Now Flourish Northern Cardinal: Selected Poems 2005-2025 coming soon for purchase!
Praise for Now Flourish Northern Cardinal
Like the state of Ohio itself, this selection of poems by Darren C. Demaree is both devastating and beautiful, blunt and delicate. His gaze and his voice are painfully — and wonderfully — human. The poems in this book were written by a man in love (his love for Emily and his children inspires some of the most beautiful pieces here) and by a man facing many of the common challenges we all know too well across this land.
The repetition of titles — many poems are numbered to distinguish them and to gather them into loose sequences — evokes the obsessive vision of Monet: no object remains the same when seen under different light. Darren is unafraid of any truth. These are the words of an Ohio poet writing in a State of (dis)grace.
—Manuel Iris, Cincinnati Poet Laureate Emeritus
There’s a gorgeous, unflinching sincerity to Darren Demaree’s work, a willingness to grapple with the entirety of what it means to be human, from the heart beating with “the purple / hope of defiance” to the way our “hands // can motion the life / right out of this thing.” The exquisite sequences in Now Flourish Northern Cardinal circle and re-circle their subjects—Ohio, America, nature, addiction, recovery, marriage, “the realistic beauty of fatherhood”—revealing that even the smallest or most painful moments are precious, as they build a bridge between who we are and who we have the potential to be. These are poems that teach the reader how to love and keep loving, how to fight for the survival of what one treasures, how mere survival can transform into beauty, if we learn “to love / everything, / even as it turns / into the smell / of having been.”
—Emma Bolden, author of The Tiger and the Cage
Darren takes us on a hunting trip, recording details and searching for some meaning and often leaving us on our own quest. We find ourselves inside of moments where conflict and joy mix. We follow the associative path of W. S. Merwin, full of personalized symbolism, nostalgia, and impressionistic suggestion. Though there is a false dance of rationality, realizations are felt more than thought. Intuition and impulse rule allowing for mystery. Drawn from his many books one encounters sequences of poems…on Ohio, the future of our children, Sam Cooke’s story, nude male figures, Trumpism, empathy, and the beautiful and poignant poems of Emily, his lover and muse. The book is a vision meant to be shared.
—Larry Smith, author of Connections: Morning Dew Tanka with Core and All Haiku by Barbars Sabol (2023)
Darren C. Demaree writes with the authority and magic I imagine thrummed inside the prophecies sybils spoke. His is a pen dipped in the inkwell of Ohio clay, and his parchment is the thunderhead of a storm just about to split open. Now Flourish Northern Cardinal should be celebrated as a tremendous achievement--not just the selected works of a poet who has performed at the height craft for decades, but also a cartography of beauty's every corner: devastation and mystery, salvation and love. “let's tell the children / that we are carried by waves / we spent years making”
—Todd Dillard, author of Ways We Vanish and Ragnarök at the Father-Daughter Dance
Odes to Ohio, to Emily, and to outliving past loves and selves, Demaree’s volume of selected poems is a resonant gesture toward living-making that is lasting and enduring. These poems are also a testament to love: love of place, love of people and community, love of the world for all its flaws and fabulousness. In their repetitions and recursions, specific realities surface. Like love, when embedded within the experiences of these poems, these realities have “no beginning / & no hope of ending.” Instead, collected here is a triumph of linguistic and aesthetic responses as witness to the heartbreak and wonder and grit and vulnerability and at-once-ness of living, well or neverwell, in the company of extraordinary beloveds for as long as one can.
—Chelsea Dingman
Darren C. Demaree is the author of twenty-four full-length poetry collections, most recently “Now Flourish Northern Cardinal (Selected Poems 2005-2025)”, (Small Harbor Publishing, November 2025). He is the recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, the Louise Bogan Award from Trio House Press, and the Nancy Dew Taylor Award from Emrys Journal.