Book Review
by BARRETT WARNER
Asleep with Whitman,
and Blake,
and the Romantics
It’s a shame that David Daniel’s Ornaments is not printed in braille. His words are best touched in order to be read, so full of intense emotion are they, yet without being “emotional,” or carrying the too much personal drama. Daniel writes to a certain core energy of feeling, full of impulse, and at times off balanced, precarious like some great stone resting on a marble. The poet doesn’t seek out this energy. He creates it out of nothing, and once he builds it, he gives that blue spark a place to go, with turns and lead changes and half passes that could rival Joan of Arc’s charismatic Percheron.
Daniel’s opening poem “Glass” sets the beat: “Once I made poems of glass, crystal pitchers / For wedding gifts, that sort of thing—very fussy. . . . / That was two hundred years ago / And also perhaps tomorrow—who knows?” Neither do we knowabout the poet’s older efforts which he still can’t break away from, but we shouldn’t try to know them. We shouldn’t even care. Almost every poem we try to write is some version of a stupid epithalamion poem and life isn’t about the marriage of this and that. Vows are not where empathy begins. And what of those crystal pitchers?
Now, though, I fill them up: You see
We’re fucking—making love I mean—all across America;
She’s on top, humming, dancing some late-Seventies
Disco thing, which is hilarious and a little scary,
And then (I write like this, too): her agonized aspect
Of ecstasy familiar from our saints, our porn—
Then a little blood, semen, a taste of iron
On my tongue. Stains everywhere. Life!
In an era of lower case, unpunctuated verse that feels more like a schematic diagram than written song, what pleasure to find m-dashes, colons, exclamation points, italics, ellipses, question marks, and commas as plain as nail holes. In “Glass,” Daniel uses these to set the energy loose, tightening the stream.
Two hundred years? Daniel is a hungry bear after such a long hibernation. He’s been asleep with Whitman, and Blake, and the Romantics who dove into nature for truth because myth and religion were too fragile. Now that we know how fragile nature is, Daniel’s plunge into instinct makes perfect sense. The physical and quantum laws which rule our reason are only speedbumps. He revs on approaching because he loves the jostle of hitting them. He is not after discovering life itself as much as he wants to find the will to be alive, the will to live.
Not everything has to be explained. Close your eyes and hear the beginning of “Crash”: “When I was a boy, angels appeared at my window. / They would open it, like a window, to my parents’ dying: / The jangling car crash, the spinning, that moment frozen, / Then the next: Such terror and beauty mixed, / The angels’ hilarity. They crept up the glass like frost. . . .” It isn’t that Daniel trusts the reader to stay with him. He cares, but he doesn’t care. As a poet, he’s a reader too. His poems are not his creations—he’s not playing God—his poems are simply voices he heard that no one else did, and he wrote them down so we could hear them too. So we could feel them. To every jaded critic who picks up this book and says, “OK, what’s my angle?” Daniel is replying, “Me. I’m your angle.”
Time only matters when you’re doing it, which is what I love about these poems, especially “The Sonnet” in which Daniel shows that once you learn heart speak you can talk and make love to anything, even a sonnet:
God how I love sonnets! I think of them every day
Just as I think of my father, who was,
In fact, a sonneteer: he wandered twelfth-century
France or Italy—wherever, grief fogs such things—
His huge head full of song: God I miss him:
But he clearly wasn’t meant for war: They say
He stood up in the trenches to recite poems
In the enemy’s direction: love, you know, love:
Then the red laser sight-light found his forehead,
Reminding his commander, for a moment,
Of a beautiful Indian woman he wished to love:
Bang Bang. Sometimes love is like that, just
As you reach for it, it runs away, or else it puts
A bullet in your head...
The hardest thing for a natural—and Daniel’s ability is about as natural as it gets—is to become a perfectionist. Perfecting an acquired skill is so much easier. With these poems in Ornaments, Daniel has perfected his natural gifts. He seamlessly enters any century and any sound and any love without its feeling overblown. Daniel doesn’t suspend our disbelief, he engages and embraces it. The long time Blake scholar doesn’t just stand with Whitman, he does so comfortably, and we feel comfortable too. He gives our disbelief the great big hug of an old friend meeting up with us again. This book is his blessing to the world.
