Steep Stony Road

STEEP STONY ROAD, a new book of poetry from Daniel Picker, captures the New England landscape in startling language. Many of the poems transport readers to Vermont, while several transport readers to Ireland, home to the familial roots of Daniel Picker. In fact, Irish poet and Nobel Prize Winner Seamus Heaney has written of Daniel Picker's poetry, noting, "His best work came from his own personal landscape." Several of the poems in Steep Stony Road allude to the verse and landscape of Irish poets William Butler Yeats and Patrick Kavanagh. But perhaps Robert Frost, and his poetry, and the landscape of New England enrich the poems of Daniel Picker even more. Frost scholar, John Elder, of Middlebury College in Vermont has written of the poems of Daniel Picker: "One special strength for Daniel Picker is modern poetry in the lineage from Frost to Heaney. Daniel Picker's own poems reflect the deep grounding in landscape that is essential to those writers in particular." In addition, Christina Davis, Curator of the Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard choose Daniel Picker's poem "River Goddess" as Winner of The Dudley Review Poetry Prize at Harvard; she describes the Prize-winning poem: as a "Frostian directive."