What Love Is : When the World Is in Want (THE COMPLETE BOOK OF LOVE POEMS) by David Daniel

Description

What Love Is is a luminous and fearless exploration of love in all its forms—passionate and tender, fleeting and enduring, joyous and grief-stricken. In this deeply personal and visionary collection, acclaimed American poet and editor David Daniel examines the ways love binds and breaks us, how it arrives unexpectedly and lingers, shaping the course of our lives. Spurred by a life-altering act of kindness from poet Jean Valentine, Daniel’s poems look at love as if through a kaleidoscope—lyrical, raw, funny, and unflinchingly honest, and all at once. From moments of ecstatic connection to the ache of loss, he navigates love’s bewildering contradictions—a force both saving and undoing us.

A work of fierce vulnerability and imaginative brilliance, ecstatic in its melancholy, fierce and funny in its heartbreak, What Love Is affirms, again and again, that love is not just something we feel—it’s something we live.

“A raunchy, lyrical, romantic, passionate, vulnerable, mortal work…”
– Rosanna Warren

“In these tumbling-forward tercets David Daniel’s poems are always falling forward like three-legged tables, like unstable humans who stumble over the tripstones of love and fall forward, who fall into the honeysuckle of desire, who suckle the birdfeeder like chicadees, whose hunger as the cat pancaked against the window. In these narratives of love, the world is a skittery heart and a sexual groove. Their arms are open to you. Run into them.”
– Tony Barnstone

“What Love Is loves love. It tenders love. It is love. You will love it.’
– H.L. Hix

“What Love Is is a miracle of visions coming together to make something utterly new and emotionally reverberant. It is a vision of what it means to be inside of love and to know that there is no way out no matter how much crying you do, no matter how much time has gone by since the last time you held it in your hands.’
– Matthew Lippman

“What Love Is is steeped in the rhythms of contemporary American life—infused with meditations on race, gender, music, and literary movements—while evoking the visionary intensity of William Blake and the meditative lyricism of Celtic monks.”
–Yuyutsu Sharma

“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.”
—Barrett Warner. From a review of Ornaments in Pratik

“So you didn’t think Rimbaud’s Illuminations were possible in an American idiom? You didn’t think that the explosive and tender, the vulgar and the visionary, could take concepts of spirit and body and wring their necks? These poems take on the South and the intricacies of race, they meditate on how power empties out the private life, all the while refusing to be pigeon-holed by ideologies of any stripe. They say with Whitman, “Do I contradict myself? Well then, I contradict myself…” Fierce and funny, ecstatic in their melancholy, these poems blow past any curb on the imagination. No one in any generation is writing poems that are like these: smart, visceral, immensely pleasurable to read.”
—Tom Sleigh

“Some of the most elegant, aggressive, sweet, hallucinatory, stone-carved, and raggedy-ass writing that I’ve ever read. Out of our slow, churning fall from childhood into adult life, Daniel makes a poetry full of mortal reckonings and whispered pleasures, sending us on a submariner’s tour of many of the most dangerous currents in American history.
—David Rivard

“David Daniel has long known what wreckage and wounds break the soul to a blossoming wonder, both on the page and in the ear. Remarkable for how he remasters his and our suffering into sacred song, I bear witness in saying: Ornaments is a sweet American solo act that inspires a new telling that ‘we can love by.’”
—Major Jackson

“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

“There are many mythic horses running through Seven-Star Bird: Heraclitus, Hart Crane, Celan, Nietszche, Wittgenstein, even God. There’s a great romance abroad in the book, one that issues mainly from those two great places where the unconscious locates itself in American life: the family and the American South. Erotically philosophic and philosophically erotic, Seven-Star Bird careers forth in its veritable stampede with a mordant humor that begins in the credible and rises to occasions of the incredible.”
—Liam Rector

“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, satirical, and heartbroken. Visionary but dry-eyed, David Daniel is one of the purest and most powerful lyric poets of his generation.”
—Tom Sleigh

“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 dying.’”
—Carl Phillips.

“These poems feel long-pondered-over, deep-sought-for. The more I read them, the more I felt in awe of them. Their wisdom is more than promise, a gift ‘not owned, but forever theirs.’ Forever ours? If we as readers are attentive to the ‘handshredding truth’—or is it an openhandedness of spirit—that fills these poems? David Daniel is a poet one can believe in, devout to both his affirmations and his doubts.”
—Bill Knott

David Daniel was born in Danville, Kentucky, and was raised in Ruston, Louisiana, Asheville, North Carolina, and Murfreesboro, Tennessee. His first book, Seven-Star Bird (Graywolf Press), won the Larry Levis Reading Prize for the best first or second poetry book of the year, and his last book, Ornaments (Pitt Poetry Series), inspired poet Tom Sleigh to write, “No one in any generation is writing poems like these: smart, visceral, and immensely pleasurable to read.” Daniel was the poetry editor of Ploughshares for more than a decade while teaching at Emerson College. He was also Core Faculty at the Bennington Writing Seminars MFA program. He now directs the undergraduate creative writing program at Fairleigh Dickinson University where he is also the creator of FDU’s WAMFest: The Words and Music Festival. WAMFest has been celebrated for its unique arts programming by the National Endowment for the Arts, and has featured collaborative performances by Bruce Springsteen, Robert Pinsky, Chuck D, Rosanne Cash, Salman Rushdie, Talib Kweli, C.D. Wright, Jonathan Demme, and dozens of the most important artists and writers of our time. He lives with his wife and youngest son, among a bunch of cats and old guitars, in Belmont, Massachusetts.