Poetry. Newly available from SPD, STARTING OUT FOR THE DIFFICULT WORLD (Harper & Row, 1987) was Cornell professor Robert Dana's fourth collection of poetry. He is a writer of strong, rich experience, which spans the city slums where he was born and came of age to the fields and skies and towns of Iowa where Dana lived and taught for many years. Tense to the point of being enigmatic, Dana is a poet whose voice one trusts: what he says he feels is validated by the precision and force of the saying itself. At the time of its publication, M.L. Rosenthal commented about STARTING OUT FOR THE DIFFICULT WORLD: "Robert Dana's new book is dangerously alive with contradictory states of feeling. The poems are harsh and rich at the same time; they're painfully lonely yet manage to share the loneliness."

Author City: IOWA CITY, IA USA

Robert Dana was born in Boston in 1929. After serving in the South Pacific at the end of World War II, he moved to Iowa where he attended Drake University and The University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. His poetry has won several awards, including two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and The Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award from New York University. Retired from teaching after forty years as Poet-in-Residence at Cornell College, he served as Distinguished Visiting Writer at Stockholm University and at several American colleges and universities. Dana was named Poet Laureate for the state of Iowa. He passed away in 2010.