David Banach
Purchase How to be Good directly on Amazon
David Banach is a philosopher and a poet, though often not in that order. He lives in Goffstown, NH, where he tends chickens, keeps bees, and watches for lessons in the sky. He likes to think about Dostoevsky, Levinas, and Simone Weil and is fascinated by the way form emerges in nature and the way the human heart responds to it. He has published over 70 poems in various journals, and is editor of Touchstone, the journal of the Poetry Society of New Hampshire.
Purchase How to be Good directly on Amazon
Some years ago I posted to social media a statement that Peter Maurin was famous for: “We need to make the kind of society in which it is easier for people to be good.” A friend responded—“But it’s so easy to be good!” My sweet summer child, I thought, and also, oh, gurl. Untested innocence is the most dangerous. David Banach’s deeply moving How to Be Good asks what we owe to one another, a question for which there will never be a clear answer. But you may feel, as I do, that the price of remaining human means asking the question again and again. Banach speaks from what seems to me the only honest platform—an acknowledgement of our own complicity. He knows that he—“one of those people who hates the sound of babies crying”—is capable of goodness for moments only. But this isn’t a book of the mind alone, or of mere ethics, which the speaker calls “a scam a whitewash…” It embraces, as we all must, hornets, anuses, piss, worms, police, McDonald’s, erections, guns, lynching, the town dump, braids in a little girl’s hair, and “O’Keefe flowers/of vulval lips.” From reading Augustine of Hippo decades ago, I remember the concept of a “highest and unchanging good.” To me, Banach has provided a description of paradise: “penetrating to the reality that/there is no separation where/there is love for love is the sight of/souls.” I don’t weep at cruelty, because I’ve come to expect cruelty. But goodness makes me weep, and I’m grateful to this book for the gift of tears.
—Patrick Donnelly, author of Willow Hammer, Little-Known Operas, Nocturnes of the Brothel of Ruin, and The Charge.
“What is goodness?” David Banach asks in his compelling new collection. The poems of How to Be Good journey through the political, the historical, and the personal, examining the theatrical masculinity of the town dump, nicknaming the inflatable figure in front of car dealerships the “Sisyphus of advertising,” and blasting anger like a broken jar of salsa. Banach recalls for us “all the difficulties of/loving in this wind-swept world where kindness/is lighter than air” through work that considers profanity and philosophy, theology and gender. How to Be Good rings with Whitman and Blake and declares empathy “an ache in places I never knew/I had places.” Banach is a rare poet of the pure heart, and his poems soothe like a balm for a contemporary age where heaven might require a two-factor authentication for entrance as a way of keeping out those who have ignored sunsets or kissed without passion. Pick up a copy of How to Be Good and let the soft strength of its healing begin.
—Jennifer Militello, Poet Laureate of New Hampshire
In this collection, David Banach reinaugurates that ancient union of poetry and philosophy. In thoughtful verse, he challenges us to hear the song of the world anew and to consider again the mysteries of its opaque complexity. The world has of course changed since the first philosopher-poets crafted their mythic dithyrambs. And so it is no longer to the muses that Banach turns for his inspiration, but McDonald’s, inflatable flailing-arm tube men, over-crowded parking lots, and the town dump. What philosophical revelations lurk within such quotidian indecencies, you may ask? Only this, Banach humbly replies, “that this whole fucked up world is fucking beautiful” and that perhaps this is enough.
—Drew M. Dalton, Professor, Indiana University and author of The Matter of Evil
David Banach’s How to be Good asks difficult questions of our unjust and fragile society, like where does a tender heart belong when “cowardice always finds a philosophy?” And why do we insist on love when, like a balloon, it can get away “until we can’t see it anymore?” In these heartfelt, sometimes playfully Socratic, poems, Banach reminds us that the real danger we face is in “trying to kill” the sting of feeling and human connection, instead of driving with it inside the vehicle of our lives.
— Hannah Larrabee, author of Wonder Tissue and The Observable Universe.
How to Be Good is the poetic journey of a speaker consciously building awareness of being alive in the world through questioning what life means and actively struggling with what that awareness brings. The poems teeter on the edge of definitions, swing between ethics and desire, between cerebral and instinctual, between the nuanced feeling of a present moment and how the feeling connects to the universe. These philosophical journeys create a Venn diagram of what it means to be a good human and to be ok with being human. The poems often breathe a crisp breeze of hope for both the individual and the collective, though it’s hope earned rather than hope found. It is the hope of a speaker putting on rose-colored glasses to look at the collective and where they’re situated within it, while constantly alert to what the glasses are doing and painfully awake to their necessity. A delightful collection that challenges the reader to look again and redefine small moments of the corporeal existence in order to understand that the purpose of the human experience is precisely to have the experience.
—Andreea Ceplinschi, Associate Editor, ONLY POEMS
Banach’s poems are the music of our ever contemplations. They refuse nothing, simmer with benign acceptance of our collective sufferings, our joys. His poems see inside everything, bound within what has come before, what is now, and what will inevitably follow. And always, they are steeped in love.
—Melanie Chicoine, President, Poetry Society of New Hampshire