Drunk in Sunlight: (Johns Hopkins: Poetry and Fiction)

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.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments I Returning Home Late Sunday Night Sunflowers in a Field Elegy for the Dying Dog Thorns. Thistles. Burning the House The Wasp That's Lately Died Early Autumn in Tennessee II Reading History Dimensions, Senses, Affections Cycling Question À la Belle Étoile The Pond in Summertime Old Stone Houses III Rising Tide at Schoodic Point In Minnesota Once America the Beautiful High School Reunion, 1998 O' Florida We've Gathered in a Formal Garden After Entertaining Sea Glass On Having Said Something Cruel Moving (Again) IV Bill Fowler's Pointer Hears a Voice Watching Nature on TV Probability and Statistics Aubade The Dandelions Ripeness Is All In Here. Out There. First Frost

About the Author :
Daniel Anderson has taught at Kenyon College, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. His first collection of poems, January Rain, was awarded the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize.

Review :
His poems are lusciously detailed and his voice is fully developed. American Poet The title of Daniel Anderson's second book Drunk In Sunlight suggests an altered state of consciousness. But Drunk On Sunlight could also serve as the book's title, since so many of the poems here reflect a kind of rapture provoked by the wonders of being: 'How excellent it is to be alive,' as the speaker of 'Aubade' puts it. Alabama Writers' Forum Milieu, narrator, and the dreads and yearnings concealed in both, compose much of the book's interest. But there's another important feature of these poems, and that is Anderson's skill with versification. -- Joshua Mehigan Poetry