Dane Cervine
Dane Cervine
Dane Cervine’s books include Children of Obscura – This Mysterious Human (Sixteen Rivers Press), Nine Volt Nirvana (Word Poetry Press), DEEP TRAVEL – At Home in the [Burning] World (Saddle Road Press), The World Is God’s Language (Sixteen Rivers Press), Earth Is a Fickle Dancer (Main Street Rag), and The Gateless Gate – Polishing the Moon Sword (Saddle Road Press). Dane’s poems have won awards from Adrienne Rich, Tony Hoagland, the Atlanta Review, Caesura, and been nominated for multiple Pushcarts. His work appears in The SUN, the Hudson Review, TriQuarterly, Poetry Flash, Catamaran, Miramar, Rattle, Sycamore Review, Pedestal Magazine, among others. Dane lives in Santa Cruz, California. Visit his website at: https://danecervine.com/.
The World Is God’s Language (2021)
“If we imagine the world as a flipbook, each page—each moment—merging into coherence as it flutters through time, it can be discomfiting to try and apprehend a single, discrete moment frozen in the cascade. That is why Dane Cervine’s poems often create a sense of vertigo as the reader is lifted out of the surge of a fractious reality and given an opportunity to contemplate distinct moments isolated from the clamor and roar. Cervine reveals a sanctified world built of memory, history, and grace, where God is evanescent, transient but eternal, and where, Cervine makes clear, we are ‘just visiting.’ —Gary Young, author of That’s What I Thought
Whether concerned with family history, Buddhist and New Age philosophies, Bali, post WWII Hiroshima, or the marvels of the natural world, each poem in Dane Cervine’s seventh collection, The World Is God’s Language, shares a gentle wisdom that elects to whisper rather than shout. With deep attention, this work deftly navigates landscapes both physical and transcendent. Love. Sex. Death. Belief. All the big topics are embraced with delightful curiosity and openness. Pleasant or painful, Cervine treats each experience with a beautiful equanimity. These are wise poems that quietly proclaim: ‘It is a lush world—each wound a strange beauty.’” —Frank Paino, author of Obscura
Dane Cervine’s new book, The World Is God’s Language, is a raft for troubled souls, a balm for aching hearts, and a tree of koan-like wisdom nuggets to be squirreled away and returned to again and again. These prose poems often address loss and difficulties but with a lightness of touch that emphasizes the spiritual lessons they can embody. In one, the speaker tells us: ‘my wandering brother buys a house…caresses the timbers…like a lover. Like a body he could spend the rest of his life inside.’ Ultimately, it is this kind of acceptance and wonder these poems teach. Another reports a conversation: ‘I’m practicing dying, he said to his daughter, in his last days. I slowly stop breathing to see what it’s like, then let go. His words almost eager: I think I can do this—the way a young boy steadies himself on the cliff bank over a river, gnarled rope in hand, leaps.’ Dane Cervine steadies us with his attention to each word, his deceptive simplicity of language, and his calibrated spirituality—which outlines mysteries, rather than attempting to fill them in. These remarkable poems are Rumi-like pearls.” —David Sullivan, author of Seed Shell Ash
Dane Cervine’s poems cast their attention on the everyday—his father’s slippers, an orange cat, the last biscuit in a box—and find the extraordinary in what’s in front of all of us. Even when the poems take place in distant locales, Cervine makes magic with simplicity. Hand in hand, he takes his readers to the edge, and willingly, we jump with him.” —Patrice Vecchione, author of My Shouting, Shattered, Whispering Voice: A Guide to Writing Poetry & Speaking Your Truth
Dane Cervine’s The World Is God’s Language is rich with both wit and wisdom. His paired prose poems are like snapshots, each one revealing an unexpected insight. The poet’s perception of each moment’s synchronistic interaction with eternal themes reflects his grounding in the Beat tradition as well as Buddhist precepts.
Sometimes sexy and irreverent, always deeply philosophical, these poems are steeped in the place and the culture of Northern California while ranging the world from Japan to Bali, Indonesia to India, Central America to the American South. As we travel with him, Cervine’s capacious awareness subtly illuminates every experience. Generous and humane, the work in this collection reminds the reader that poetry can be both joyous and profound.
Children of Obscura (2026)
“The poems of Children of Obscura are koans, prose poems, a stretching out of the traditional haibun; they use known forms to build new. These are poems that unite the poets and scientists, about how knowledge helps and blinds us, written with a poet’s delight in language. Cervine looks at how that “grand but broken scheme” we call curiosity “feeds on the unknown like an addiction.” He is driven by that same curiosity to research, to keep asking questions. Propelled by an awe found in factoids about skin, hair, sexual attraction, astrophysics (“even the explainable is so odd as to elicit wonder”), the poet probes how human consciousness—and concerted attempts to understand it—have brought us to our contemporary context. The world’s “web of entanglements,” instructs Cervine “to read its green meaning” even as he concedes that that “most of what we are lies in tectonic geography beneath.” —Farnaz Fatemi, author of Sister Tongue
Three prose poems from The World Is God’s Language from Monterey Poetry Review. Published Spring 2020.
Read some of Dane’s poems in The Dewdrop.