Daffodil

About Daffodil

Stopping time on the page to discover the poetic moment where past and present are one, 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 for the precise detail and his 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, even as we penetrate to the core, to the deep center of our experience of the self and of all living species. At the center of this collection are his captivating poems about animals—”The hope in fear / Also thrill to run” of the rabbit, the snapping turtle “nestled / Next to a brother rock,” and the muddled human attempt to save a creature separated from its mother in “The Fawn”—as the poems continually engage with the troubling and heady passage of days and years, and a 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 we’re tumbling with Katz in a field of yellow flowers with a group of long-haired young people what seems only a moment (but is really four decades) ago or doing yoga right now, looking out a sliver of window at moving clouds, this collection evokes the exact scenes and buzz of perception 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.