A Season in Eden by Peter Daniels

A Season in Eden by Peter Daniels

£10.00

"The poems in Peter Daniels’s new collection are personable and urbane, like old friends who have dropped in to share the latest news, but also sensuous and spiritual. They wear their formal flourishes lightly, but get to the very soul of things, so that when you reach the final line, you know you have been on a journey, and even if that journey is simply to Dalston Junction or to the shops, something has been transformed in the process." – Tamar Yoseloff

 "Peter Daniels writes poetry that fizzes with wit, bold ideas and unexpected turns. A Season in Eden shows the full, dazzling range of his skills, each piece creating its own brilliantly imagined universe. He is equally at home in the surreal and the political, in the labyrinths of memory and on the streets of twenty-first century London. These lively poems compel attention, swerving and diving and delighting." – John McCullough

ISBN 978-0-9934748-4-2

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Poem of the week in the Guardian.

"a mature, authoritative collection. … 
Daniels is especially good at straight-faced astonishment (“The Mormons in Sicily”, “Policeman, Stoke Newington”) but there are dark waters too, writings which explore myth or tease the mythical from London’s quotidian. “…Counting Eggs“… is as diverse as it is consistent, drawing the reader back again and again, resisting the reviewer’s glib summation, but conjuring Robert Frost’s remarks about beginning in delight and ending in wisdom.” 
— John Greening, Times Literary Supplement, 27 July 2012

"If you don't buy this book you'll regret it." – 
— James Sutherland-Smith, The Bow-Wow Shop

"Peter Daniels is a poet who has bided his time before bringing out this definitive collection of his work and the wait has been worth it." 
— David Cooke, Ink Sweat and Tears

"The test of a book is to leave it, and come back to it several weeks later. Don’t count the poems you have read, but the poems you want to reread. Re-opening Counting Eggs, I find every poem seems like an old friend: The Pump, The Jar, Mice, Insects, Knickerbockers… and each poem leads naturally to the next, to the end. Although many of the poems have a delicious dry humour, Daniels is never just witty, and his poems’ meanings deepen with every reading." 
— Kim Morrissey, London Grip

"The voice is humane, drawn to the marginal, the uncelebrated ... Daniels's notion of what constitutes our environment is bracingly inclusive incorporating not just animals and plants but lamp posts, pumps, money, and - notably and with great warmth - buses. Humans are attended to because in an ordinary act - a soldier at breakfast, policeman at a cashpoint, woman crossing the road - the poetry gently unearths the absurdity o our lives, and at its best, casts the most commonplace of actions in a new light." 
— Ellen Cranitch, Poetry London

***** Beautiful poems, 21 May 2012 
"Counting Eggs is a wonderful collection of poems by my favourite contemporary poet, Peter Daniels. It's a book I keep on my bedside table. I've read every poem at least twice but with each reading something new comes to light. Peter takes two steps back from everyday life to reveal the hidden mysteries of the mundane: a public bus, a water pump, a jar. His observations are razor sharp and his words are sensitive and profound. Beautiful poetry by an impeccable wordsmith and master of observation." 
— FShelling on Amazon

"Peter Daniels’s poems are those of a natural story-teller with a gift for creating off-beat characters and playful, unpredictable narratives. His eye for the absurdity of every-day life is sharp but gentle, his tone light but authoritative. Daniels never preaches or pontificates, but, in their indirect and humorous way, his poems seek answers to the bigger questions about how we should live." 
— Carol Rumens

"Brilliance is much in evidence in Peter Daniels’ first full-length collection. The poems have a subtle flavour all of their own, a sense of ‘brave new world’, as well as of ‘fin de siècle’. They’re myth-making, risqué, unforcedly stylish and with a delicate spiritual sense. Several of them, including ‘Shoreditch Orchid’ and ‘The Pump,’ are an absolute triumph." 
— Moniza Alvi

"The stripy shirt today. It chooses my mood. I suit it. 
Peter Daniels writes poems that shift perspectives, sometimes so deftly that you scarcely spot it being done – that is, until you notice that city landscapes have come alive with unsettling details round the edges; the everyday is subject to small seismic jolts of time and scale. Not that these poems are unnerved by the experience; they may rarely feel quite at home in this world, but they inhabit it with appetite." 
— Philip Gross