Poetry. Robert Dana's WHAT I THINK I KNOW is the fruit of a lifetime's quiet dedication to the art of poetry. These rigorously clear and deeply felt poems repay the closest reading. My hope is that this selection-chosen from over three decades of writing-will bring a host of new readers to a poet whose fullness of vision and strangely inward music represent, in fact, the true voice of poetry itself-Jay Parini. WHAT I THINK I KNOW is a lush and sensual re-evaluation of the world of objects-Today, everything takes/ the color of the sun. The air/ is filed and fine with it;/ the dead leaves, lumped/ and molten; flattened grass/ taking it like platinum (At the Vietnam War Memorial, Washington, D.C.)-validated throughout by a constant incarnation of the divine in the everyday. Dana was born in Boston in 1929, and has lived in Iowa for many years, where he is poet-in-residence at Cornell College.

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.