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OF EARTH

OF EARTH

$20.00Price

ISBN: 978-0-9839975-9-7

Pub Date: Sept. 2012

Pages: 120


By John Daniel


Reflecting Daniel's deep affinity for the land and lives of the given world, Of Earth offers poems of praise that do not deny suffering and death but find them essential to the vast, intricate and mysterious territory of being. "Nature," he writes in his introduction, "means having been born—microbes, humans, the entire cosmos itself, with all the living, dying, love, loss, joy, horror, beauty, and questions about ends and beginnings that the cosmos has so far evolved. Like all true literature, nature poetry belongs to the ongoing conversation the human community is conducting through time about who we are and where we have come from, about where we are and who our kinfolk are, about how we live and how we might live, about how our lives should matter."

    John Daniel’s poems are indelible, essential, endearing, and exquisitely shaped. This rich and precious earth, so often trampled and forsaken, must be somehow touched and restored by such attentive consideration. We are much richer readers, who live with these generous poems and this great poet’s spirit.

    —Naomi Shihab Nye, author of Transfer and Fuel


    What is the poet’s work? “Listening to what lives outside our lives,” John Daniel answers. And on this book’s pages, he offers the results of a remarkable attention. Daniel’s poems are psalms born of stillness. They are praise-songs born of both awe and a steely insistence on clear, spare depiction of the “mystery of the given world.” Vivid glimpses into his process of truth-seeking, his poems spring from a secular yet numinous reverence.

    —Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate, author of The Voluptuary


    John Daniel presents poems of testimony to the glories and mysteries of the natural world. In a steady voice filled with wonder and gratitude, he examines thunder: ­storms, the Milky Way, a screech owl’s eyes, thimbleberries, a dying snake. Daniel’s poems are honest, compassionate, genuinely wrought and generous in their gifts.

    —Pattiann Rogers, author of Wayfare and The Grand Array


    Author of nine books of poetry and prose, John Daniel is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University and for twenty-three years edited poetry for Wilderness magazine. His poems have appeared in two pre­vious collections—Common Ground, an Oregon Book Award finalist, and All Things Touched by Wind—and in maga­zines such as Poetry, The Southern Review, Southwest Review, Sierra, and Orion. A former logger, hod carrier, railroader, and rock climbing instructor, he lives with his wife, Marilyn Daniel, in the Coast Range foothills west of Eugene, Oregon.

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