Ornaments
Poems by David Daniel
University of Pittsburgh Press,
2017, 55 pages, $16.00
by BARRETT WARNER
Asleep with Whitman,
and Blake,
and the Romantics
It’s a shame that David Daniel’s Ornaments is not printed in braille. His words are best touched in order to be read, so full of intense emotion are they, yet without being “emotional,” or carrying the too much personal drama. Daniel writes to a certain core energy of feeling, full of impulse, and at times off balanced, precarious like some great stone resting on a marble. The poet doesn’t seek out this energy. He creates it out of nothing, and once he builds it, he gives that blue spark a place to go, with turns and lead changes and half passes that could rival Joan of Arc’s charismatic Percheron.
Daniel’s opening poem “Glass” sets the beat: “Once I made poems of glass, crystal pitchers / For wedding gifts, that sort of thing—very fussy. . . . / That was two hundred years ago / And also perhaps tomorrow—who knows?” Neither do we knowabout the poet’s older efforts which he still can’t break away from, but we shouldn’t try to know them. We shouldn’t even care. Almost every poem we try to write is some version of a stupid epithalamion poem and life isn’t about the marriage of this and that. Vows are not where empathy begins. And what of those crystal pitchers?
Now, though, I fill them up: You see
We’re fucking—making love I mean—all across America;
She’s on top, humming, dancing some late-Seventies
Disco thing, which is hilarious and a little scary,
And then (I write like this, too): her agonized aspect
Of ecstasy familiar from our saints, our porn—
Then a little blood, semen, a taste of iron
On my tongue. Stains everywhere. Life!
In an era of lower case, unpunctuated verse that feels more like a schematic diagram than written song, what pleasure to find m-dashes, colons, exclamation points, italics, ellipses, question marks, and commas as plain as nail holes. In “Glass,” Daniel uses these to set the energy loose, tightening the stream.
Two hundred years? Daniel is a hungry bear after such a long hibernation. He’s been asleep with Whitman, and Blake, and the Romantics who dove into nature for truth because myth and religion were too fragile. Now that we know how fragile nature is, Daniel’s plunge into instinct makes perfect sense. The physical and quantum laws which rule our reason are only speedbumps. He revs on approaching because he loves the jostle of hitting them. He is not after discovering life itself as much as he wants to find the will to be alive, the will to live.
Not everything has to be explained. Close your eyes and hear the beginning of “Crash”: “When I was a boy, angels appeared at my window. / They would open it, like a window, to my parents’ dying: / The jangling car crash, the spinning, that moment frozen, / Then the next: Such terror and beauty mixed, / The angels’ hilarity. They crept up the glass like frost. . . .” It isn’t that Daniel trusts the reader to stay with him. He cares, but he doesn’t care. As a poet, he’s a reader too. His poems are not his creations—he’s not playing God—his poems are simply voices he heard that no one else did, and he wrote them down so we could hear them too. So we could feel them. To every jaded critic who picks up this book and says, “OK, what’s my angle?” Daniel is replying, “Me. I’m your angle.”
Time only matters when you’re doing it, which is what I love about these poems, especially “The Sonnet” in which Daniel shows that once you learn heart speak you can talk and make love to anything, even a sonnet:
God how I love sonnets! I think of them every day
Just as I think of my father, who was,
In fact, a sonneteer: he wandered twelfth-century
France or Italy—wherever, grief fogs such things—
His huge head full of song: God I miss him:
But he clearly wasn’t meant for war: They say
He stood up in the trenches to recite poems
In the enemy’s direction: love, you know, love:
Then the red laser sight-light found his forehead,
Reminding his commander, for a moment,
Of a beautiful Indian woman he wished to love:
Bang Bang. Sometimes love is like that, just
As you reach for it, it runs away, or else it puts
A bullet in your head...
The hardest thing for a natural—and Daniel’s ability is about as natural as it gets—is to become a perfectionist. Perfecting an acquired skill is so much easier. With these poems in Ornaments, Daniel has perfected his natural gifts. He seamlessly enters any century and any sound and any love without its feeling overblown. Daniel doesn’t suspend our disbelief, he engages and embraces it. The long time Blake scholar doesn’t just stand with Whitman, he does so comfortably, and we feel comfortable too. He gives our disbelief the great big hug of an old friend meeting up with us again. This book is his blessing to the world.
Ornaments
Poems by David Daniel
University of Pittsburgh Press,
2017, 55 pages, $16.00
