In the Book of Genesis, Noah sends forth a raven and a dove to test the status of the flood. The return of the dove is widely celebrated, but the fate of the raven—the bird who speaks—is left ambiguous. In Christina Davis’ luminous first collection of poems, her questions are those raised by the journey of the raven and what he represents: language and communication, risk, exile and mortality.
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From Publishers Weekly
Simple metaphysical questioning characterizes this strong first collection: "Every question/ I have ever asked," says Davis's title poem, "could be ground down to// Do you love me? Will I die?" Davis brings a psychological acuity and a mythic, laconic approach (reminiscent sometimes of Louise Gluck) to a spare universe of ravens, mountains and purgatorial reminiscences: one of many poems about the afterlife inquires, "Does anyone ever ask to return as himself again?" Davis uses religious language, both pagan (Odin's ravens) and biblical (Noah's birds), along with forms of prayer, to explore a postreligious world marked by family trauma, skeptical hopes and (unspecified) illness; adaptations of the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva, Emily Dickinson, Woolf, Rilke and others, provide additional reference and range. The sparseness of imagery can risk placing too much weight on unsurprising phrases, as when Davis asks "what love is." Usually, though, her demanding attitudes and her unembellished poems fit together well—"As if there were just one/ of each word and the one/ who used it, used it up." The result is a head-turning debut. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From the Back Cover
"Christina Davis sends forth a wild bird in her magical first collection, and it carries messages that are at once oracular, urgent, and utterly authentic. She has inscribed a true book of mysteries." —Edward Hirsch
"These poems are so bright they hurt: urgent and necessary, they explode and shatter into original wholeness, reclaiming for Soul its own language—fierce, challenging, and spare. This is a book Emily would have kept by her bedside. About it, she might have said, 'Here is a newness in the wind to trouble your attention.'" —Susan Mitchell
"In the oddity and rightness of these poems, it’s 'As if there were just one/of each word, and the one/who used it, used it up.' Out of this economy, the voice that emerges—rueful like Dickinson, wryly charming like Szymborska—pushes the boundaries of contemporary lyric by being both runic and absolutely clear." —Tom Sleigh
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
an exciting debut,
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This review is from: Forth A Raven (Paperback)
I don't envy the poetry editors who have to read hundreds, even thousands, of first books. First books aren't often as polished and wise as Christina Davis' though, and this book is masterful. Alice James frequently publishes books by poets who are practitioners of spare, lyric meditations, and Davis is one of these, but she knows exactly how to combine the personal with deeper concerns--so much so that the poems in this book seem profoundly prayerful and engaged with the most difficult questions about love, the spirit, humanity and family. (The book, in fact, relies much on questions, which says a lot about Davis' aims.) There is something almost koan-like about some of these poems, but they are never puzzling or solely an intellectual exercise--these are poems of real tenderness toward the world and of linguistic care. Davis is not a poet who woos with verbal pyrotechnics, and this is a relief: her stripped style makes the impressive mind and soul beneath these poems all the clearer.
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