David Need: Broken Windows

The poems in Broken Windows are from 1994-98. They look back to a spiritual emergency I’d had in my early 20s while living in the Connecticut Valley in Massachusetts. I’d had one of those Beatrice love encounters that seems to happen to some poets and that led me to a daily meditation practice (1-3) hours and eventually to pursue graduate work in Buddhist Studies. By the time these poems were written, I’d stopped identifying as a Buddhist and was searching for ways to tell other folks about who I was/what had happened to me. Many of these poems were written as 3-5 minute performance pieces; I’d introduce a poem with a story about one of the impossible things that had happened to me — the three miracles I’d seen, or a story from one of my hitchhiking trips across America. The language in the poems is simple because I was trying to talk about something that isn’t straightforward but matters.

—David Need

Praise for Broken Windows:

‘These poems from Need’s oeuvre of the late 1990s are both excruciating in their soundings of a deeply felt life and meticulously crafted with gorgeous imagery and exquisite detail. Filaments of syntax, spun from tungsten and silk, pull you into the mansions of these poems, down imaginary and ordinary corridors into “rooms with broken walls/and rooms with angels’ bright shadows.” Here are poems to The Dark Lady, poems of existential bafflement, of being down and out in the desert, of fecund things that happen without words and “leave their faint whispers and scents all over our skin.” “Funeral Instructions” holds what may be an ars poetica for the work: “If there is no other place for my heart in this/world after all…throw it ever before you/and climb towards it/and throw it again.”’

—Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr.

‘An inward peregrination into external spaces of the North American continent is vividly framed in David Need’s Broken Windows. Through lyric concreteness and passion, located in the material charge of his words, readers encounter the inevitability of the passing of lifeforms inside an extraordinary gift, “a vast emptiness that is love.” Resonate with desire, a diagonal line of the uncanny crosses horizons of illusive physical permanence. A passing of the years of oneself here finds location in expansive embrace, a sensorium of song.’

—Dale Smith

‘How can it be this master of explosive spirituality and complex erotic figuration writes early on with such calm, painterly landscapes and early loves that somehow shine with meditative grace and metaphysical wonder. Written long before the serial upheavals of Offshore St. Mark and St John’s Rose Slumber, and the still to be published cosmography of grief, Goodnight Irene, these poems evoke what would seem an earlier innocence, a less complex, joyous sense of embodiment, but one is entitled to suspect that these idyls, prayers, love songs, ecstatic landscapes and hymns of praise, hide evidence of even earlier upheavals, as if they are the traces of some even more fundamental and occluded personal apocalypse. Readers of Need’s recent spiritual fabulations will forthrightly find, here, an answer to a long-asked question: What does Need need? It’s a wonder to have these works, delights in and of themselves, and vital keys to what was to come, and to what is still arriving.’

—Joseph Donahue

‘These early poems beautifully and movingly limn, announce and occupy much of the terrain that has come to characterize David Need’s work: home, field, object, abidance, desire, quest, anticlimax, insufficiency, drift. They comprise a compact, resonantly organized book that proceeds with wary, affecting temper and tread, culminating in “Funeral Instructions” that are pure, absolute stone. By turns odic, lyric, elegiac and prose-poetic, Broken Windows takes a bat to the ground itself.’

—Nathaniel Mackey