Customer Reviews

Breathing Room: Poems

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The pros who reviewed this book have a different agenda than casual readers, I think. (Or is it that there are so few casual readers of poetry? I note that there are very few customer reviews of books of poems...) It seems to me that most readers enjoy having their emotions stimulated by use of poetic language and form, and are less interested in edginess, or newness, or technical fireworks. On that basis, I recommend reading the poem You, referred to by one reviewer as a trite generalization directed at a distant you. Doesn't feel trite or generalized to me--in fact, as it transports me into the experience of someone yearning for his dead mother (pretty specific, huh?) it makes me cry. I don't feel manipulated, just moved. I'm not lost in admiration of Davison's technical achievement, just moved. But I think that's what a poem should do.

The reviewer from Library Journal makes me laugh because she so misread the poem "You". I agree with the previous reader/reviewer, it is very specific, it is clearly addressed to the poet's mother, and it makes me cry too. One of the things that made me decide to change fields after getting my degree in lit was the overwhelming pretension and condescension of professionals, who seem to have forgotten that poetry isn't, or shouldn't be, only for an academic elite who make a career of exegesis.