Reviews of Seven-Star Bird

David Daniel’s first collection of poems, Seven-Star Bird, is a true book of poetry in the classical sense. Every poem is related in theme and content. But more important is the fact that the poems resonate with a voice that is unique and lyrical, and at the same time penetrates the unconscious currents of our collective imagination.” —The Literary Review

"Daniel steeps a Southern sense of gone-ness with Hericlitean and Virgilian classicism, resulting in perfectly crafted poems that call upon our deepest sense of communal grief through restraint and elegiac brevity." —Nashville Scene

“At his best, as in the wonderful title poem, David Daniel is ‘River-Throated,’ an authentic heir of Hart Crane. Mr. Daniel’s visionary development of the flooding of Friendship, Texas—with its now lost legacy of Moravian spiritual culture—is a persuasive synecdoche for American losses in our ongoing engulfment.” —Harold Bloom

“Fusing history, folk wisdom, ancient religious thought, and a decidedly contemporary sense of the ironic, the poems of Seven-Star Bird are poems of homecoming and nowhere-a-home, of spiritual quest and of the earthly struggle to survive as a people and as a self. Daniel nimbly clocks and captures for us 'the terrible speed of beauty born and passing.’”—Carl Phillips 

 “Like Hart Crane in ‘The Bridge,’ David Daniel has a vision of desire that is transcendental, but also social, that links erotic and domestic love with love of the divine. But he is also a passionate historian and elegist for the destruction of community, as in his poems about Friendship, Texas, and a metaphysical joker and elegist who can write about the death of a lover in poems that are alternatively rueful, satiric, and heartbroken. Visionary but dry-eyed, David Daniel is one of the purest and most powerful lyric poets of his generation.” —Tom Sleigh