Grief, Love, and Doubt in “One Wild Word Away” https://ift.tt/2fY0jI5
In his third collection of poetry, One Wild Word Away, Geffrey Davis gives his inner life as many rich voices as are in a choir — bereavement, love, and doubt sing out from his poems. His emotions bleed through each page, and his readers are a witness to his raw feeling, both simply and wrenchingly expressed. With his carefully chosen words, Davis strikes flints to illuminate his private darkness.
With an ease born out of tremendous knowledge of his craft, Davis easily blends traditional poetry subjects with modern anxieties. These contemporary fears turn out to be the same terrors that poets have written about for centuries. but due to an artistry that is largely due to his brutal honesty, Davis’s poems about life and death are truly fresh. “I’m writing a new song,” he declares, and the reader believes him.
One Wild Word Away weaves together birds and wasps, women tormented by cancer and addict husbands, and boys who yearn for normalcy and permanency as they try to harden themselves against repeated disappointments.
“Nightmares taught me young,” writes Davis, revealing a winding journey from his boyhood to fatherhood, and he is refreshingly honest about the suffering he has undergone to break a cycle of trauma. Davis grew up as “Just another / addict’s child who’d learned to stop / asking for mercy.” He is still haunted by the nightmares of his childhood, and grasps joy and “warm safety” whenever he can.
As a result of his childhood spent in “a rotting yard,” Davis flings himself at the beauties of nature and poetry and love; he tries to soar toward the heavens, yet his glance still turns backward. “I will clench almost any image / if only to carry the difficult beauty / of a loved one’s fallen face.” His father was no Daedalus, and the pain of his memories is what brings Davis’s Icarus hurtling back to earth. Davis aches to give his child all that was withheld from him.
“Ever After” reveals one of the most moving themes in the collection: a man’s watchful, anxious love for his family, and his inability to completely protect them from sickness and cruelty. It’s not only his memories that keep Davis up at night: inherited trauma, an unfeeling world, and curiosity threaten the innocence of his child.
In his poem sequence “From the Midnight Notebooks,” Davis speaks to his “Dearly Beloved,” and each poem — both tender and razor-sharp with insight — evokes a somber sermon, minus any condescension and the promise of a paradise at the end of mortal suffering. Cancer threatens a pair of lovers, a horrific disease with its own language and Davis speaks it with hard-won eloquence. “Fear,” he writes
Unleashes another quiet
or not-so-quiet litany of reasons
to spit the bullet of sleep,
Cancer keeps your mind
backfiring deep into the night.
How much of a poet’s fate is due to sheer willpower, the strength to define happiness and family on one’s own terms? What is the cost of creating poems from the wreckage of the family you were born into, and remembering pain without despairing from it? Davis does not offer easy answers to those questions. Some of his most powerful phrases are questions themselves. “Family, isn’t this / what we’re after? No one says,” he writes in the aptly named poem “Unfinished.”
In his often uneasy, foreboding portraits of nature, Davis reveals himself: delicate, exposed to the elements, prey to a hundred fears. He loves birds, and he well knows “the trouble with flight.” Despite harsh winds and relentless dangers, a poet must continue his flights into self-knowledge, which is a never-ending migration. “Can we reclaim the night without another / hymn to convince us our staying?”
POETRY One Wild Word Away
By Geffrey Davis
BOA Editions Ltd.
Published April 23, 2024
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