Keynote
David Daniel explores a city-entire lives-swept clean off the map in this haunting debut
Book Title
Seven-Star Bird
Subtitle
Poems
Cover Image
- Winner of the Levis Reading Prize
Body
As breezes lap the shallow-tugged tide flow
And swallows twitter and skirt the dusk,
We lie within the wreckage of the stars-
The moon spill, our planets' pull-this sad machine.
—from "Seven-Star Bird"
You will not find Friendship, Texas; it now lies at the bottom of a lake of floodwater, forgotten. In Seven-Star Bird, David Daniel rescues the town's-and the poet's own family's-stories and memories, from an immigrant past and from the clutches of devastation. In a weaving of elliptical and elaborate voices, lyrics, and narratives, Daniel's debut collection-guided by Heraclitus-discovers an ethical, religious, and aesthetic antidote to the disasters of loss and disappointment, why the gods call down their inexplicable punishment, why we can never step into the same river twice.
And swallows twitter and skirt the dusk,
We lie within the wreckage of the stars-
The moon spill, our planets' pull-this sad machine.
—from "Seven-Star Bird"
You will not find Friendship, Texas; it now lies at the bottom of a lake of floodwater, forgotten. In Seven-Star Bird, David Daniel rescues the town's-and the poet's own family's-stories and memories, from an immigrant past and from the clutches of devastation. In a weaving of elliptical and elaborate voices, lyrics, and narratives, Daniel's debut collection-guided by Heraclitus-discovers an ethical, religious, and aesthetic antidote to the disasters of loss and disappointment, why the gods call down their inexplicable punishment, why we can never step into the same river twice.
List Price
$14.00
Purchase at
Purchase at:
About the Author
Credit: Melissa Frost
Praise
- “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
- “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
