Customer Reviews

Conversion/Return

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These poems about the mystery of faith are beautifully realized. They embody, in the language of this world--flesh and food and everyday surroundings as well as dream and ritual--an unslakable longing to regain what was promised by visions in childhood of the divine breaking through into the daily. As in so many of our great poems about union or separation from the divine, they are love poems. One doesn't have to be a believer to be converted by these deeply authentic, beautiful, human poems.

--Sondra Zeidenstein, author of Resistance

Although these poems describe the struggles and visions of the soul, it is--as always in a Cortney Davis poem--the soul as tethered to an intensely physical body. Conversion / Return brings us into the heart of a religious quest touched by grace from start to finish. From the submersion in the mikvah to Davis's visions of Mary, these poems have Judaism sanctifying Christianity and Christianity (specifically, Roman Catholicism) sanctifying Judaism. Religious struggle, usually such an understandably private matter for most Jews and Christians, is here bravely and starkly and beautifully shared.

--Dick Allen, author of Present Vanishing: Poems

The spiritual quest is never easy, yet it is a great theme in civilization. Cortney Davis in Conversion/Return bravely carries this theme into the twenty-first century. Her poems are infused with the pain and joy, the anguish and hope of this journey toward God and Self. The reader will find these poems are both personal and universal, both struggle and revelation, and always honest and touching.

--Gary Metras, author of Francis d'Assisi 2008