Kirjahaku

In The Shower Scene from Hamlet poet Daniel Lusk is at his mature best, creating portraits and literary collages from the lives of artists, eccentrics, and famous public figures that ricochet across a millennium of the world's art and cultural history. The poet blends extraordinary facts and rumors about personalities long dead with intimate glimpses of his own peripatetic past for the enjoyment of readers.

This collection is beautifully crafted, exquisitely lyrical and astutely observed; poems of place and time that stun you with the originality of their imagery, poems of landscape, the natural world, buried narratives and dreams, pitch perfect memories of rural childhoods, the caesarean birth of a calf, how time passes, how little we know of each other, revelations so full of mystery they speak to our non-verbal centres as only music or abstract art can do. These are the "spells and charms" of a poet at the height of his powers. -Chrys Salt, MBE In Every Slow Thing Lusk's poems achieve a radiance that illumines and penetrates the surfaces of his American life. The collection exposes a personal history refracted through the mind of the recorder, a time lapse sequence of the act of imagining fictions of memory and self. Careful observation of nature and his psyche has taught him things to say underwater and to examine what cliffs, those towering monuments of time, yield after a rockfall. With searing honesty, Lusk's precise, at times mythic, language calls attention to life's curiosities and enriching failures. Each poem ends in a rippling silence and without complaint. -Anton Floyd, author of Falling into Place and Depositions This stunning sequence of poems from Daniel Lusk incorporates physical, emotional and psychic phenomena-from the poet's back yard to the farthest reaches of the universe. Part auto-biographical, his poems are also attentive and wakeful to nature. Here we find life, lyric odes to the wonders of the world, and an empathic connection with individuals the poet has encountered: a New Guinea man in a clay mask, an artist's model, a dying hermit, a family grieving the loss of a child. Ancient as breath and the beating of the heart is our urge to find meaning. Lusk traces inexplicable moments like a master filmmaker, miraculously gifted at capturing thought in motion. -Afric McGlinchey, Tied to the Wind, Ghost of the Fisher Cat, and other books

Daniel Lusk's memoir, Girls I Never Married, begins in Iowa at the end of the Great Depression. He was born to devoutly religious parents who "were renters and debtors, the working poor." Like many writers of his generation, his life and his writing developed against the backdrop of unrest and amid the struggle for cultural change in America - Civil Rights and Vietnam, the women's movement, communes, sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll - during the latter half of the 20th century. In Girls I Never Married Lusk shares his narrative dowry from mid-western preacher, rancher, and jazz singer to New England professor, poet, and minister of words.

The poems in this new collection by Daniel Lusk have been inspired in large part by the wildlife he encountered while living at the edge of wilderness in northern Vermont. Lusk sings of nature's wild kingdom - animal, anima, animus - in which humans, animals, earth and its heavens are related in a marriage royal and holy: the porcupine in quill robe, the moose in his crown, birds whose songs can heal, moss rocks and wet caves, midnight caterwauls, and hemlock shadows. "Without bears, bats, or fire," he asks, "What is there to worship?" Kin has been a finalist for the Tupelo Press Dorset and Snowbound Awards, the Sarabande Press Morton Prize, and White Pine Press Book Award. Many of the individual poems in this collection were first published in national journals, among them Appalachia, The Iowa Review, New Letters, Nimrod International Journal, North American Review, and The Southern Review.