Peter Dale Scott

Minding the Darkness completes one of the most exciting trilogies of our time, which began with Coming to Jakarta (1989) and Listening to the Candle (1992). Minding the Darkness is the final volume of Peter Dale Scott's landmark trilogy, following Coming to Jakarta and Listening to the Candle. It brings to a stunning, triumphant conclusion 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 time." The apogee of Scott's long hypnotic epic poem about the political and the personal, and their darkly powerful relationships, Minding the Darkness gathers extraordinary energy by way of its Poundian collage and tight three-line stanzas. With riveting images and eerie, accumulated juxtapositions, Minding the Darkness fully bears out James Laughlin's opinion that "Not since Robert Duncan's Groundwork and before that, William Carlos Williams' Paterson, has New Directions published a long poem as important as Peter Dale Scott's." He can achieve the quiet authority of the best later Williams. (The Times Literary Supplement [London]) Real poetry, visionary and complex. (The Washington Post) There's nothing quite like these books.... certain to be one of the most remarkable and challenging works of our time. (American Book Review)

When the San Jose Mercury News ran a controversial series of stories in 1996 on the relationship between the CIA, the Contras, and crack, they reignited the issue of the intelligence agency's connections to drug trafficking, initially brought to light during the Vietnam War and then again by the Iran-Contra affair. Broad in scope and extensively documented, "Cocaine Politics" shows that under the cover of national security and covert operations, the U. S. government has repeatedly collaborated with and protected major international drug traffickers. A new preface discusses developments of the last six years, including the Mercury News stories and the public reaction they provoked.

Peter Dale Scott's meticulously documented investigation uncovers the secrets surrounding John F. Kennedy's assassination. Offering a wholly new perspective - that JFK's death was not just an isolated case, but rather a symptom of hidden processes - Scott examines the deep politics of early 1960s American international and domestic policies. Scott offers a disturbing analysis of the events surrounding Kennedy's death, and of the 'structural defects' within the American government that allowed such a crime to occur and to go unpunished. In nuanced readings of both previously examined and newly available materials, he finds ample reason to doubt the prevailing interpretations of the assassination. He questions the lone assassin theory and the investigations undertaken by the House Committee on Assassinations, and unearths new connections between Oswald, Ruby, and corporate and law enforcement forces. Revisiting the controversy popularized in Oliver Stone's movie JFK, Scott probes the link between Kennedy's assassination and the escalation of the U. S. commitment in Vietnam that followed two days later. He contends that Kennedy's plans to withdraw troops from Vietnam - offensive to a powerful anti-Kennedy military and political coalition - were secretly annulled when Johnson came to power. The split between JFK and his Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the collaboration between Army Intelligence and the Dallas Police in 1963, are two of the several missing pieces Scott adds to the puzzle of who killed Kennedy and why. Scott presses for a new investigation of the Kennedy assassination, not as an external conspiracy but as a power shift within the subterranean world of American politics. "Deep Politics and the Death of JFK" shatters our notions of one of the central events of the twentieth century.

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. This selected volume presents new dimensions of a poet "capable of true invention," as Thom Gunn has remarked, " and] of interest to all who read poetry"

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. The usual result is a kind of daily schizophrenia by which we desensitize ourselves to our own responses to what we read in the newspapers. The psychic self-alienation which ensues makes integrative poetry difficult but necessary." With a brilliant use of collage, placing the political against the personal--childhood acquaintances are among the darkly powerful figures--Scott works in the tradition of Pound's Cantos, but his substance is completely his own.