The Honey of Earth. New poems. Terrapin Books
(Cover painting by Lee Shippey)
Available from Terrapin, Bookshop, Amazon or Barnes & Noble.
"How can I—or anyone—not adore David Graham’s new collection? The tone throughout is hospitable, wry, and affirming even while acknowledging that loss and suffering are ever present. The honey of earth “comes and goes at once,” Wallace Stevens wrote, and these poems embody that paradox in vivid detail and compelling language. The sweetness that life offers—love, art, music, family, nature—exists simultaneously with the bitterness it guarantees—pain, grief, death. Both coming and going, The Honey of Earth deftly weaves “darkness and light together” with great wisdom, humor, and compassion. "
—Eric Nelson
Local News: Poetry About Small Towns. Poetry anthology, co-edited with Tom Montag. MWPH Books, 2019.
Over 200 poems from and about the small town experience from poets all across America.
(Cover photo by David Graham)
available soon from Amazon, or direct:
Cost is $18 per copy; two or more copies, $14.40 each; 4 or more copies: $10.80 per copy. Check payable to: Tom Montag. Mail to: Tom Montag, PO Box 8, Fairwater, WI 53931
"The poems and images mirrored in “Local News: Poetry About Small Towns” are some of the best work that I have had the pleasure of reading in quite some time. In this wonderful anthology, you will find many of the same problems that face the urban dweller: boarded-up storefronts, foreclosures, and the ever present blight. And if you look real close, perhaps the smile of a sunflower — it’s all there. Don’t let this one pass you by!" --Richard D. Houff
After Confession: Poetry as Autobiography. Essay anthology, co-edited with Kate Sontag. Graywolf Press, 2001.
"The autobiographical impulse in English and American poetry is here explored in two poems and 28 essays by a range of contemporary poets. Each weighs in on a different area of the discussion, but all are evocative and engaging. One quickly discovers that the confessional poem's legacy extends further than the expected Plath, Sexton, and Lowell. Sappho, Shakespeare's elusive figures, Milton's daughters, and Mary Wordsworth are as likely to be evoked by these writers, as they demonstrate how poetic voice spans an infinite variety of combinations. Colette Inez quotes Flaubert, while Claudia Rankine references Simone Weil: "I am also other than what I imagine myself to be." In concluding his essay, William Matthews writes, "Jack Nicklaus didn't hit that shot out of a fairway bunker with a sidehill lie with his personality, he hit it with a 4-wood." Other poets who join the discussion include Joseph Bruchac, Kimiko Hahn, Adrienne Rich, and Yusef Komunyakaa. The editors have done an outstanding job. Highly recommended to any library interested in poetics." --Scott Hightower, Fordham Univ., New York Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Stutter Monk. Flume Press, 2000. Chapbook. "I have long regarded David Graham as one of the most moving and able poets of his generation. In Stutter Monk, his best work to date, he proves his mastery and soul again. In face of his parents' failing health and the horror of his wife's ordeal with breast cancer, his poems--dead on, unsentimental, profoundly affecting--simultaneously bay at the moon in their sadness and express the author's joy in being alive." --Sydney Lea |
Second Wind. Texas Tech University Press, 1990. (Cover painting by Lee Shippey) "Intelligent, hardwon, and immensely readable, Second Wind numbers among the finest poetry books of recent years. In the broadest sense, David Graham's theme is nothing less than mortality: how we live, die, and affect each other along the way. The book is also a beautifully complex anthem to America in its variety, as it was and is. . . . Second Wind . . . succeeds in doing that difficult thing: giving pleasure as it makes us think." --Alice Fulton "In dense, richly textured language, David Graham draws on the ancient art of scop and minstrel, juggler, storyteller, and magician, to sing sagas of small towns, boyhood, domestic life, aging. Tough-minded and lyrical, and full of canny intelligence, all his taut tales ring true." --Ronald Wallace |
Magic Shows. Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1986.
(Cover drawing by Lee Shippey)
"David Graham's MAGIC SHOWS is a superb collection of poems, creating a world largely but not exclusively American, in settings vividly but never wholly familiar. He knows our country, our childhood, our parents; the highways, farms, squalor and weather that surround us. And he knows equally well the exotic and the strange that delight, terrify, or appall us. His wonderfully skilled poems are alive with lovely echoes of a literature he has as much by heart as our landscape, habits, and history. This is a fine and generous volume by a poet of remarkable talent. --Anthony Hecht
(Cover drawing by Lee Shippey)
"David Graham's MAGIC SHOWS is a superb collection of poems, creating a world largely but not exclusively American, in settings vividly but never wholly familiar. He knows our country, our childhood, our parents; the highways, farms, squalor and weather that surround us. And he knows equally well the exotic and the strange that delight, terrify, or appall us. His wonderfully skilled poems are alive with lovely echoes of a literature he has as much by heart as our landscape, habits, and history. This is a fine and generous volume by a poet of remarkable talent. --Anthony Hecht
Greatest Hits 1975-2000. Pudding House Publications, 2001. Chapbook. (Out of print)
Doggedness. Devil's Millhopper Press, 1989. Chapbook. (Out of print)
Cover drawing by Lee Shippey.)
Cover drawing by Lee Shippey.)
Common Waters. Flume Press, 1986. Chapbook. (Out of print)