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Books by John Daniel
Click here for a list of John's books and other publications.
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Lighted Distances is not a collection of poems but a varied meditation made of 382 haiku-like three-line stanzas and eleven brief inclusions of prose. It began as a loose haiku journal of a year spent in the sagebrush and juniper country of southcentral Oregon, where forty-five years ago I first came to believe I might be a poet and writer. The sequence gathered a further dimension from
my longtime interest in the origin and nature of the universe, life, and consciousness. I found myself sketching a kind of cosmic creation story, based on readings in science and philosophy as well as my own questions, hunches, and spiritual inclinations. The book could be seen as a meditation on two places: a patch of open country at the fringe of the dryland American West, and the starry wilderness we call the Cosmos.
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“When Huck Finn lit out for the Territory, no doubt he found a mysterious, magical world much like that in John Daniel's modern coming-of-age tale. The glories, the violence, the stirring spirit that fashioned our nation continue, and are vividly chronicled in this bold and generous novel. Daniel has re-seen and re-gifted us all with our deepest, most cherished American stories, expressed here with poetic precision, amplitude, grace.”
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Of Earth
New and Selected Poems
John Daniel’s new book of poetry, his first in eighteen years, contains roughly half the poems from each of his two previous collections, Common Ground and All Things Touched by Wind, and a generous selection of newer work. Old or recent, most of these seventy poems were inspired by the landscapes where Daniel has lived or spent lengths of time over the last forty years.
More about Of Earth
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Winner of the 2011 Oregon Book Award in Creative Nonfiction
The Far Corner
Northwestern Views on Land, Life, and Literature
"These essays include meditations and arguments on becoming a writer; on old-growth forest and the practice of clearcutting; on the fluid dynamics and biotic diversity and mythic resonance of rivers; on the writers Ken Kesey and Wallace Stegner; on the literary genre of "creative nonfiction" and its kinship with fiction; on death and dying and the consolations of death and dying; on the al-Qaeda attacks of September 11, 2001; on a stint of hot-weather solitude in the Rogue River Canyon; and on my allegiances to the places and region and country I call home."
—From the introduction to The Far Corner
More about The Far Corner
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Read comments from the 2011 Oregon Book Awards judge
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Winner of a 2006 Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award
"Rogue River Journal touches, more than a little, the fountains of glory in wild lands skirting the Rogue River. It touches another kind of glory also, and with equal elegance—the past, the relationship between a son and a father, as John Daniel recalls, with honesty, flamboyance, tenderness and true regard for his father's life, his own journey toward manhood. It is an extraordinary book."
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Winter Creek
One Writer's Natural History
"John Daniel's voice is perfectly modulated, his judgments restrained, his sense of self dead level. This approach, together with Daniel's lyrical sensibility, makes this contour map of one writer's evolution wonderfully engaging."
—Barry Lopez
More about Winter Creek
Read the reviews.
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Oregon Rivers
With photographer Larry N. Olson
"I see from this book that Oregonians have been doing a good job of protecting wild rivers. You're rich with rivers. Some of them I know, and these photographs have shown me many others—many portraits of water's wildness and a fine variety of landscape sculpture, Northwest-style."
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"In his extraordinary exploration of memory and loss, John Daniel has found exact and lyrical words for what is almost impossible to put into words. He looks inward and outward with unfailing clarity, unfailing attention. This is a relentlessly heartbreaking and beautiful book."
—Jane Hirshfield
More about Looking After
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The Trail Home
Nature, Imagination, and the American West
"This collection of essays, as richly numinous as a Hopi song-story, illuminates John Daniel's singular ability to wed poetic instinct with high reportorial skill and enlarge not only our understanding of the land itself but of the fragile human place within it."
—T. H. Watkins, Wilderness Magazine
More about The Trail Home
Read the reviews.
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Poetry Collections
Wild Song: Poems of the Natural World
"Readers respond to grace and power of language, the emotional resonance it evokes," Daniel writes in his preface to Wild Song. "Poetry, with its rhythmic intensities, its rich directions and indirections of meaning, can ignite small explosions of clarity."
In Wild Song, readers will find more than a few such "small explosions," some of which will feel like subtle aftershocks, some of which will leave them breathless.
—Susan Hanson, San Marcos Daily Record
Read the reviews.
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Salmon Run Press
1994
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All Things Touched by Wind
"Eloquent and warm meditations on the natural world, by a poet who knows and loves the American West. Daniel's careful eye continuously discovers the particularities of the elements which surround and sustain the human beast."
—Naomi Shihab Nye
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Common Ground
"All our wildness may be disappearing, but for poems like these."
—David Laing, Fireweed
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