Starting Out for the Difficult World

Dana, Robert

ISBN 10: 0060550945 / ISBN 13: 9780060550943

Published by Harper & and Row, New York, 1987

About this Item

95 pp. A small black mark on the front of the dj, visible in the photo. Dana is the author of In a Fugitive Season; The Power of the Visible; Some Versions of Silence; Against the Grain: Interviews with Maverick American Publishers; Blood Harvest; What the Stones Know; Journeys from the Skin; The Dark Flags of Waking; My Glass Brother and Other Poems. 'Great art, someone said, / rides on the backs of the poor. / Perhaps that's so. But this / is not Long Island. No packed / white waves leap yelping on the shore. / Here, the nights are cold and starry. / Three solitary clouds pig along / the near horizon. And you could / mistake this autumn for Keats's / or your own, or the / autumn of someone you once new.'--from ''Starting Out for the Difficult World.''.

Seller Inventory # 000413

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Starting Out for the Difficult World
• Publisher: Harper & and Row, New York
• Publication Date: 1987
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0060550945
• ISBN 13: 9780060550943
• Binding: Cloth
• Edition: First Edition
• Condition: Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine
• Seller catalogs:
  • Poetry

About this title

Synopsis

Poetry. Newly available from SPD, STARTING OUT FOR THE DIFFICULT WORLD (Harper & Row, 1987) was Cornell professor Robert Dana's fourth collection of poetry. He is a writer of strong, rich experience, which spans the city slums where he was born and came of age to the fields and skies and towns of Iowa where Dana lived and taught for many years. Tense to the point of being enigmatic, Dana is a poet whose voice one trusts: what he says he feels is validated by the precision and force of the saying itself. At the time of its publication, M.L. Rosenthal commented about STARTING OUT FOR THE DIFFICULT WORLD: "Robert Dana's new book is dangerously alive with contradictory states of feeling. The poems are harsh and rich at the same time; they're painfully lonely yet manage to share the loneliness."

About the Author

Robert Dana was born in Boston in 1929. After serving in the South Pacific at the end of World War II, he moved to Iowa where he attended Drake University and The University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. His poetry has won several awards, including two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and The Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award from New York University. Retired from teaching after forty years as Poet-in-Residence at Cornell College, he served as Distinguished Visiting Writer at Stockholm University and at several American colleges and universities. Dana was named Poet Laureate for the state of Iowa. He passed away in 2010.