Rapids by Daniel Wade

‘Wade draws into focus a landscape in constant transition. Here are city streets and alleys, borders, construction sites, island edges, boats and ocean that pulse, like a burst dam, with life unstoppable. Rapids is a glorious tour through the noisy, dirty, raw and often dazzling maze of history, memory and the present moment as it exists in the long shadow of the poet’s deep connection with his native Dublin. A skilled and eloquent guide, Wade gifts us—page after striking page—with poems of loss, hope, brutality, and stars.’

–Annemarie Ní Churreáin, (2020 Artist-in-Residence, Centre Culturel Irlandais Paris).

‘Rapids, Daniel Wade’s debut, very powerfully displays a mastery of not only craft, but of his romantic-yet-reasonable fathoming of the troubles of humankind. In a time when poets write in water, rather than ink, inside the electrical cages of Political Correctness, making no impression on the reader, Daniel Wade has bravely eloped from his electrical cage, and has left an eternal impression on me, and will do so on others.’

–Marc Di Saverio, author of Crito di Volta (Guernica Editions, 2020).

‘Rapids is a robust, rowdy, reverend, and well-wrought début. Dublin and other cities are viewed through old eyes in a young man’s head at the dawning of the day. The cast are all here: drug addicts, dole heads, thugs, sailors, pub heads and party boys, ex-lovers and ex-enemies. We sail on river and ocean, with ghosts of the drowned and lost, with old men no longer of the new world, water washing us clean of the city’s scabs and waking us up to something more than just living. Daniel Wade sings elegies and marks the cut of legends known and unknown as he wanders with girls, and wonders at the might and mire of other men’s destinies. A writer on his way, if you know what’s good for you, take a walk with him, down the canal, to the pub, or better yet out, to the Irish sea to hear the waves as he does, with the ear of a conductor, accurately noting the music of the sensorium.’

–Karl Parkinson, author of The Blocks, (New Binary Press, 2016)