Today's poem is "Solitude"
from Of Earth
John Daniel
is the 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 collectionsCommon Ground, an Oregon Book Award finalist, and All Things Touched by Windand 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.
Books by John Daniel:
Other poems on the web by John Daniel:
Three poems
"Found Poem"
Three poems
John Daniel's Website.
About Of Earth:
"John Daniels 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 poets spirit."
"What is the poets work? 'Listening to what lives outside our lives,' John Daniel answers. And on this books pages, he offers the results of a remarkable attention. Daniels 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."
"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 owls eyes, thimbleberries, a dying snake. Daniels poems are honest, compassionate, genuinely wrought and generous in their gifts."
"When a young Ojibway went into the woods for an initiatory vision, singing, 'Whenever I pause, / The noise of the village,' he was seeking a vein running between solitude and society. Thoreau sought the same vein, and it is the realm of John Daniels Of Earth. These poems are nature poems, but we might as well call them social poems or, to use Yeats word, companionable. If you want to share the joys of being alive on this perishing earth, this book is for you."
Naomi Shihab Nye
Paulann Petersen
Pattiann Rogers
Kenneth Fields
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