Drunk in Sunlight (Johns Hopkins: Poetry and Fiction)
The witty playfulness, formal grace and elegant plain style are the qualities that one first notices in Daniel Anderson's fine new collection,Drunk in Sunlight; but as one continues reading and rereading these marvelous poems, one comes to admire most the way that wit and elegance are put in service to such a deep, tender and sometimes troubled apprehension of time, mortality, and the changing textures of the natural world. In Anderson's capable hands, form becomes a metaphor for the mind's rage for holding change at bay, and it always stands in expressive and complicated tension with the evanescent energies of life, energies which require form for their expression, but which at the same time ultimately ironize the forms they both require and elude.(Alan Shapiro, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)Daniel Anderson’s sensibility is a nostalgic one, but without sentimentality or morbidity. This is a poet who embraces life, loves it too much not to mourn a moment’s passing. His imagery is quite literally colorful—it shines with 'that bullion luster of the sun,' and even delights in 'that shade/ mulberrying the roadside.' Splendid, affecting lyrics (such as 'Elegy for the Dying Dog,' in which the animal comes when he is called—by Death itself) are flanked by longer, reflective narratives written with an uncommon formal grace. Anderson is a poet to read and re-read with pleasure and growing wisdom.(Mary Jo Salter, Mount Holyoke College)In this doom-haunted book image and expression come at us with a Keatsian richness, even as they record the bearable sorrows of our lives. Anderson's fallen world is unique, for the garden remains in lush full bloom and its flawed inhabitants have not been cast out. Sad, beautiful, true, and often satirical, these poems make a grandeur of irony.(Mark Jarman, Vanderbilt University)His poems are lusciously detailed and his voice is fully developed.(American Poet)The title of Daniel Anderson’s second bookDrunk In Sunlightsuggests an altered state of consciousness. ButDrunk On Sunlightcould 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 MehiganPoetry)