Praise for Sailing the Bright Stream

David Manning’s new collection, Sailing the Bright Stream, is an immersion into shimmer and revelation, the lyric circumnavigation over not just water, but terra firma—the often intimidating, yet familiar and cherished, geography of the querulous heart, its rites and fractures, the gleam of language flowing from the poet’s pen. These are poems with heft and imagination, a sense of humor, and abiding faith. They lead us ever homeward—as Manning writes in his wonderful poem, “Perennial”—that we shall “awake / in that resounding dawn.”

—Joseph Bathanti, North Carolina Poet Laureate (2012-2014)

One word in particular describes the experience of hiking the landscapes of David Manning's poems: wonder. In these lines I encounter the novel, the exciting, the unexpected, the occasionally weird, all joining in perfect sense and sensitivity to become familiar. Affirming. On the final page, I say, “YES, this is the way it is.” The particulars, the universals, the challenge, the invitation to share our humanness in all its variety make this a wonderful collection, decades of favorites and new poems to anchor them.

—Bill Griffin, author of Riverstory : Treestory

While the physical landscape here extends from the beaches of southern California to the hills of West Virginia to the east coast, the emotional landscape is equally as broad and deep. There is a compassion in these poems that resonates, a sense of wonder as the poet looks inward and outward, often at the same time. There are poems that brought me to tears, others that had me laughing and nodding in agreement at the situations and emotions. Others lingered with me throughout the day. David Manning has captured intense moments with a kindness that is too often lacking in our twenty-first century world. Brava on a collection that will have many more people saying Yes to these poems.

—Pat Riviere-Seel, author of Nothing Below but Air