Summer

By Robert Dana

Poetry. After serving in the South Pacific at the end of World War II Robert Dana moved to Iowa, where he attended Drake University and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. His poetry has won... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 093807864X
• ISBN13: 9780938078647
• Release Date: April 2000
• Publisher: Anhinga Press
• Length: 78 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Engaging, fearless, respectful, occasionally inspiring poems

Now in his seventies, Robert Dana draws upon his decades of life experience and a keen eye for the world around him to craft a poetry that is totally engaging, fearless, respectful, and occasionally inspiring. Sunlight Gospel: I'm here in this little/four-room, four-square/house, sitting it its/gospel of pal sunlight;/fog in the madrone, in/the pines, in the orange/roses of my neighbor's/garden; a wafer of sun/burning overhead/to break through; part/of the bare ghost of/an old orchard; four/apple trees--three/across the road in a/still-empty lot deep/in brown grass; two/dead, another half/dead, all their limbs/twisted wonderfully/and wrung by salt/winds off the bay;/only the one in my/tiny front yard,/leafy, bright with/tart, feral fruit.

"A Book for All Seasons"

In his eighth collection, master poet Robert Dana offers the "gospel of pale sunlight," and shows us "the patient/spaces each word makes/to keep the day in place." Surveying the scene from the aerie of his 70 years, sculpting everyday language to the metrics of the heart, Dana celebrates the rituals of daily life, reminding us in peril of forgetting that "everything we do/is a form of prayer." From his vantage point in the mundane-sacred, the poet perceives "God in the gar-/bage, in the stares of children,/the mouths of charlatans." Here's a poet at the top of his form, saying the beauty and poignancy of time distilled by the prism of a life.