Drunk in Sunlight

The witty playfulness, formal grace and elegant plain style are the qualities that one first notices in Daniel Anderson's fine new collection, Drunk in Sunlight; but as one continues reading and rereading these marvelous poems, one comes to admire most the way that wit and elegance are put in service to such a deep, tender and sometimes troubled apprehension of time, mortality, and the changing textures of the natural world. In Anderson's capable hands, form becomes a metaphor for the mind's rage for holding change at bay, and it always stands in expressive and complicated tension with the evanescent energies of life, energies which require form for their expression, but which at the same time ultimately ironize the forms they both require and elude.

Daniel Anderson’s sensibility is a nostalgic one, but without sentimentality or morbidity. This is a poet who embraces life, loves it too much not to mourn a moment’s passing. His imagery is quite literally colorful—it shines with 'that bullion luster of the sun,' and even delights in 'that shade/ mulberrying the roadside.' Splendid, affecting lyrics (such as 'Elegy for the Dying Dog,' in which the animal comes when he is called—by Death itself) are flanked by longer, reflective narratives written with an uncommon formal grace. Anderson is a poet to read and re-read with pleasure and growing wisdom.