"At his best, as in the wonderful title poem, David Daniel is 'River-Throated,' an authentic heir to Hart Crane. Mr. Daniel's visionary development of the flooding of Friendship, Texas—with its now lost legacy of Moravian spiritual culture—is a persuasive synecdoche for American losses in our ongoing engulfment."
              —Harold Bloom

"Fusing history, folk wisdom, ancient religious thought, and a decidedly contemporary sense of the ironic, the poems of Seven-Star Bird are poems of homecoming and nowhere-a-home, of spiritual quest and of the earthly struggle to survive as a people and as a self. Daniel nimbly clocks and captures for us 'the terrible speed of beauty born and passing.'"
              —Carl Phillips

"These poems feel long pondered over, deep sought for. The more I read them, the more I felt in awe of them. Their wisdom is more than promise, a gift 'not owned, but forever theirs.' Forever ours? If we as readers are attentive to the 'hand-shredding truth'—or is it an open-handedness of spirit—that fills these poems. David Daniel is a poet one can believe in, devout to both his affirmations and his doubts. Seven-Star Bird is an auspicious debut." 
              —Bill Knott

"Like Hart Crane in 'The Bridge,' David Daniel has a vision of desire that is transcendental, but also social, that links erotic and domestic love with love of the divine. But he is also a passionate historian adn elegist for the destruction of community, as in his poems about Friendship, Texas, and a metaphysical joker and elegist who can write about the death of a lover in poems that are alternately rueful, satiric, and heartbroken. Visionary but dry-eyed, David Daniel is one of the purest and most powerful lyric poets of his generation."
              —Tom Sleigh

"In 48 short lyrics, Ploughshares poetry editor David Daniel offers paeans to a Seven-Star Bird, a heartlanded creature that looked on as the speaker's family 'rivered these lands with abandon,' but can finally witness that they 'want no more than water does, low places/ To dwell and the gravity to change.' "
              —Publishers Weekly

"Daniel…steeps a Southern sense of gone-ness with Hericlitean and Virgilian classicism, resulting in perfectly crafted poems that call upon our deepest sense of communal grief through restraint and elegiac brevity."
              —Nashville Scene