Johns Hopkins: Poetry and Fiction
2 total works
The poems in The Night Guard at the Wilberforce Hotel navigate the evanescent boundaries between the public and the private self. Daniel Anderson's settings are often social but never fail to turn inward, drowning out the chatter of conversation to quietly observe the truths that we simultaneously share and withhold from one another - even as we visit friends, celebrate a young couple's union, or eavesdrop on the conversations of others. These twenty poems include meditations on teaching hungover undergraduates, wine tasting among snobs, and engaging the war on terror from the comfort of the suburbs. They are alternately driven by ornamental language that seeks to clarify and crystallize the beauties of our common world and the poet's faith that fellowship ultimately trumps partisanship. Even as they weigh and measure the darkness of the heart and the sometimes rash and stingy movements of the mind, the poems refrain from pronouncing judgment on their characters. As much as they ponder, they also celebrate in exact, careful, and loving terms the haunting and bracing stimuli from which they originate.
Accessible and wry, at times comic, and often mournful, Daniel Anderson's poetry is relentlessly attentive to the splendors of the natural world. But the poems collected here-previously published in such leading literary journals as Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, The Yale Review, New England Review, and Southwest Review-are not relegated simply to the realm of pastoral meditation. They give voice to the sorrowful and sometimes unfortunate things we say and think. They chronicle, with both precision and care, the many ways in which jubilation and lament frequently reverse themselves. Above all else, each poem crystallizes in its wake a freshly minted moment, one that articulates an experience that reaches beyond the poet's own time and place. Sunflowers drenched in early evening sun; icy blue, explosive waves along the rocky shores of Maine; September cotton "like strange anachronistic snow" in Tennessee-Anderson forges these images into deep ruminations on love, shame, delight, loss, and estrangement.