“The World in Want”: a review of David Daniel’s WHAT LOVE IS by Gail Hosking
What Love Is
David Daniel
Nirala Publications (March 2025)
90 pages
You’d have to pick up this book even if you aren’t interested in poetry, just from the title and the gorgeous crow on the cover. Aren’t we all interested in love and what it means? We spend lifetimes figuring that out. Of course, we eventually learn over time that love means many things. David Daniel, the poet, touches on a great deal of love’s aspects like his ruptured appendix with his thoughts near death. “Wailing into the wild heart’s places.” Death, he gathers, is possibly a celebration of the love we have held and still hold, he writes.
Aside from coming at love from surprising places, he layers events by using different voices while paying attention to sounds (“sunlight on the sea”), syllables, lunch ladies, plant details and birds, even a T-shirt he creates for his wife to let her know what he’s feeling, insisting that T-shirt sayings are the “sixth love language.” He lingers over the word “honeysuckle” and its melody and beauty, starting in his youth, “wild on the tongue.” His notes in the back of the book explain further how these poems began, which is something readers often wonder but never find out. Telling us about his poem, “Artifacts,” we find out about the thousands of boys with hemophilia who died of AIDS because of a tainted supply of blood with a clotting factor. This connection brings even a deeper love to Daniel’s writing.
Love comes in many flavors and images, he insists, romantic and otherwise. And it can be “boredom and sameness.” Still, his words about love are tender, frisky, and clearly a page-turner even as he brings both love and anger into “difficult conversations.” He researches with his own life the images that surround him like his body and his memories. “The slow pressures of time.” I could almost hear him humming “wild thing” before making love. He covers Lowell the poet, the 54th regiment of the Civil War, and a German soldier killed at the Battle of the Bulge. Other details that “tether to the world’s chest,” fill with simple things like watching his wife sleep. Some lines break our hearts with surprise and tenderheartedness.
Creatures announce the arrival of his son with indirect communication, implying not only the circle of life, but the connection of us all to everything. He explores our wild heart’s places, coyotes he speaks with, first loves, and the mystery and mystical with an upside down bluejay caught in his bird feeder. He spends time with “the night the barred owl visited perched on a branch above our porch.” I am in love with his line about that owl, who “…looked at us/ for a long time, long enough for us to know/ most everything we need to know.” It gives me an almost spiritual chill every time I read it.
David Daniel has won many prizes starting with the Graywolf Press, the Pitt Poetry series and Levis Reading Prize. He’s a songwriter, a poet and teacher. He’s holds an MFA from the University of Virginia, has taught at Bennington Writing Seminars, been editor of Ploughshares, and founder of WAMFEST, which brings musicians and writers together every year. He is also the author of two other poetry books, Ornaments and Seven-Star Bird. Daniel is both a pleasure to read, and an author you should not pass over. Might I add, he’s a creative soul sharing his observations and his own private sufferings, which I have learned over time is no small task.
Gail Hosking is the author of the memoir Snake's Daughter, and two poetry collections, Retrieval and Adieu. Her essays and poems have been published in such places as South Dakota Review, Upstreet, Lillith Magazine, Consequence Magazine, and Nimrod International. Several pieces have been anthologized, and she’s received a few Pushcart nominations, and twice, "Most Notable" in Best American Essays. Recently, she was a finalist in the Autumn House Press book contest. Gail holds an MFA from Bennington Writing Seminars and she taught at Rochester Institute of Technology. Forthcoming in the fall 2026 is another memoir: No Glory: A Military Family's Reckoning (Kentucky University Press).