieratic beauty and uncanny arabesques, introduces us to a poet
of meticulous skill and architectural ecstasy.      Norman Finkelstein

Peter O'Leary

Peter O’Leary has edited two volumes of Ronald Johnson’s poetry—To Do As Adam Did: Selected Poems (Talisman House) and The Shrubberies
(Flood Editions)—and is the author of Gnostic Contagion: Robert Duncan & the Poetry of Illness.