Title: Kate Daniels
Source: Kate Daniels
More informationKate
Daniels is a Richmond-born poet and graduate of the
University
of Virginia
who has been awarded the Pushcart
Prize, the Crazyhorse Prize for Poetry, and the
Louisiana Literature Poetry Prize, as well as the
James Dickey Prize. In addition to editing Out of Silence: Muriel Rukeyser's
Selected Poems (1992) and coediting a volume
of critical essays on Robert Bly titled Of Solitude and Silence (1982),
she has published three volumes of original
poetry: The White Wave
(1984), The Niobe Poems
(1988), and Four
Testimonies (1998).
Born in a working-class section of Southside Richmond in 1953, Daniels is the daughter of a British war bride, Jean Graham, who divorced her American-serviceman husband after two years before marrying Daniels's father, Harry E. Daniels, in 1952. The first member of her family to attend college, Daniels earned a bachelor's degree and a master's degree from the University of Virginia (1975, 1977) and a master of fine arts degree from Columbia University (1980). She served as a fellow at Harvard University's Bunting Institute and has taught creative writing at Wake Forest University and Bennington College. Daniels has been married twice and has three children from her second marriage, to Geoff Macdonald. She converted to Catholicism, and religious matters often enter her work.
Title: Daniels, Kate
Source: University of Pittsburgh Press
More informationAn
associate professor of English and an associate
dean of arts and science at Vanderbilt University,
Daniels explores in her poetry women's place in
contemporary American and southern culture,
especially through her own perspectives as both a
poet and a mother. A formally exacting poet, she
works in a range of meters, but is careful not to
fall into form for form's sake. Her poems are
remarkably concentrated with narrative details,
making relatively short pieces read like
full-bodied stories. Her style is often
prose-like, even conversational, though it never
loses sight of the driving energy of the
underlying rhythms, the way "common" southern
speech breaks across the lineation. Daniels's
poetry has been characterized equally by aesthetic
as well as ethical concerns throughout her career.
Although her work never devolves into the
propagandistic, she is unmistakably a political
poet, using her verse to explore cultural tensions
massed around gender and class inequalities.
Her first book of poems, The White Wave (1984), which was honored with the Agnes Lynch Starrett Award, established Daniels as an emerging writer. The subject of her second volume, The Niobe Poems (1988), is the drowning of Daniels's five-year-old nephew. She adapts the Greek myth of the tragic mother Niobe as a figure for the anguishing complexities of love and death. Four Testimonies (1998) draws from a remarkably rich range of subject matter, from the intricacies of modern spirituality to the horrors of natural disaster to the enduring pains and pleasures of motherhood. Daniels's fourth collection of poems, entitled My Poverty, will return to the Richmond cityscape of her youth. This collection is distinct in the general history of southern poetry in its devotion to recovering the urban, working-class South, presenting a vision of the literal and cultural poverty of working-class Richmond. Daniels is also working on a series of poems that investigate convergences of psychoanalysis and poetry.
First published: February 8, 2008 | Last modified: November 23, 2010
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