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Cover image of The Night Guard at the Wilberforce Hotel
Cover image of The Night Guard at the Wilberforce Hotel
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The Night Guard at the Wilberforce Hotel

poems by Daniel Anderson

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In his third collection of poems, Daniel Anderson ponders and celebrates the images, sounds, and tastes of contemporary life.

The poems in The Night Guard at the Wilberforce Hotel navigate the evanescent boundaries between the public and the private self. Daniel Anderson’s settings are often social but never fail to turn inward, drowning out the chatter of conversation to quietly observe the truths that we simultaneously share and withhold from one another—even as we visit friends, celebrate a young couple’s union, or eavesdrop on the conversations of others.

These twenty poems include...

In his third collection of poems, Daniel Anderson ponders and celebrates the images, sounds, and tastes of contemporary life.

The poems in The Night Guard at the Wilberforce Hotel navigate the evanescent boundaries between the public and the private self. Daniel Anderson’s settings are often social but never fail to turn inward, drowning out the chatter of conversation to quietly observe the truths that we simultaneously share and withhold from one another—even as we visit friends, celebrate a young couple’s union, or eavesdrop on the conversations of others.

These twenty poems include meditations on teaching hungover undergraduates, wine tasting among snobs, and engaging the war on terror from the comfort of the suburbs. They are alternately driven by ornamental language that seeks to clarify and crystallize the beauties of our common world and the poet’s faith that fellowship ultimately trumps partisanship. Even as they weigh and measure the darkness of the heart and the sometimes rash and stingy movements of the mind, the poems refrain from pronouncing judgment on their characters. As much as they ponder, they also celebrate in exact, careful, and loving terms the haunting and bracing stimuli from which they originate.

Reviews

Reviews

Like the night guard in the title poem of his new collection, Daniel Anderson takes us on memorial rounds with him, checking latches and looking into dark corners, sometimes surprised—often not—at what's to be found there.

Daniel Anderson's fine new poems are plain spoken, and yet their outwardness turns subtly inward as we read and endows each subject with depth and discovery.

The sensory realm of these poems is as slow and subtle as melting snow. The world is muffled and muted. What matters is how the mind goes into the observed world to illuminate it with thought, to stir its flagging passions, and even to bring it hope. This is a jolting and beautiful book, one I will go back to again and again.

About

Book Details

Publication Date
Status
Available
Trim Size
5.5
x
8.5
Pages
80
ISBN
9781421413471
Table of Contents

I. The Night Guard at the Wilberforce Hotel
Pardon and Amnesty
Almost
In Vino Veritas
From Here to There
Epithalamion in a Minor Key
At Advent's End
II. This First Hot Saturday in May
A Late Apology
Provinces
T

I. The Night Guard at the Wilberforce Hotel
Pardon and Amnesty
Almost
In Vino Veritas
From Here to There
Epithalamion in a Minor Key
At Advent's End
II. This First Hot Saturday in May
A Late Apology
Provinces
Teaching The Merchant of Venice
The Hills, Beautiful Hills
Insomnia at Forty-Six
Easter Sundays
III. Labor Day
The Novelist to His Characters
Someone Is Burning Leaves
Four Voices for the Afterlife
Mare Cognitum
Now: A Benediction
Acknowledgments

Author Bio
Daniel Anderson
Featured Contributor

Daniel Anderson, M.A.

Daniel Anderson has taught at Kenyon College, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. His first collection of poems, January Rain, was awarded the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize.