In this thoughtful and surreal collection, nature dreams and hypnotizes; Warner pays careful attention to sound and soundlessness, to the self and the world, the distance between the thing and the thought of it. Shadow Work is for the reader who needs night and silence and a sense of safety. It will help you “crawl out of the life you have been painting.
Shadow Work is a wild and haunting investigation of the self with turns of phrase that forbid as they delight. Warner uses language as a metaphor for creation: the creation of the self, the creation of the memories that build the self, the creation of an other as we hold up unwieldy mirrors to the world. In Shadow Work, words are the arbiter of memories, which bleed into each other in Warner’s dreamy meditations on childhood, suburbia, self discovery. And words force meaning out of the silent and indifferent churn of nature. Stagnant mornings that twitch alive with the first cup of coffee, that lock into the ordinary with their familiar parables of survival, that sometimes produce little resistances and beauties, which Warner observes with a playful gaze. And yet the play doesn’t seem like play at all. Shadow Work deftly conveys a world weariness, something yelping at dawn as the night becomes day, and then another day. Shadow Work ultimately leads us through a landscape of hunger so we may arrive sated. The hunger for an absent father leads us to the desire to be present. The grasping at a memory that explains nothing leads us to sit with the dramas unfolding before us. The need for self possession, and Warner's dedication to self excavation, is at the heart of Shadow Work as the world unfolds and folds, collapses and expands, obscures and reveals.
Shadow Work is a haunting collection of pensive poetry that should garner Daniel Warner both attention and respect in the world of verse. He blends the modern and the mystical, offering up eloquent metaphors and thought-provoking, gut-shot lines that resonate and build through each poem. This collection is an existential carousel and a dark love note to life, with the occasional slice of humor between reverent pondering. Bouncing from the mundane microcosm to the deepest mysteries, Warner asks hard questions, demanding attention and patience, but rewarding both, as only good poetry can.
"I am a hole that is whole.And still, I can be undone with a single word, which I am grateful for."In Jungian psychology, the shadow self represents one’s fears, impulses, and repressions; in these emotive works, poet Warner dwells within, then understands and integrates with his shadow. In this three-part progression—Disintegration, Awareness, and Integration—some poems treat with Warner’s conflicted relationship with his father, opening with “Fissure in the Endless Maw” in which a fishing trip reveals his sense that he has “killed an angry child and opened its wound to the world,” with “Dad” symbolized as darkness. As awareness sets in, Warner opines in “Symbolic Language” that, “Remove names, and things are just things.” With integration, he realistically recalls his father’s shocking sins, yet finds comfort in a “Summer Night” by realizing, “Simply, I exist,” and contemplates a new year that “begins like a poem” in the piece “New Year, 2019: Captain of the Sadness Boat”.With this debut collection, Warner deftly constructs free verse that can leave the reader hanging, haunted like its author, or resolve all problems in a few well-chosen words. He may make rational observations, such as that “Fall’s coming appears as a leaving” (from “Wayah Bald”), or plunge into verbal rhapsody: “Aureole of white moonlight stands next to reaching pines” (from “Sky Painted with Leaves”). As his shadow self, Warner seems truly disturbed, referring once to a companion’s head as an “island in fog” and creating a vivid, at times bitterly humorous encounter with Jack London in a bar, converting the famous creator of White Fang into a wolf and the poet’s wife into a wolfish female who has a roving eye. As Warner gradually emerges into awareness and integration, a colder portrait of “the man I’ve called father” emerges, combined with a quietly optimistic view of better experiences to come. Those who appreciate poems of subtle vision and deep, at times agonizing, self-exploration will savor Warner’s work.