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Beethoven’s Dream completes the cycle of hybrid works which includes The Condition of Music and Arc Tangent . As in these other works, Selland extracts fragments from a working notebook, juxtaposing appropriated text with his own extemporaneous writing to produce these meditations on daily life, memory, desire and loss. The book contains two long works, Sketches and Beethoven’s Dream , where Selland’s interests in music, philosophy, and painting - and the love of Beethoven that he shared with his father - merge with the workaday world of Silicon Valley’s high-tech factories; the tension between dissatisfaction with that world and the desire to inhabit more completely life as it actually has become is a major concern. Both works explore the intersecting points of past and present, dream and reality, internal and external, where identity emerges as a cluster of unstable boundaries , in language whose resonances and silences are haunted by the internal transformations of which they are the traces. Forrest Gander wrote of Arc Tangent , Eric Selland’s previous Isobar book: For all its formal dazzle, this is a deeply expressive book, often tinged with sadness. The first part shifts between prose, haibun, line-broken normative statements, and more intensely elliptical and syntactically acrobatic lyric. The second section then draws together much of the fracture of the earlier poems into an assemblage of observations on loss, distance, age, and stretched connections. A stunningly accomplished book.
