Robert Dana
Robert Dana was born in Boston in 1929. After serving in the South Pacific at the end of World War II, he moved to Iowa where he attended Drake University and The University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. His poetry has won several awards, including The Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award from New York University and two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. He revived and edited The North American Review in the sixties and also operated The Hillside Press. Retired from teaching after forty years as Poet-in-Residence at Cornell College, he has also served as visiting writer at Stockholm and Beijing universities and at a number of American colleges and universities. Dana was appointed Poet Laureate for the State of Iowa 2004 through 2008. He died in February, 2010, of pancreatic cancer.
NEW & SELECTED POEMS: 1955 TO 2010
BY ROBERT DANA
$35.00. (email us for availability)
About Yes, Everything:
The apparently gentle ingenuousness of Robert Dana's deft and durable poems is deceptive; it conceals a sturdy, hard-earned sensitivity, an open-eyed and open-hearted readiness to confront whatever comes for it, to keep whatever in pain or joy proves worthy of keeping. -- C.K. Williams
About What I Think I Know:
There is a lifetime of love and loneliness in these poems; and bitterness, and knowledge. Even a little happiness. Always loveliness and good music. And amazing craft. And a night hawk's soul. -- Gerald Stern
About Starting Out for the Difficult World:
A Dana poem seems not crafted but improvised. Yet it is about as "effortless" as a jazz solo that brings to bear years of experience. You hold your breath as the poem takes place. -- Edward Brunner
Dana's poems are about the hard truths he has come by but telling them slant, as another highly quirky poet put it. Slant and almost word for word. I don't know another poet who weighs his words more than Dana does. He works with a careless and fearless mind, a fierceness and delicacy of feeling, a great subtlety of craft and an intense localness of vision. -- Ted Solotaroff
If these new poems are more relaxed formally, they are still in the vein of meditations on death and love and nature and beauty. I think of Keats, Stevens, and Roethke, also poets whose formal restlessness and trust in the imagination never managed to obscure their unmistakable voices. Good company. -- Jeff Gundy
SUMMER
BY ROBERT DANA
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Another poet passing seventy might be ready to call his latest collection Winter. Not Robert Dana, who never seems younger than in this, his eighth book. Summer is about vanishing things that disclose anything but their frailty. It is "our enduring strangeness" that Dana affirms in his angular montages. About that which is off-to-the-side, no one is quite so sumptuously descriptive. Out of what others pass by as nothing, out of the "Black/ganglia of bare trees," Dana makes a "net/set to snare the first/bird that flies" to produce, again and again, like a prestidigitator, a bird that struts its stuff, "cocky as a robin on ice." Robert Dana has become our most elegant flaneur in the realm of the speculative--the walker whose strollings through the world produce a "murmurous celebratory music/for a discontinuous life." -- Edward Brunner
Dana... sings beautifully. -- Gerald Stern
HELLO, STRANGER: BEACH POEMS
BY ROBERT DANA
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A special collection of Robert Dana's poems about the beaches of Cape Cod, the Outer Banks and Florida. A collection of what Dana calls "the great luggage of the sea," Hello Stranger is filled with sea oats and sabal palms and blues and willets and cockles and john-boats. Robert Dana's poems have both the tenderness and accuracy of Impressionist paintings. His beaches are washed and strewn with the understanding of a poet who uses language with uncommon accuracy.
THE MORNING OF THE RED ADMIRALS
BY ROBERT DANA
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Like the red admiral, which uses all of the known wing strokes of flying insects, Robert Dana employs an astonishing range of poetic strategies to describe the pleasure and pain of this fraught moment in our history. And just as the brightly colored butterfly animates these pages, now lighting on a domestic scene, now flitting through a meditation on the nature of poetry, so Dana steps lightly "down some moonless fractal, wild refraction, unpredictable reflection." His clarity of vision and economy of means enact an exuberant encounter with the world; his vivid reading of his walk in the sun -- "Alive on the breath-edge of metaphor" -- is at once bracing and wise. Robert Dana is a magnificent poet. -- Christopher Merrill
In this, his tenth collection of poems, Robert Dana surprises, delights, and may even momentarily confound his readers with this ambitious book which is, above all, a work of transformations. "Heaven is here, not there" -- Dana says, and these poems invite us to "Dance... down this senseless, bright dingle of commingling and delicious confusions" so that we, too, can say, with the poet, "Every day I live I live forever." -- Richard Holinger
