Therapon

A poetic disambiguation of “therapon” (“ancient chamber” in Greek, often translated as “attendant”), and oneiric dialogue steeped in music and mystery, Therapon, by Dan Beachy-Quick and Bruce Bond, comprises 60 near-sonnets. The book breathes new life into collaboration with its fluid entwining of two voices whose elliptical, Socratic questioning recall poetry’s roots in oral and philosophical traditions.

The book’s epigraph inscribes a preverbal origin story (“you were no one with your crayons / once”), while conjuring Emmanuel Levinas: “Language […] comes to me from the Other / and reverberates by putting / it in question.” Framed by the phrase “two came first / the mother of one,” Therapon investigates the plurality of self and other, call and response, and loneliness and communion, through deep listening: “Say a word and I am there. Some self / That says I with me, or for me, therapist, field.”

These moving poems argue for the co-constitutive nature of language and relation. Beachy-Quick and Bond suggest our estrangement from ourselves, each other, and the world is based in naming and the will to representation, while also showing how language has the potential to suture us back to ourselves and each other (“The voice will carry a spoon / & the medicine will heal what’s in me. I remember—”). Poetry’s grammar and logic (“the plural of I is a boat […] the plural of water was water”) also gestures toward psychic wholeness and acceptance of mortality: “I felt it […] that thing, what could be known / that I would never know […] death’s whole fact as gentle as / the grass bent down where all night the doe lay…”

Steeped in Kabbalistic mysticism, Therapon recalls the etymology of “soul” (“sea”), immersing one in the wilderness of words, symbols, dreams. The work of returning, of remembering, salvation, and Nietzschean affirmation (“‘Yes’ has no mouth, but speaks”) is, Therapon proposes, a lifework: “my first word / had a face and when the face left it / took that word the one I heard the one / I chased with every word thereafter.”