by Christina Davis
Alice James Books 2006
Reviewed by John Deming
Life as Inverted Journeywork
It could be said after reading Christina Davis’s Forth a Raven that the poet has found her medium but not her form.
Now that that sentence has scared away any high-schoolers who wound up here accidentally while Googling sources for a Poe paper, I’ll note there’s a lot to like in this book, but that the raven she has sent forth will inhabit America’s favorite literary medium in a kind of a bird-smacking-into-glass way rather than a sneak-in-through-the-window-and-prod-your-mania way.
Which isn’t really a criticism, because the window could just as easily have been open, and either way, the arrival of a noteworthy writer has been announced.
Forth a Raven is worth the read for a number of reasons, primarily the fact that the poems offer mystery, intelligence and wit that can’t be faked: “You learn to walk, which is done by walking. / You learn the past tense of have, which is hunger.” Davis’s lean lyrics also comprise a very lean book; at 49 pages (43 pages, once you remove the section dividers), she provides readers with a quick dip into contemplation and oft-earned romance.
So what’s the problem? The forms her poems inhabit are consistently out of sync with the content. Primarily built on trim couplets, tercets, and quatrains, her poems lean towards being clever thoughts rendered lyrically—the kind of things suitable for little conversational prose poems, not for the icy detachment you’ll feel she’s striving towards. The poems become estranged; the line breaks, in many cases, lend needless gravity to small metaphorical anecdotes:
Whereas I know a man
who saves the anonymous faces
sold with the framesand props them against the wall (and, in his wallet,
folds them with his family) till the daywhen each is recognized.
In “Nostalgia for the Infinite,” Davis poses the question “Does anyone ever ask to return as himself again?” The answer is yes, because Louise Glück answers the question gorgeously in “Landscape,” the centerpiece in Averno. Glück is worth mentioning here because I think Davis takes a lot of her formal cues from Glück—namely Glück’s sledgehammer enjambments, and the ironclad detachment of her precise, barely-there lyrics. Only one other poet has pulled off that kind of detachment, and her name is Plath.
Davis is more conversationally inquisitive, more willing to be your friend. These kinds of enjambments and stanza breaks poeticize this good-natured curiosity. This is not always the case; take this nicely executed quatrain that opens “Last Words”:
My grandmother said precious little but merely breathed in and in
as if the back of her were open and we were no longer in
the presence of the front. Is it over?
someone asked, of the inverted journeywork.
Yet the more Glückian the italics and sparser the lines, the less compelling and more dramatic the notion of the poem. Here is “Dramatis Personae” in its entirety:
What is it you do, again?
What do you call a character
who is only put here
to foster an impenetrable plot?A foil?
A human.
I guess the point is we’re all of us foils, but the microphone volume needs to come a down a couple of notches. A number of fun, occasional, “ooh that would make a good poem” poems are chased into similar patterns. She’s best when the “point” of the poem is buried in image, oddity, and playful artifice—the title poem is a good example, as is “Two Varieties of Passion Plays,” which concludes:
So what, if it took a year to make
a bass of that boy in the field,
so what, if the mothers must agree
to raise their girls as voices?
Ultimately, I think Forth a Raven introduces us to a head with a million important ideas. But the work itself would be stronger, and the voice would appear more genuine, if the poems exercised a bit less rigidity.
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