Posts Tagged ‘Todd Davis’
Poetry Friday: “First Kiss”
November 2, 2018
Todd Davis’s poetic imagination is steeped in the natural world. “First Kiss” demonstrates this as much as any poem possibly could. The poem describes a childhood courtship, every action of which either involves elements of nature or is seen in terms of them. This begins with the poem’s very first words: the girl sounds like…
Read MorePoetry Friday: “Nothing More”
October 14, 2016
Whenever I first meet a long skinny poem, I ask myself: Why has the poet chosen these very brief lines for the poem’s shape? In Todd Davis’s “Nothing More,” the effect of these short lines is a sort of staccato: short phrases punched out in succession and often snapped by startling line breaks. Yet what…
Read MorePoetry Friday: “Homily”
September 16, 2016
Last Sunday I was trying to decide whether to go church or take a walk along the river on a beautiful summer day in my corner of northwestern Washington. Some days I have time to do both and some days, for some justifiable reason, I do neither. The poem “Homily” by Todd Davis is both…
Read MoreFinding Another World in Winterkill
April 13, 2016
“There is another world, but it is in this one.” —William Butler Yeats Reading Yeats’s line, I think vaguely incarnational thoughts: heaven enters earth with Christ’s Incarnation; God dwells within our world, not separated from it; and so on. I believe these statements. Yet these formulations give me nothing to grasp onto, nothing to engage…
Read MoreTeaching My Son to Hunt, Part 2
April 27, 2012
Continued from yesterday. Some folks like to use the word “harvest” instead of the word “kill.” But we harvest broccoli and tomatoes and cabbage from our garden. When I take the life of a whitetail that will be butchered and stored in my freezer to feed the family through the winter, I think the only…
Read MoreTeaching My Son to Hunt, Part 1
April 26, 2012
At the cycle’s center, They tremble, they walk Under the tree, They fall, they are torn, They rise, they walk again. —James Dickey, “The Heaven of Animals” After the brief warmth of days barely above forty and lingering nights well below freezing, the snow that fell last week has become hard and brittle. Crystal upon…
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