Daniel Nathan Terry

Daniel Nathan Terry is the author of Capturing the Dead, a sequence of poems in the voices of Civil War soldiers and photographers, primarily that of a fictional war photographer named Noah Williams. "Although its subject matter is familiar," comments poet Jeff Gundy, "the treatment is always fresh and sometimes dazzling. . . . Common soldiers and famous figures--from Matthew Brady to John Wilkes Booth to Lincoln himself--take on weight and solidity, captured in words that emulate the precision of film." Gundy places Capturing the Dead among "other great sets of war poems from the last two centuries," from Whitman's Drum-Taps to Andrew Hudgins' After the Lost War. Terry's poems, Gundy sums up, "offer both fidelity to history and relevance to our own predicament. They have much to teach us."  -- NFSPS Press.
 

As with A. Van Jordan’s M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A, Daniel Nathan Terry’s Capturing the Dead speaks in a chorus of voices, sees through a battalion of eyes. By conjuring the war photographer Noah Williams, a “composite of the hundreds of unknown photographers,” Terry has found a way to re-enter the Civil War—as an embedded journalist, as an angel (“I can see nothing/ as it is without grieving/ for what was”). In doing so, Terry has become one of our generation’s Whitmans: walking among the wounded, doing his best to attend to the living and the dead.

This is a heartbreaking work, a stunning debut.

  -- Sebastian Matthews

More praise for Capturing the Dead:

The language of this stunningly accomplished debut collection is more haunting than the images of the dead in war that it captures. The formal control; the Civil War iconography; the dates, times and locations are apparitions behind the emotion at the center of these poems. Don’t be fooled by the look back into history; these poems are relevant today and resonate with us. Terry’s images will burn on your retina like film developing in a dark room, and we will remember these poems like we remember the fallen figures it commemorates. Indeed, holding Capturing the Dead in my hands, I echo the words of the poet: “I cannot look at you and ignore this/ light….”

    -- A. Van Jordan

In his stunning book of poems Capturing The Dead, Daniel Nathan Terry has re-captured and rendered, with an uncanny clarity and depth, the lives of the people of the American Civil War originally captured in the photographs of Mathew Brady. These are haunting, tender and luminous poems.  

    -- Malena Morling

In this masterful and meticulously researched debut collection, Daniel Nathan Terry gives us the photographer’s view of the Civil War, its beginning and aftermath. Terry, by capturing the past, asks us to look squarely at the present day. I have never seen a young poet write with such a vast range of form and emotional scale. A powerful, important, beautiful book.

  -- Sarah Messer