In Winterkill, Todd Davis, who, according to Gray’s Sporting Journal, “observes nature in the great tradition of Robert Frost, James Dickey, and Jim Harrison,” offers an unflinching portrait of the cycles of birth and death in the woods and streams of Pennsylvania, while never leaving behind the tragedies and joys of the human world. Fusing narrative and lyrical impulses, in his fifth book of poetry Davis seeks to address the living world through a lens of transformation. In poems of praise and sorrow that draw upon the classical Chinese rivers-and-mountains tradition, Davis chronicles the creatures of forest and sky, of streams and lakes, moving through cycles of fecundity and lack, paying witness to the fundamental processes of the earth that offer the possibility of regeneration, even resurrection. Meditations on subjects from native brook trout to the ants that scramble up a compost pile; from a young diabetic girl burning trash in a barrel to a neighbor’s denial of global warming; from an examination of the bone structure in a rabbit’s skull to a depiction of a boy who can name every bird by its far-off song, these are poems that both celebrate and lament the perfectly imperfect world that sustains us.
Table of Contents:
Contents
Nicrophorus
Part I
Homily
Phenology: Actias luna
Afterlife
Sulphur Hatch
Mud Dauber
In a Dream William Stafford Visits Me
By the Rivers of Babylon
Drouth
After the Third Concussion
What My Neighbor Tells Me Isn’t Global Warming
Grievous
Yu
Wu
After Reading Han Shan
Cenotaph
Crow’s Murder
Aesthetics Precedes Ethics
Signified
Fire Suppression
Whip-poor-will
Part II
Salvelinus fontinalis
Part III
At the Raptor Rehabilitation Center
Carnivore
Burn Barrel
Chorale for the Newly Dead
October Gloriole
Ornithological
Fenestration, an Eclogue
Winterkill
The Field Moving Inside the Field
Visible Spectrum
After Considering My Retirement Account
Self Portrait with Fish and Water
Final Complaint
The Last Time My Mother Lay Down with My Father
Morning along the Little J, before the Hurricane Makes Landfall
Brief Meditation at Nightfall
Monongahela Nocturne
Ash Wednesday
Wood Tick
How Our Children Know They’ll Go to Heaven
Circus Train Derailment
Part IV
Turning the Compost at 50
Ode Scribbled on the Back of a Hunting Tag
How Animals Forgive Us
Reading Entrails
Translation Problems
Epistemology, with July Moon
Poem Made of Sadness and Water
The Light around the Little Green Heron
Monarchs
Canticle for Native Brook Trout
Silkworm Parable
July Letter to Chris D.
Revelation
Priest
Benediction
Thieves
Transfiguration of the Beekeeper’s Daughter
April Landscape, with Petals/Furrows/Wife
August Hatch: Thinking of My Son aft er the Goldenrod Blooms
What I Know about Death and Resurrection
Dreams of the Dead Father
Acknowledgments
About the Author :
Todd Davis is the author of five full-length collections of poetry. He teaches environmental studies, creative writing, and American literature at Pennsylvania State University’s Altoona College.
Review :
"In his fifth collection, Davis (In the Kingdom of the Ditch) again tackles the nature of nature, how it both affects humans and is in turn affected by them. Through meditations on the flora and fauna of his Pennsylvania home, Davis brings readers into a world rife with danger and darkness as well as quietude and splendor. . . . Given its meditative qualities, the book is a slow burn, and some readers may find that the poems' steady, deliberate pacing makes the collection feel longer than it really is. Those who appreciate a subtle word and an eye for the trees will find much to savor. Davis reverently observes nature's own poetry and how it illuminates the process of change."
"This collection's negative capability of faith and doubt, spirituality and science, myth and natural history charges nearly every poem in both traditional and viscerally original ways. . . . Like so much in this fine book, the empty impressions speak softly and clearly of what Wallace Stevens called the "nothing that is not there, and the nothing that is." Winter's absence and death remind us to feast on poems, remember, imagine, and survive into spring."—Harvard Review Online
“Reading Todd Davis’s gorgeous poems, you can’t help but feel that the capacities of human vision, and also our appetite for exactly this way of seeing and naming, have been mysteriously, precisely increased.”
—Jane Hirshfield, author of Come, Thief and The Beauty
