Seven-Star Bird

"At his best, as in the wonderful title poem, David Daniel is 'River-Throated,' an authentic heir of Hart Crane. Mr. Daniel's visionary development of the flooding of Friendship, Texas—with its now lost legacy of Moravian spiritual culture—is a persuasive synecdoche for American losses in our ongoing engulfment."—Harold Bloom

"Like Hart Crane in 'The Bridge,' Daniel has a vision of desire that is transcendental, but also social, that links erotic and domestic love with love of the divine. But he is also a passionate historian and elegist for the destruction of community, as in his poems about Friendship, Texas, and a metaphysical joker and elegist who can write about the death of a lover in poems that are alternatively rueful, satiric, and heartbroken. Visionary but dry-eyed, Daniel is one of the purest and most powerful lyric poets of his generation."—Tom Sleigh

"There are many mythic horses running through Seven-Star Bird: Heraclitus, Hart Crane, Celan, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, even God. There's a great romance abroad in the book, one that issues mainly from those two great places where the unconscious locates itself in American life: the family and the American South. Erotically philosophic and philosophically erotic, Seven-Star Bird careers forth in its veritable stampede with a mordant humor that begins in the credible and rises to occasions of the incredible."—Liam Rector