DANIEL WEEKS
Author, Poet, Historian, Musician
We No More Sang for the Bird:
A Poem of World War I
We No More Sang for the Bird tells the story of five British poets—Rupert Brooke, T. E. Hulme, Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas, and Isaac Rosenberg—all of whom died for their country during World War I. The long opening poem and its six attendant hymns are a meditation on the nature of tragedy and the redemptive value of poetry.
FOR NOW: NEW AND COLLECTED POEMS, 1987-2017
January 12, 2020
For Now: New and Collected Poems, 1979-2017 represents more than forty years of the work of the poet Daniel Weeks. Although many of the poems have been drawn from his seven published books and chapbooks, others have previously appeared only in literary journals or have never before appeared in print. "My goal has always been to write poems that cannot be mistaken for prose," Weeks has said, and readers have remarked on the lyricism, rhythmic flow, and musical prosody of his work as well as its vivid, hard-edged imagery and wide cultural and historical resonances.
Praise for For Now:
“The wild, fearless imagination of For Now commands an engaging variety of subjects, feelings, sources, forms. That omnivorous range gains even more energy from the central element of poetry: mastery of sound. In the musicianship of Dan Weeks’ sentences and lines an unpredictable, jazzy abundance thrives.” —Robert Pinsky, U.S. Poet Laureate and author of At the Foundling Hospital: Poems.
“For Now: New and Collected Poems gives generous evidence of Daniel Weeks’ gifts, primary among them his extraordinarily perceptive eye and heart. These poems move with agility, wit, and gravitas, with tones of voice richly revealing how the poet finds himself—and therefore places the reader—among others, contemporary and historical. Daniel Weeks has the ability to make celebrants of his readers.”—Thomas Reiter, Pulitzer Prize nominee and author of Catchment.
“In poems of ‘classic austerity,’ Dan Weeks brings a fierce but quiet intelligence to bear upon ‘lives… more intimately lived.’ His lines offer numerous modest and private pleasures and strike notes of deep feeling that resound throughout these pages. For Now is a collection in which we can locate, in troubling times, our better and more generous selves.”—Michael Waters, 2017 Guggenheim Fellow for Poetry and author of Celestial Joyride.
“ ‘Why should I/seek a harmony/that isn’t?’ Dan Weeks asks. In For Now, he offers or intimates answers with the gravitas and acumen of a poet-philosopher and the craftsmanship of a poet-scientist. Whether writing about the morning dignity of drunks on the curbsides of Paterson & Clifton, the yellowjackets mad with thirst, or other artists, like ‘the scratch/of a needle/on black vinyl, // a muted horn,/ brushwork, bass,/ and subtle turnings of//the keys,’ he manages to ‘unlock/the lonesome/to allow/sweet solitude/its hearing.’ Follow his tunes.”—Mihaela Moscaliuc, author of Immigrant Model.
"This tale's a fragment from the life of dreams"
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
