Description
Daniel Corrie’s sonically rich, incantatory poetry embodies large concerns, fullness of the imagination, mindfulness of the world’s details, vividness of image and metaphor, clarity of expression, elegance of craft.
William Wright wrote in Shenandoah, “Daniel Corrie is a poet whose two thematic obsessions are time and our human place in our humanly threatened natural world. Corrie’s poetry is deeply imagined, painstakingly crafted, lucidly essentialized and large . . . His poetry enters the frontiers of our collective search to understand and adapt emotionally to the human-driven crises threatening our biosphere’s life support systems and living beauty.”
Corrie’s poetry savors the natural world’s details. Too, his poetry captures our awakening to the great threats to our world’s anciently evolved beauty and abundance. In Corrie’s poetry, such realities as climate change and species extinction are not presented didactically. As Corrie commented in an interview (Town Creek Poetry), “Such art doesn’t have to be propaganda. Our dreamlife isn’t didactic, but it affects us profoundly. I think art can work like that.”
Praise for For the Future
Daniel Corrie’s poetry is profoundly and beautifully meaningful in its exploration of time and in its confrontation of our own time’s threats of climate change and other human impacts on a vulnerable planet. With equal skill in free verse and strictly rhymed and metered verse, Corrie explores the natural world and our place in it through lenses constantly, deftly shifting between the telescopic and microscopic. Always exacting, sometimes ecstatic, For the Future carries the rapture of love poems and the weight of psalms.
—Noel Crook, Salt Moon
Here is deep ecology. Here are poems that quietly and incrementally ramify to the furthest reaches. Daniel Corrie’s work belongs in the same genus as Whitman, Roethke and Ammons, but is its own species in how it embodies the fundamental concepts of ecology through accretion. Reading this collection is like coming upon the fresh tracks of a wild animal, be it bear or heron, and suddenly the world opens. Here is striking, original and compelling work that helps us more keenly be members of the biologic and temporal systems swirling around and through us.
—Derek Sheffield, Through the Second Skin
It is not enough to say that Daniel Corrie is an excellent poet or that his poems are well-crafted vehicles of language and meaning. Dan Corrie possesses that rare thing called vision, the ability to see into “the ancient suddenness of now” where present and past merge to form “the continually dissolving world.” It is out of this dissolution that Corrie works to see the world anew, “to see meaning / where the pattern always // will be the dunes / of patterns shifting.” Daniel Corrie is a poet of beauty and wisdom, and my world is better for having his poems in it.
—Al Maginnes, Inventing Constellations and Music from Small Towns
