Who was Simone Weil and Kate Daniels?
Kate Daniels is a poet with a breathtaking range of interests and voices. She is able to give a voice to the passionate, ascetic intellectual Simone Weil and also write of the domestic felicities (and infelicities) of marriage, child-bearing, and child-raising. Daniels enters the most emotionally vertiginous experiences (earthquake, suicide, divorce, the death of children) and bears away the tragic and luminous truths of our human condition, seen sub specie aeternitatis. (And the above only describes her most recent book, Four Testimonies!) She is a poet whose many voices command, and reward, our attention. About Weil “The Testimony of Simone Weil,” the first of the four long poems that form Kate Daniels’ new collection, gives voice to the radical French political thinker and religious philosopher. Here Weil meditates on some of the most famous images by Eugene Atget, the acclaimed documentary photographer who recorded a perishing Old Paris.
