Jeffery Beam

Spectral PegasusDark Movements

“I turn the corner of my dream and there you are,” Hillsborough-based poet and songsmith Jeffery Beam writes in Spectral Pegasus/Dark Movements, a new book pairing Welsh artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins’s paintings with Beam’s responses in verse. Though the line occurs in the context of a collaborative work about the Mari Lwyd, a wassailing tradition in Wales, it also captures the feeling of Beam’s poetry in general, with its songful beauty and sense of dreamlike encounters, in nature and other mirrors, with oneself. Stark with rich blues and reds, at once erotic and reverent, Hicks-Jenkins’s equine paintings alternate with Beam’s poems in a sensuous rhythm of image and sound (especially when you play the accompanying CD). A long series of launch events begins at 5:00 p.m. on March 8 at the Orange County Public Library, where Beam will be joined by folk singer Mary Rocap. —Brian Howe