Jason Boulet, "'I believe in enmindment': Enlightenments, Taoism, and Language in Peter Dale Scott's Minding the Darkness," University of Toronto Quarterly 75.4 (2006) 925-945:

"Despite his desire for humans to 'attune / our self-clouded intellects / to the mysteries of Tao' (32), Scott clearly questions the wisdom of inactivity or passive acceptance in the face of both political and personal darkness. He dramatizes this doubt by recalling how, when he was canoeing as a boy, his father – whose 'ideals' were, significantly, 'drawn from moral critiques / of the acquisitive society' (22) – 'emphasized the importance / of paddling at first upstream // so as to be sure of getting back' (51). Scott transforms the river (in reality the St Lawrence) into the 'experience of history,' in which his younger self was 'launched unawares' (51) – only to find that, late in his life, he is left uncertain, implicated in innumerable horrors, and largely impotent: 'Depressed that my canoe / was now pretty much dead in water' (53). A complete acceptance of the 'impersonal and amoral' flux of the world can ultimately lead to the ridicule of any attempts at positive action and the reduction of all ethical distinctions to an absurd language game: 'How has the Way become so obscured that there are true and false? How has speech become so obscured that there are right and wrong? ... right and wrong are ... mutually dependent' (Chuang Tzu, 15), and 'the paths of right and wrong' 'are inextricably confused' (Chuang Tzu, 21)."

Prairie Schooner, Winter 2004, 195-97:

"Scott is surely right to insist that "there are times when the most novel/ act of creativity/ is to aim at the simple truth," and he seems all the more credible in that he undestands his own limitations: "truth emerges/ from letting go/ of the need for poetic Truth." Scott can not only excoriate the "decision/ to support the opium-growing/ Afghan rebels" and the "Texas oilmen/ who from the esrly '80s/ were lusting after Central Asian oil" but also remind us and himself that "it would be wrong to/ derive some Manichean moral/ there was no one evil strain." His Buddhist training and practice leaven the whole poem, even at its angriest, A section on dukkha ("the first noble truth/ not just suffering but imperfection/ impermanence") makes several accusations, but also ends by asking whether accusation itself can become complicit in what it accuses...."

Poetry Flash, 289 (Jan/Feb/March 2002), 1:

"At the end of a century...this certainly is a time for reflecting on the trajectory of our civilization. It is to this task of examination, and self-examination, that Peter Dale Scott lends his talents in his magnificent book-length Minding the Darkness.... One thing that immediately strikes the reader...is the contrast between two seemingly opposite voices: the poet's unadorned vulnerability and confusion on the one hand, and the astounding scope of his erudition and breadth of subject matter...on the other. Scott is simultaneously a sage and a novice. As it turns out, this is just one of the many contradictions and dichotomies that run through the work.... In one poignant passage, the poet, finding himself unable to lift a half-submerged canoe out of the water, realizes how much courage it took for his wife, Ronna, to marry an older man....As the poem zooms out to scan all of human history...Scott seamlessly gathers up super string theory...the Iliad and the Odyssey, a New Yorker article on Rwanda...the alchemy of John Dee and Robert Fludd....

Scott is not an academic or purely confessional poet, content to live with the irony of his internal contradictions. He writes that "...we are adrift / in an ocean of non-commitment" (IV.ii) and he is not about to be one more rudderless poet....Scott's analysis of the U.S. role in the new world order focuses on the most undemocratic of our institutions, the Federal Reserve B[oard] and the CIA, and their hidden complicity with the illegal drug trade.... Scott turns his reflective gaze back on his own participation in the New Left, especially its excess of revolutionary rhetoric ("revolution as social lobotomy")...and the New Left's disrespect for the basic institutions of democracy, including the seminal thinking of Adams and Jefferson, who Scott cites as guiding thinkers.... [T]he poet moves towards some resolution between the personal and the political, asserting that "inner and outer enlightenment / depend on each other // both of them lost / when they are not dialogical." In a statement that foreshadows the terrorist attacks, Scott describes our present moment of "...secular capitalism / and its mimetic offspring / secular communism // facing the `theological alternative / of shariah and jihad....I recommend Minding the Darkness to all who struggle to make sense of our lives, lived as they are in the twin universes of selfhood and history.

Picked as one of "The 10 Best Books of 2000" by John Wilson, ChristianityToday.com, 1/3/01.

Peter Dale Scott writes feelingly of his mother, the New World Order, and a hometown tragedy in which Berkeley attorney Fay Stender was shot by assailants who felt she had betrayed her client, Black Panther George Jackson -- later, paralyzed, she killed herself. Scott recounts a recent meeting with the family Stender left behind, including her son, now grown, with "two small daughters half Chinese/home for Pesach from Hong Kong/paraded and touched like the Torah.