Review: 'Pharmako/Poeia' by Dale Pendell

Dale Pendell’s ‘Pharmako/Poeia – Power Plants, Poisons & Herbcraft’ was originally published in 1995. This review is written from the updated 2010 North Atlantic edition. Pendell is an author and poet whose written works include ‘Inspired Madness: The Gifts of Burning Man’ (2006) and ‘Living with Barbarians: A few Plant Poems’ (1999), as well as developing the political concept of ‘horizon anarchism’, which he first enunciated at Burning Man 2006. ‘Pharmako/Poeia’ is the first of a trilogy of books dealing with power plants.

Today’s world is highly specialised. In the academic universe there are thousands of bubbles floating about that contain the aspects of very small areas of study and research. This tends to fly in the face of history, when in the past it was more typical for the individual to be, if not skilled in, at least versed in many sciences and humanities. In Pharmako/Poeia however, Pendell demonstrates that the art of a cross-disciplined approach is not only still alive, but has the power to augment understandings above and beyond its parts. He reveals the depth to which scientific/poetic dichotomies are often no more than categorical fallacies, which have been wrongly extenuated in post-enlightenment thinking.