Peck, John: Excursus

Black Square Editions, paperback

Edited by Mark Scroggins

Publication Date: June 9, 2026

Publisher Marketing:

John Peck has long been recognized as perhaps the most formidably intelligent and musical poet of his generation. His work, from Shagbark (1972) to Cantilena (2016), demonstrating a consistent mastery of both traditional forms and free verse, has extended and complicated the high modernist tradition like no other poet’s, while maintaining a peerless musicality and an exceptional rigor of thought and conception. Less well known is Peck’s prose work, which is as deeply crafted and elaborately burnished as his poetry: the writings gathered in Excursus are a marvel of critical insight and philosophical and psychological gravity, laying out their arguments in exceptional detail and persuasive ingenuity. Drawing on his deep sensitivity to poetic language and structure, his philosophical sophistication, and his training as a Jungian analyst, Peck maps marvelous connections and plumbs hitherto unseen networks of meaning and affect in every writer he examines. Excursus, the first collection of Peck’s critical prose, is a landmark work: from extended meditations on such poets as George Oppen, David Jones, and Thom Gunn, to reflections on translating Jung’s Red Book and Black Books, to the kaleidoscopic title essay—a fantasia on the composition of his magnum opus Cantilena, which ranges across all of western culture—these essays place Peck among the most erudite, graceful, and penetrating critical thinkers of our moment.