Consolation Miracle (Crab Orchard Award Series in Poetry) [Paperback]

Chad Davidson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 9, 2003 | Series: Crab Orchard Award Series in Poetry

Consolation Miracle is a book of visceral, image-driven poems that search for the miraculous in the seemingly ordinary. This collection fashions art out of artless objects as a consolation, or perhaps compensation, for their smallness. Yawns and pears, cockroaches and crows resonate against historically conflated backdrops, while our own hands seem suddenly strange as they hide themselves in our pockets, balance a burning cigarette between two fingers, or grip the gun that shot Lincoln. Other poems address the destruction of empire, the end of old Hollywood, and the hyperbolic fizzling out of entire centuries. Here, consolation miracles are rarely the ones sought after, yet they radiate in their neglect. Davidson’s poems help us understand the inner life of cows, imagine the plight of a banished Kama Sutra illustrator, speculate about Cleopatra’s lingerie. With a title borrowed from Gabriel García Márquez, Consolation Miracle contains a magical realism for the twenty-first century.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Chad Davidson is a poet of brilliant, unanticipated mixtures: a postmodernist who cares deeply for grace and clarity; an odemaker with a penchant for the epigrammatic; a philosopher of both gravitas and levity. His elegantly crafted surfaces never mask character or abbreviate temperament. Davidson means to bring the whole person to the page. Consolation Miracle announces a poet that I look forward to reading for years.”—Rodney Jones, author of Kingdom of the Instant and Elegy for the Southern Drawl

“Once in a very great while a first book comes along that seems to defy all expectations, that surprises and delights with that rare combination: a lively verbal wit and musical and visual precision coupled with a maturity of vision and meditative grace. Chad Davidson's Consolation Miracle is just such a book, a bag of jewels, poems both finely cut and sparkling with imaginative fire. Surely he is one of the most resourceful, supple, and soulful young poets writing today.”

—Bruce Bond, author of Throats of Narcissus and Radiography

“Reading each poem in Consolation Miracle is like watching a seine net pulled onto the beach at sunrise: the arc of poetry revealing its haul, one by one, and then suddenly, a multitude of sleek, puffing, shiny things full of fear and trembling. The tight curtail sonnets, ‘Almost Ending with a Troubadour Line’ and ‘The Match,’ are every bit as beguiling as the longer, meditative lyrics, ‘All the Ashtrays in Rome’ and ‘Cleopatra’s Bra.’ And the longest poem in Davidson’s striking first collection, ‘Space,’ stakes its claim as one of the benchmark long lyrics for the new century.”—Ruth Stone, author of In the Next Galaxy and Ordinary Words

 

“Chad Davidson exults in the pleasures of the tongue, the eye, and the mind. He is a poet who delights, surprises, challenges, and seduces. The poems of Consolation Miracle are poems I just can’t say no to—I want to come back to them again and again, immersing myself in the deft and variegated worlds this poet creates.”—Allison Joseph, author of Soul Train and In Every Seam

 

“Such a graceful marriage of form and lyric experiment that it’s hard to believe Consolation Miracle is a debut. It houses a diction and aesthetic so ambitious, and successfully ambitious, that it is an even greater wonder that most of Davidson’s subjects—a starfish, the contents of Abraham Lincoln’s pockets, Cleopatra’s Bra—could fit tidily into a sock drawer.”—Austin Hummell, author of The Fugitive Kind

 

“In the title poem of his brilliant first book, Consolation Miracle, Chad Davidson speaks of ‘moonshine swelling in goat bladders, the slender/ throats of Coke bottles, as if gods too thirsted /for the real thing.’ Certainly, in a world where language at the hands of the media and the State is bastardized around the clock, we mere humans thirst for the real thing, language that does not lie, and so here it is, shaped into those miraculous embodiments of authentic Being called poems—and in Davidson’s hands, much more than a consolation: a triumph.”

—B. H. Fairchild, author of Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest and The Art of Lathe

About the Author

Chad Davidson is an assistant professor of English at the State University of West Georgia. His poems have appeared in Colorado Review, Crab Orchard Review, DoubleTake, Epoch, The Paris Review, Pequod, Poet Lore, and numerous other publications.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 80 pages
• Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press; 1st edition (October 9, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0809325411
• ISBN-13: 978-0809325412
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,546,919 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Makes the dull interesting, April 2, 2005

By 

Romy- Eng 2 (New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Consolation Miracle (Crab Orchard Award Series in Poetry) (Paperback)

Chad Davidson's uses everyday objects in a way that gives them more importance and significance. The author's technique is to teach history, interpret it and show details in a more contemporary style, rather than just spit out information the way a textbook does. A pear, starfish, lemon, and other object used in everyday life are given a new meaning. How the were once viewed as dull and mundane are now seen in a different and interesting light.
'Consolation Miracle' gives the reader another approach to learn about the ordinary things we use and see on a daily basis. This however is not Davidson's only purpose; he also wants to place the reader in the situation he is talking about through his diction and detail. Some of his word choice is not common day vocabulary but this only makes the poems better. This is a good book because Davidson is able to make someone learn new things just by having them read his poems. Things we take for granted are now given new appreciation and the reader realizes this. Becoming more aware of one's surroundings and historic origins is never something to frown upon and Davidson makes the voyage much easier.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing Debut Collection, December 7, 2008

By 

Gregory Fraser - See all my reviews

This review is from: Consolation Miracle (Crab Orchard Award Series in Poetry) (Paperback)

Readers are treated to an exploration of how language needs to be and can be revitalized in a postmodern world dominated by surface-level meanings--the simulacra of television ads, Hollywood blockbusters, and theme-park spectacles. Davidson's writing ranges over many geographies and histories (those of India, Japan, Italy, and Greece, to name just a few); in addition, it enters the tightest of psychological spaces, while also exploring the infinite expanses of outer space. All this ranging seeks to show us the restorative power of language. Consolation Miracle locates itself both inside and outside a world of overabundant representations that threaten us with entropy and ennui. Time and again, the threat of boredom rears its eternally lolling head, forcing the poet to dip into his rich lexicon, his arsenal of unusual, restorative words in order to stave off emptiness, linguistic and spiritual death. A first-rate collection both to read and teach.

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Make Room, Read "Space", November 20, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Consolation Miracle (Crab Orchard Award Series in Poetry) (Paperback)

If you're reading this, you have an interest in poetry, and if you have an interest in poetry, the good kind, the dynamic and moving kind, you should own this book. You'll be lucky to get a first printing.

There is a sly wisdom in these poems about the things of this world as remarkable as what we find in Richard Wilbur. In fact, the lines are as well-wrought as Wilbur. Considering Davidson's authority, his ability to teach us so much fact, history, and trivia, we are reminded of the old standards: of Auden, Lowell, or Bishop. But the poems seem to have a contemporary sheen all their own. The long poem "Space" is one of the few contemporary long lyrics worth reading.

Consolation Miracle is a mature collection (a minor miracle?) in a time when so many poets are settling for "poetry" or "the idea of a poem" rather than poems, when poets are praising artifice rather than art. It might be the strongest first book of poetry in the last ten years.