Daffodil: And Other Poems - Hardcover

by Vincent Katz (Author)

Stopping time on the page to discover the poetic moment where past and present are one, Vincent Katz (called a poet of "vibrant cinematic hunger" by Eileen Myles) opens himself to the fleeting beauty of both culture and nature in this stunning gathering of new work.

With his painterly eye and disarming concision on the page, Katz opens this book with a powerful image of "all time sequestered in the fold of a daffodil," setting the stage for an encounter with the immediacy we must embrace to see the world around us with clarity. At the center of this collection are his captivating poems about animals--"The hope in fear / In thrill to run" of the rabbit, the snapping turtle "nestled // Next to brother rock"--as the poems continually engage with the heady passage of days and years, and the promise to honor a life in the here and now, to walk the street with the sense that, "It's not about buying / But rather about feeling the air."

"Whether in nature, or on a crowded or empty city street, was all a dream?" Katz writes, considering Daffodil. "Surely, there was and is still someone close, and that continues, as animals, despite war, despite incursions, continue. New York is a place of return, where we're aware of faces and other things; there, or in a field of flowers, in places in the distant past and present, love has some inexorable way of continuing."

These poems evoke the exact scenes that command our daily thoughts, that usher in grace and beauty, with their quietly urgent moral qualities, which, Katz suggests, can shape our days if we allow them to.

Author Biography

VINCENT KATZ is the author of the poetry collections Broadway for Paul (2020), Southness (2016), and Swimming Home (2015) and of the book of translations The Complete Elegies of Sextus Propertius (2004), which won a National Translation Award from the American Literary Translators Association. He is the editor of Black Mountain College Experiment in Art (2002), and his writing on contemporary art and poetry has appeared in publications such as Apollo, Art in America, ARTnews, The Brooklyn Rail, and The Poetry Project Newsletter. As curator of the "Readings in Contemporary Poetry" series at Dia Chelsea, Katz also edited the anthology Readings in Contemporary Poetry for the Dia Art Foundation (2017). He lives in New York City.