Introductions

Praise for David Woo’s Divine Fire

I expect David Woo to be one of the two or three poets of his generation. Divine Fire is even more wise, eloquent, and light-bringing than was his first book, The Eclipses. David Woo now writes the poems of our climate, in the tradition of Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, and Elizabeth Bishop.
—Harold Bloom

One of the top poetry collections of the year. Before he died in 2019, Harold Bloom wrote, “I expect David Woo to be one of the two or three poets of his generation.” I’ve now read Woo’s new collection, “Divine Fire,” three times, and each time I find it more remarkable. His poems — wry even in the face of racism, death and the apocalypse — never fail to disturb my assumptions.
—Ron Charles, Book Club, The Washington Post

David Woo’s quietly magisterial, wide-rangingly allusive second book of poems Divine Fire stations us like the man Kafka imagined in front of a mirror containing all of the world’s wisdom, but unlike that man who “desired…to ensure…the silvering” properties of the mirror would last—a kind of fool’s errand—, Woo shows us a way through the chimera of the world’s wisdom to a “real life…mirror…nailed to the ceiling” of “some red-velvet motel,” beneath which we move achingly aware of “all those limbs” before us, with us, that have knotted and unknotted in the “art of becoming another.” What we see in the “real life” mirror is not world wisdom but a divine fire that both makes and destroys us so that “what remains is something wee,/ wee and oh-so-sempiternal, the self/ unselfing another, world without end.”
—Michael Collier

Divine Fire is even better than The Eclipses, praising which I pretty much used up my store of superlatives. It’s funnier, sexier, wiser, more grief-stricken, more profoundly literary, more personal without ever once stooping to mere revelation. It makes me think of that remark of Mallarmé’s about all earthly existence belonging in a book―or, as tweaked by Merrill in ‘The Book of Ephraim,’ ‘the world was made to end (pour aboutir)/ in a slim volume.’ In fact, a very apt comparison can be made with ‘Ephraim,’ despite their obvious differences: it feels more and more, with each rereading, like an entire life, ‘a sea to swim in,’ one I sense I will never quite get to the bottom of, or want to.
—Daniel Hall

A good book of poetry shows us what a strange and holy world we live in. Divine Fire does just this, opening window after window onto other texts and other art: a faded Vermeer, the poetry of Luis Cernuda and Catullus, Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Pessoa, and more. And on everything in Divine Fire, as in a Vermeer, the light is falling—there is nothing that is not touched by it.
—Han VanderHart, Ecotheo

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Praise for David Woo’s The Eclipses

David Woo’s first book of poems is eloquent, poignant, superbly wrought. Like the major poet Henri Cole, Woo has achieved a fresh, highly individual imaginative language in the American modes of Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane. The title poem and the beautiful transposition of Hofmannsthal in “Bal­lad of Infinite Forgetfulness” have an aura of permanence about them.
—Harold Bloom

Part James Merrill (naming the elegance of things), part John Ashbery (portraying the drift of consciousness), David Woo, in his first book The Eclipses, is elegiac and spidery and full of the desolations of solitude. When we see a mother’s death room, we cannot look away because we also hear the “fearful music” of love … Intelligent first poems.
—Henri Cole

Rhythmic verve, a fluency of image and reference, a confident probing into peculiar corners of the physical world—these are some of the qualities marking David Woo’s luminous debut collection, all anchored by a purity of feeling in plain language. Splicing exhilaration and unease, the poet keeps one eye on the pointillist pixellations of the world, while the other gravely takes in the evidence of human sorrow. Without denials, he pieces together the “Heraclitean fragments” of the factual, always alert to “the instant flapped/and flung weightless to its own loss.” Tutored by heart and head, his “singularities” vibrate with universal implications, turning, as the good poem must, “the ineffable into words.”
—Eamon Grennan

The Eclipses is a book of woe, mourning, and transcendence seldom seen in such luminous detail. David Woo is an artful remembrancer, and his approach to family and his literary ancestors has created perpetual art forms. Such allegiance provides eloquent heartwork.
—Michael S. Harper

Among the most achieved first books I’ve ever seen, absolutely standing in its own ripened voice and heart, a perfect, rare marriage of language perception and feeling.
—Jane Hirshfield

A brimming gorgeousness that can tip without warning into something scoured and simple.
—Kay Ryan

The grace with which David Woo’s poems transform knowledge, as in insight and learning, into form and feeling and then back again into transformed knowledge is just astonishing. All the classical virtues—clarity, restraint, motion in serenity, gravitas—along with a just and faultless intimacy with the English language, conspire in The Eclipses to create moment after moment of piercing tenderness.
—Vijay Seshadri

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Graceful … A potent combination of deep compassion and cleareyed scrutiny. The honesty here is remarkable.
—The New York Times Book Review

Gorgeous diction and scintillant detail. Lovely. Oracular.
—Vince Gotera, The North American Review

Woo catalogs ways of mourning through excruciating and tender particulars of memory, leaving us with memorable lines and dense poems of great candor and emotional weight. His first collection reassures us because it explicates, like so many great works before, how humans are trapped between the lure of mystery and the effects of loss, “like a figure in facing mirrors.”
—Review Revue

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A list of places where poems, criticism, and interviews by David Woo have appeared:

The Adroit Journal, Alta Journal´s California Book Club, American Religious Poems (The Library of America), The Asian American Literary Review, Bellevue Literary Review, BOA Editions, Epoch, Forbes, The Georgia Review, Literary Hub, Literary Imagination, The Kenyon Review, Margie, Michigan Quarterly Review, New England Review, The New Republic, The New Yorker, On the Seawall, The Open Boat: Poems from Asian America, Parnassus, Poems for America, The Poetry Foundation, Poetry London, Poetry Northwest, The Poetry Society of America, Raritan, The Southwest Review, The Threepenny Review, TriQuarterly, The University of Georgia Press, The University of Iowa International Writing Program Collections, Witness, and Zyzzyva.