Daniel Bourne - Poetry

Poetry

Bourne's poetry has been published in American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Indiana Review, Salmagundi, Shenandoah, The Journal, and North American Review. His poetry has also been widely anthologized.

In the award citation for the 2003 Edges Prize, won by Bourne for Where No One Spoke the Language, poet Carolyne Wright praises Bourne for his ability to "make the strange familiar," writing that "Bourne speaks, across borders of linguistic and national difference, a profoundly human language for us all." This collection "is worldly in the best sense: drawing on the author's extensive time in Poland, the poems meditate on history and cross-cultural perspectives. With intellectual depth and range, Bourne's poems bring the reader into a larger consciousness about our place on the earth."

The poet, William Heyen, writes, "What Daniel Bourne has done here is something I haven't heard done yet--Charles Simic's surreal mode grounded, but with Simic's knowledge of Eastern Europe. Remarkable and relentless, Where No One Spoke the Language achieves a voice of exile deeper than any I've heard from an American poet since The Waste Land." Indeed, before its publication, Where No One Spoke the Language was a finalist for the T.S. Eliot prize in poetry in 2003.

Bourne's poetry has been translated into Polish and Hungarian. In Hungary, it appeared in Magyar Napló, the official literary magazine of the Hungarian Writers' Union. In Poland, it appeared in Odra and Topos. His poem "Vigilia" and the title poem of his book, "Where No One Spoke the Language," were published under the pseudonym Jerzy Sarna in the illegal underground literary journal, Obecnosc, during martial law.