Four Testimonies: Poems

by Kate Daniels

"The Testimony of Simone Weil," the first of the four long poems that form Kate Daniels' new collection, gives voice to the radical French political thinker and religious philosopher. Here Weil meditates on some of the most famous images by Eugene Atget, the acclaimed documentary photographer who recorded a perishing Old Paris.
Three survivors of the collapse of the Nimitz Freeway in the 1989 San Francisco earthquake tell of the calamity and its aftermath in the narrative poem "In the Marvelous Dimension."
Echoing the Greek myth of Demeter and her daughter Persephone, "The Smash-Up" centers on a divorced woman and the sufferings of her grown daughter, whose husband has just committed suicide. In this poem, Daniels ruminates on marriage, sexuality, inherited behavior, and spousal abuse and portrays a mother's guilt at failing her offspring.
"Portrait of the Artist as Mother," twenty poems that compose the final sequence of the collection, finds new life and second chances, exploring the difficulties of motherhood as well as its bounties. Daniels artfully contemplates the obstacles involved in maintaining one's identity as a writer and as a woman while confronting the challenges of motherhood.

Genres: Poetry

100 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1998

About the author

Kate Daniels is the is the author of six collections of poetry, a memoir, and two edited editions. A former Guggenheim Fellow, she is the Edwin Mims Professor of English emerita at Vanderbilt University. She teaches writing at the Washington-Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis, and formerly served as poet in residence at both Vanderbilt and Duke University medical centers. She lives in Nashville.

Reviews

[Jimmy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Four long poems. The first one is about Simone Weil (1909-1943). She was a radical French political thinker and religious philosopher. She died from self-starvation at the age of 34. She was a lifelong sufferer from anorexia.

My favorite poem was the second one. A woman is trapped in her car after an earthquake with her dying children.

[Tina · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't usually read poetry, so I'm not sure I'm a good critic. Several selections, especially the ones on motherhood, made me weep before I knew what hit me. Several poems I want to copy into my favorite quote book. I want to share some of the poems, but I'm not sure how others will react (I'll be disappointed if they don't like them), so I'm tempted to just keep them to myself. I'm guessing this means the poetry is good?!

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ambitious, formal, excellent poetry on a difficult subject. The book deals with the collapse of the overpass in the most recent San Francisco earthquake from four different perspectives. Very difficult subject and approach that's moving and, for the most part, successful.

[behsforensics]

Cutting is for In the Marvelous Dimension
By Kate Daniels

[Diann Blakely]

Twenty years ago, America’s university presses had a reputation for publishing books that were either quaintly local or unreadably erudite. Footnote-ridden tomes on Shakespeare’s use of the exclamation point, for example, or works devoted to quilting patterns in northeast Alabama usually lost money. But universities tended to regard the red ink as a necessary badge of honor in their sometimes dubious pursuit of prestige and scholarship.

Today, universities operate like corporations, slashing budgets and personnel from their unprofitable areas. While such policies have wreaked inarguable harm on untrendy departments like classics, they’ve had a beneficial effect on university presses, whose catalogs are now increasingly filled with novels, art books, collections of short stories, personal essays, and/or poetry designed to attract the general educated reader. These titles not only sell, but they also represent some of our best writers, especially writers who lack appeal to those larger houses—which operate not like corporations but like multinational conglomerates.

Southern university presses are among the country’s strongest, and the most laudable ones have maintained regional ties and scholarly standards while establishing connections—and markets—on both coasts and in major cities in between. LSU Press, for example, has an excellent, long-standing roster of poetry titles, including Dave Smith’s Southern Messenger Series, which published FOUR TESTIMONIES, the most recent collection by Nashville’s Kate Daniels. But LSU has worked as well to strengthen its relationship to the larger literary world, in recent years contracting with the Academy of American Poets to publish the winners of that venerable institution’s much-coveted Walt Whitman Award, given annually for a poet’s first book.

*

POETRY EAST 1980-2000, a handsome boxed set of three anthologies featuring work previously published in this journal, makes for excellent browsing but also leaves a troubling omission: Poetry East is described as having been founded by Richard Jones in 1980, whereas longtime readers know that the magazine was in fact co-founded by Jones and Nashville’s Kate Daniels, whose name doesn’t appear in the press material or in any of the anthologies themselves, despite her decade of work for the publication. While POETRY EAST has apparently proved more enduring than the co-founders’ relationship, the exclusion of Daniels’ name in this celebratory publication seems especially odd in light of the wide acclaim accorded her most recent book, FOUR TESTIMONIES.

(originally published in the NASHVILLE SCENE)

[Alicia Mooney · Rating 1 out of 5]

I am trying to reread this collection. I need to return to it and give another chance.