Natures

by Jeff Davis

Poetry. This collection of poems written over the course of a career, like poems from Rappachini's garden, remind us of what we have longed for, as well as what we might have lost. These are love poems to and of nature, to and of flesh. Hence NATURES. The many natures of what we, as humans, are, as well as what we strive for, wish for adn dream of, yet are denied. Bitter-sweet, yet so full of honey, Jeff Davis's poems are grounded in and place-specific to the western North Carolina mountains, their fauna and flora, their cultures and seasons--their many natures. We follow him through the rhododendron slicks and the creek beds of his own particular eros by way of a voice derived from teh work of the Black Mountain poets a generation before, his forbears and literal mentors. Lucky we are to follow the trail that he has here blazed.

91 pages, Paperback

First published April 28, 2006

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[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jeff Davis is a Blue Ridge mountains poet resident in Asheville, NC, who hosts a radio show, WordPlay, for the Asheville station, WSFM. This selected poems appeared in the spring 2006 and encompasses work, I assume, from the early Seventies through to at least the death of Creeley (a year earlier) -- it's Creeley's romantic nature these poems strongly evoke, as well as Snyder and Niedecker. The two sequences, The Tithe of Clouds and Anecdotes of Ishara, impressively unravel several threads of thought about place, assignation, and religious orders among the Greek esoteric traditions. This short poem gives you some sense of it:

A Tithe of Clouds

The ridge exacts a tithe of rain
when pilgrim clouds
from the plain of Georgia and the Gulf
rise and mass at the mountain gaps
like flocks, up the high road.
They head north lightened.
The streams sing on their way down.

Davis has a way of meting out clauses in a line, enacting the difficulty of encounter with an other, quite an appealing sort of hesitancy. So,out in the woods in fall, Davis sees the brambles of root and limb emerging from the ground:

If we are still, we will see
like them, even in this bare season,
what lives:

Nothing, helpless
we come, to take place
among them

in this deep particular
triumph of the cold season.

"To take place | among them" is to begin then to "see | like them" cracking bramble off from the attribute of their similarity in this to those who would "take place" -- a beautiful formulation that justifies the high spirits of Jonathan Williams' back-cover encomium: "Hit'll read!!!"

As you're reading you are given to wondering whether or why there aren't more such seers of place among these hills and dales, nor do I mean, quite, just Western Carolina's. And you begin in so wondering to take place among these poems.