Onyx Moon: Poems

James Beall’s work is at first an enigma. What to make of his challenging vision, his unique voice, the round-about syntax, his penchant for unfamiliar diction, his seemingly schizophrenic take on the world. For here is a poet blessed with double vision, a man who sees the world with both brain and heart, who is fully at home in his bicameral mind, scientist and mystic at once.. The literary landscape is rife with physician poets, of course. Poetry has long been linked to medicine; in mythology, the Greek god Apollo was responsible for, among other things, both healing and poetry.  Poets like John Keats, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. and William Carlos Williams were all trained as doctors. One thinks of the late poet, Dannie Abse who wore both “white coat and purple coat.” But fewer poets who are also physicists come to mind unless one considers Einstein whose theory or relativity reputedly came to him in a dream, or the kinship between theology and quantum physics found in the work of John Polkinghorne who is both a theoretical physicist and Anglican priest... Often in Beall’s poetry, a poem traces the poet observing his own thought process like a poem by the late John Ashbury. But in Beall’s case, the poem is more accessible, more, frankly, “beautiful.” The poetry constantly goes beyond the surface with a kind of x-ray vision. (from the Introduction by Richard Harteis).