Advent

Advent

"Poetry has always been said to speak a charged, heightened language … Daniel Rifenburgh’s words seem to me to bear a considerable charge … The language of Advent often has the force of spare accuracy: it can also stun the reader with a brilliant, slow-fuse image. What governs the movement of the poems is a genius for the speaking voice … Such poetry is rich because of its many articulate selves, and the way its variety of voices makes for a striking texture of dictions …"  – Richard Wilbur (from the Introduction)

"Of very few books, let alone first books, does one wish to proclaim, ‘This is it!’ Advent is that rare exception, a collection certain to please all who care for the art. Daniel Rifenburgh has all one could possibly hope for in a new poet: ambition, wisdom and breathtaking skill." – Lucien Stryk

"The poems are terrific: so fluent, so smart, and brimming with charm. Rifenburgh is my candidate for discovery of the year. He cannot be compared to X or Y. He is Z all by himself." – Donald Justice

"These poems are startling in their vividness, skill, their originality and solidity. I find that lines and images resonate long after they have served the purposes of their local contexts. Mr Rifenburgh’s work deserves wider notice, particularly when so much of scant merit is greeted with acclaim." – Anthony Hecht

Reviews of Advent

London Magazine, April-May 2004
"Born in New York State, [Rifenburgh] served in the U.S Army during the Vietnam War and later worked as a newspaper reporter, travelling throughout Latin America. The Spanish-American influence is strong in his poetry, and he owes a particular debt to Cesar Vallejo. He teaches in Houston, where, before he won a prize for this first collection, he also drove a taxi… Rifenburgh is enjoyable because he ranges at large over many subjects, testing, exploring, reporting, celebrating; he has many moods … The work bears evidence of an ‘at-easeness’ with English and European literary traditions … For example, [he] devotes a poem called ‘Lycidas’ to the memory of a deceased brother, mixing an echo of Milton’s exalted syntax with contemporary slang to surprisingly good effect. Poems about Hawthorne and Melville, Villon, Shelley and Keats, rub shoulders with ironic evocations of the Sixties (see ‘LSD & All’), and wry, compassionate reflections on everyday life in South America.

In the Plaza San Martin in downtown Lima
A shoe-shine man snags the newly-arrived tourists
Trickling out of the splendid Hotel Bolivar.
At the end he hits them up for five bucks
In Peruvian notes, milking their confusion, but
Gives a great shine, spitting on their toes,
Slapping their feet like crazy.

Something of Elizabeth Bishop’s mixture of concern and amusement sweetens the brusqueness of Rifenburgh’s ‘Andean Music’. You could call its tone respectful of the unrespectable. You share a grim laugh with the poet as his plane takes off from Peru where ‘The only lights in Lima/ Come from the headlights of taxis’ because ‘The guerrillas have entered the city/And blown the electric grid.’ The airport officials are officious, dishonest, yet curiously generous.

They examine your passport,
Your luggage. You are a tourist;
You may go. Adios! Regressa!
Here’s a last shot of pisco, gratis.
Vuelve, Senor, otra vez
A nuestra Peru!

Yet, for all his ironic witticisms, Rifenbergh is, au fond, a profoundly spiritual poet, committed, like Hecht and Wilbur, to declaring his seriousness. The title poem, ‘Advent’, at the end of his collection, confirms an allegiance to Biblical phraseology and the Christian story that might steer a contemporary English poet into bathos. The American somehow gets away with it – I’m not quite sure why. Perhaps because the poem begins with such an exact evocation of a New England fall:

Rain continuous, all day
The drumming on sere leaves
That score the ground, curling
Upon nothing. They all fell, it seemed,
In a day, a day of wind without rain,
A blue norther, high pressure and
Crisp air. . .

None of this prepares us for the poem’s sermon-like conclusion.

We defeat the world through surrogates, and but briefly,
While placid beasts feed in drizzling pastures,
Building strength for the flight into Egypt,

Yet the son must be born in us, says the Father,
Or wither, when new oil floods the ventricles
And we become, however briefly, His surrogates
Or betrayers.
And for this, in Winter’s dead zero,
We must sing, sing Hallelujah.

– Anne Stevenson

Acumen, May 2002
"The second Waywiser book, Advent … presents the work of another American, Daniel Rifenburgh. The volume, a first collection, includes an Introduction by Richard Wilbur who rightly praises Rifenburgh’s work for ‘the way its variety makes for a striking texture of dictions’ and notes how ‘what governs the movement of his poems is a genius for the speaking voice – its keys, rhythms, and modulations, its dialects and echoes’. Rifenburgh writes vividly and forcefully on a wide range of subjects. Andean Music’ is a fascinating sequence of eight poems, colourful and intelligent. ‘Lycidas’ is a moving elegy on the poet’s brother; ‘Donald Justice before a Soft-Drink Vending Machine’ is gently humorous. Rifenburgh’s range is considerable, his technical control impressively assured, without ever being pedantic." – Glyn Pursglove

Houston Chronicle, December 2002
"Rifenburgh is a varied poet … [H]e has his literary side, with poems on Melville, Hawthorne, Keats, as well as poems after Rilke, Villon and the late American poet Henri Coulette. But some of his best work is from personal experience: poems on the death of his brother; on his uncle with a birth defect; on a broken marriage; on substance abuse in the 60s; even on selling used cars. When he writes in forms, he handles them superbly, including a setina (‘My Father’s Will’) and two villanelles (‘Written Words, Like Paintings’ and ‘Voice’." – Robert Phillips