Native Species

In his sixth book of poetry, Todd Davis, who Harvard Review declares is “unflinchingly candid and enduringly compassionate,” confesses that “it’s hard to hide my love for the pleasures of the earth.” In poems both achingly real and stunningly new, he ushers the reader into a consideration of the green world and our uncertain place in it. As he writes in “Dead Letter to James Wright,” “You said / you’d wasted your life. / I’m still not sure / what species I am.” To that end, Native Species explores what happens to us—to all of us, bear, deer, mink, trout, moose, girl, boy, woman, man—when we die, and what happens to the soul as it faces extinction—if it “migrates into the lives of other creatures, becomes a fox or frog, an ant in a colony serving a queen, a red salamander entering a pond before it freezes.” He wonders, too, “How many new beginnings are we granted?” It’s a beautiful question, and it freights, simultaneously, possibility and pain. These are the verses of a poet maturing into a new level of thinking, full of tenderness and love for the home that carries us all.

Table of Contents:
Contents Geomorphology I. Almanac of Faithful Negotiations Goat’s Milk Perception Passerine Hard Winter The Woman Who Cuts My Hair Cracks How Our Names Turn into Light Hexagonal First Thoughts about God after Spying a Speckled Trout Eat a Green Drake Talus Slope Geodes My Mother’s Cooking Failed Argument against Sorrow Finding a Skull Because This Is What Love Comes To In the Seventh Month My Mother Worries Decadence Denomination 17-Year Locust Hibernation II. Lost Country of Light Green Beans Dead Letter to Elizabeth Bishop The Alzheimer’s Patient Tries to Remember the Names for Trees What Came Before Lessons from the Flood The Mennonite’s Daughter Goes Down to the River First Kiss What My Aunt Virginia Says When She Visits Lineage What Water Wants Valley Maker Memory Native Species The Turtle Taxidermy: Cathartes aura For the First Nine Months We Perceive the World through the Eyes of Our Mother The Mink A Senior Citizen at the Good Shepherd and Water of Life Assisted Living Center Asks Her Son for a Sky Burial Dead Letter to James Wright III. Seep Generosity The Rain that Holds Light in the Trees Gnosis Waiting to Hear If a Friend’s Wife Has Cancer Notes on the Anniversary of the Death of Galway Kinnell After Twenty-Seven Years of Marriage Dead Letter to Richard Hugo With Nothing Between Us and the End of the World Self-Portrait with My Dead Logjam on Lookout Creek Appalachian Nocturne: Ursa Major Returning to Earth Thankful for Now Coltrane Eclogue And If There Is a Day of Resurrection Acknowledgments

About the Author :
Todd Davis is the author of six full-length collections of poetry as well as of a limited-edition chapbook. His writing has won the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Bronze and Silver Awards, the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize, and the Chautauqua Editors Prize, and has been nominated several times for the Pushcart Prize. He teaches environmental studies, creative writing, and American literature at Pennsylvania State University’s Altoona College.

Review :
2019 Foreword Indie SILVER Winner for Poetry — 2019 Foreword Indie SILVER Winner for Poetry 2019 Midwest Book Award, Gold Medal — 2019 Midwest Book Award, Gold Medal