Ostentation of Peacocks

"The funny thing about Daniel Kane's book, given its rather showy title, is how unostentatious his poems really are. Excessive, yes, gorgeously so; and 'out there' in bravely following his, or his given language's, inclinations. What is anything that can be observed or thought and how do our words account for, and even augment, that sketchy existence? How is a poem a fact if anything can be? Peculiar to Kane is his often headlong, always nimble variant on how to proceed: transmutation, an ostensible care for writing as fitting together a world in words as if out of nowhere. This remarkable book adds up, heartily, to its own 'heap big meal'."— Bill Berkson Daniel Kane was born in New York City and grew up in Manila,Philippines; Mexico City, Mexico; London, England; Tenafly, New Jersey; and New York City. He is currently Senior Lecturer in American Literature at the University of Sussex, Brighton, England. Kane's books include All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s, What Is Poetry: Conversations with the American Avant Garde, Don't Ever Get Famous: Essays on New York Writing After the New York School (editor and contributor), and Fragments, Blotches and Healing Lights: The Conversation Between 'New American' Film and Poetry (forthcoming 2009). "Daniel Kane is the revitalising voice twenty-first century poetry needs, and Ostentation of Peacock is a full display of his transatlantic talent. Fresh, funny and visionary, this book offers the reader a real world of fantasy with the lyric grace of early Ashbery and the prophetic ambition of early Ginsberg."— Jeremy Noel-Tod "The variegated plumage of Kane's elegant, iridescent, fan-tailed poems is a constant delight. Some are indeed as ostentatious as peacocks in their pride, but others obliquely and movingly mime uncertainty, confusion, and loss. This is a gorgeous collection, and one that deserves a 'harmonious welcome'."— Mark Ford "Fun is missing from this world everywhere; but here it is, at times pitiless but still fun. Daniel Kane's personable imagination dwells in the house of free play: a posture of meditation on the couch upon which there is ought to do but muse on things of a consequence neither relativized nor sanitized. Absolute inquiry into creatures-objects-ideas produces, in this leavened mind, a flurry of response that is a 'cosmos or order or harmony in a bag full of hard to categorize leaves'. Not only fun has been missing, but also compassion, and that is here too, 'with singular freshness and poignancy'."— Rebecca Wolff