CHRISTINA DAVIS is the author of Forth A Raven (2006). She is curator of the Woodberry Poetry Room, Harvard University, and lives in Cambridge, Mass.
Despite its minimalist aesthetic, Davis's second collection is
anything but coy; the poems are slim and brief, but not light. The
collection, which begins its considerations of grief and absence
with a father's death and widens outward, is inaugurated with a
single conviction: "There is no this or that world." What follows
is a rigorous meditation on this premise, a refusal of the notion
that one passes from presence into absence, from life into death,
as if by bridge or tunnel. Rather, presence and absence, life and
death, coexist--and we are daily challenged to reconcile their
simultaneity. Perhaps this is an idea that is best taken small
bites, as not to overwhelm; the poem "Addendum" is simply: "Who was
it said: 'AND/ is the greatest/ miracle'? Praise// be his/her
name." And yet, the poems overwhelm, overflow with syntactic
attempts to embody the slipperiness of coming to terms with the
paradoxical mass of an absent thing, the weight of the hole. These
poems are as conspicuously minimal as they are unsuspectingly
heavy, and it is by achieving both of these effects at once that
they prove that we and our grief are blessed to occupy the same
space.
Copyright 2013 Publishers Weekly, LLC Used with permission.In his
foreword, poet Forrest Gander (Core Samples from the World, 2011)
describes Davis’ lyrics as taut vectors that extend “beyond easy
finalities, into an always unforeseen.” This uncertainty and
inconclusion define Davis’ second collection, composed with brevity
and concision, some poems comprising a dozen words or fewer. “Till
Human Voices Wake Us” consists of 17 syllables in a rhythmic
whisper: “In the history of language, / the first obscenity was
silence.” Sinuous omission, white space, and sparseness permeate
the work. Yet Davis’ stanzas harbor a disconcerting inertia,
kinetic phrases, and fragments filled with quick shifts and strange
accelerations, as when the speaker in one poem “didn’t know there
were coyotes / till the disappearance / of the little dogs, or deer
until / the windshields shattered.” In this way, Davis brings
vivacity crashing into absence. So, too, in “Transcript,” which
turns a question of aesthetics onto the reader: “In the presence /
of the unfinished we are / invited to look / in both directions, in
case / the Empty is us.” --Diego Báez “Here is a book that has
flapped up out of the startled dark of a parent’s death. Into the
moment of recognition of a life apart. A part of life. The syntax,
precise and probing, repeatedly extends beyond only apparent
completions, beyond easy finalities, into an always unforeseen. As
though a living hand were reaching out of the poem and—.” (Forrest
Gander)
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