David Daniel, Seven-Star Bird: Poems

Literary Review, Spring, 2004 by Mark Hillringhouse

David Daniel, Seven-Star Bird: Poems Minnesota: Graywolf Press, 2003.

David Daniel's first collection of poems, Seven-Star Bird, is a true book of poetry in the classical sense. Every poem is related in theme and content. But more important is the fact that the poems resonate with a voice that is unique and lyrical, and at the same time penetrates the unconscious currents of our collective imagination. There are mythic forces at work in his verse that gather enough power to send bass tremors into the bedrock of our psyche.

The book's title poem, a poem of transcendence, a poem of over fifty lines, takes the reader down a spiritual journey into the heartland's deep interior. He writes about a town, Friendship, Texas, that no longer exists because a dam let it sink into oblivion. And he writes about the lives that once haunted that inundated world. I am reminded of Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology in the way Daniel uses the voices of the dead to partially narrate events and facts out of the memory of this bygone world.

In Daniel's world, God looks down bemused by the murders, lynchings, amputations, fatal accidents, and all the other horrors of doomed life in antediluvian Friendship. The poet teases God into these poems and stages a battle between the river God and the nihilism of manifest destiny, industrial progress, and the American urge to destroy. All rivers contain the representative torrents of our collective emotions, and this poet lets them flow into his lines and sends them off to heaven in the opening lines:

   As breezes lap the shallow-tugged tide flow
   And swallows twitter and skirt the dusk,
   We lie within the wreckage of the stars--
   The moon spill, our planet's pull--this sad machine.

Daniel's voice invokes the riparian silence of John Keats and the infinite consanguinity of Hart Crane into those opening lines. His use of metaphor is testament to his visual strength as an imagist, and his melismatic line a testament to his aural strength as a lyricist. He proves that poetry is still an art made up of sonic textures, tones and rhythms.

In this poem, Daniel is able to display his many poetic talents. I admire the way he uses enjambment to push the weight of his lines down the page, and I love the way he uses mid-line caesura to pause long enough for the line to break, sink in, and then regain momentum. These devices imitate the way a river ebbs and flows with the currents. He is also adept at paying homage to the great poets who have influenced American poetry in the last two centuries. He pays tribute to Roethke's "whiskey on his breath" in the way he constructs his own ambiguous childhood darkness, and he pays homage to Dickinson in the way he uses the double dash hyphen, or to Frost in his double iambic openings.

   So we steered by the swirling mathematics
   Of whiskey and revenge, the business of getting,
   Then of letting go. Stars gather in the sky like rain--
   Dizzy atoms that collapse, collide:

   In our dream the dead of Friendship, Texas,
   Stand on the shore of their once-town singing:
   Let the river horses run
   Let them run ...

This is a poet who has learned his craft from his predecessors and who has used it to reconstruct a parallel world of his own. Seven-Star Bird is a poem where the divine Logos and ever-changing river of Heraclitus meet the infinitesimal particle and quantum physics of Niels Bohr. It is also a poem where the ominous nature of Frost's "Fire and Ice" meets the gentle nature of Keats's meadow and field. There is also a good deal of Eliot's "handful of dust" to be found in this poetry.

This is very apparent in Daniel's short poem, The Word, the last two lines of which echo some of the modernist sensibility of Eliot's Four Quartets--"The last sound we'll hear will be the silence/ Of our first word finally formed .../" I am drawn immediately into this image of a silent realm of language as a kind of linguistic philosophy for the making of poetry--philosophical silence, the silent spinning of ideas, Logos, unconscious desires all "inaudible as dreams."

Gaston Bachelard writes in the Poetics of Space, "When two strange images meet, (as they do in Daniel's poetry) two images that are the work of two poets pursuing separate dreams, they apparently strengthen each other. This is the quality I take from reading many of the poems in this book and from hearing the echoes of the great poets who have influenced his writing. Daniel goes on to establish the "ontological link," as Bachelard puts it, "between invisible and inaudible."

Daniel is a poet who explores the frontiers of metaphor, and as he reaches further into the language, he discovers a hovering point at which words begin to disappear. In Nights and Days he is able to create a poem out of a single gesture. It is also a poem about his child growing up and about the mystery of life surrounding the natural world that we have no way of understanding. In this poem, the speaker is amused at the antics of his son, who unlike the children or the ploughman in Auden's great poem, "Music Des Beaux Arts," does notice the importance of failure. Icarus in this poem is instead a seagull that drops a starfish. Daniel, using poetic sleight of hand, threads this image of human hand and starfish, bird, water and sky, through the poem's sixteen lines in one fluid motion. It is a stunning achievement beginning at the water's edge in the day and ending in the night in the bedroom where the implied first person plural speaker as husband and wife make love. This consummates the ontological link as a mysterious union.