An astonishing vision of the world right now that searches for meaning through the exploration of timeless themes, both sacred and profane
DAVID WOO was born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona. The son of Chinese immigrants, Woo studied at Harvard, earned an MA in Chinese studies from Yale University, and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford. His first collection of poetry, The Eclipses, won the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize. Woo’s work has been widely published and anthologized in publications such as the New Yorker, the New Republic, the Threepenny Review, Southwest Review, and The Open Boat: Poems from Asian America.
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 The Eclipses. David Woo now writes the
poems of our climate, in the tradition of Wallace Stevens, Hart
Crane, and Elizabeth Bishop.
*author of The Daemon Knows*
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.
*Pulitzer Prize-winning author of 3 Sections*
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.
*author of Under Sleep*
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.'
*author of My Bishop and Other Poems*
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.
*Washington Post*
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