Friday, November 21, 2025

Dan Campion / camouflage, surrealism and satiric wit

Dan Campion, The Mirror Test
At a recent book reading, I was fortunate to meet an Iowa City-based writer named Dan Campion. We had an interesting conversation, and he kindly shared a copy of his recent book of poetry, The Mirror Test (MadHat Press, 2024).

As an artist and designer, I was immediately drawn to the cover (shown here, designed by Marc Vincenz, using an image credited to Vincenz, Jake Quart and Sonia Santos), which—like the poetry it illustrates—works by a finely hewn balancing act between clarity and confusion.

Ambiguity at its finest pervades Dan Campion's wonderful poems. I myself, as an addict of clarion vision, as well as its famous subversion in the varieties of camouflage, stopped abruptly in his book at Blaze Orange, a quietly elegant comment about the irony of vision, its enablement, yet also its prevention. Here is the complete text of that poem, reprinted with the permission of its author (copyright © Dan Campion)—

Blaze orange, the opposite of camouflage,

creates a bold, conspicuous mirage

of safety, as if iridescence could

not stain with hemoglobin red nor would

it disappear completely under snow

that rushes down with vicious undertow

nor fail to stop or slow a motorist

who'll flat refuse the breathalyzer test.

We bought my blaze orange T-shirt late one year

to spare me being taken for a deer

while walking through the woods. It's comical.

But even so, at least once every fall

I pull it from the bottom of the drawer

and put it on and venture out, secure.


Only recently, maybe ten days before I met Dan Campion, I had given a talk for a conservation group, about animal camouflage, in which one of the slides I showed was that of blaze orange hunter's garb. As for Dan Campion himself, I didn't recognize the name. Only later did I realize that in fact he was the author of a book I so enjoyed, years ago, about the humorous writings of Peter De Vries (1910-1993), titled Peter De Vries and Surrealism, a must read.
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