You Tell Me Its Underpinnings
Davis maintains a deep engagement with, and investigation of, the world around her. She is able to immerse herself in the newness of things by seeing them through children’s eyes, and describes what she sees with a lovely freshness and excitement.
My daughter is nine months old. I spend what is probably a ridiculous portion of any given day just admiring her fantastically chubby cheeks. Sometimes when she’s asleep I try to write a poem, and the poem is usually about her, and then I think, who on earth wants to read this drivel? And I put away my notebook and pick up a magazine. (Have you even made it to the end of this paragraph? I’m amazed.)
It is heartening, then to read Carol Ann Davis’ new book of poems, Atlas Hour, in which she takes up the challenge of writing about motherhood and young children, among other things, and manages it admirably. Take, for example, “Mysteries of the Deep,” which captures wonderfully the exhausted, underwater feeling of living with a newborn—the parents blearily watching a TV show about a shark
that once
skeletonized a cow the announcer says which is how we feel
most mornings 1,000 feet of water below us
and no one who speaks your language but you
with your grunting and your spit up
sleeping this day only at a 45-degree angle
as mysterious as the flamboyant cuttlefish the size of your thumb
The poem’s attention moves back and forth between the televised underwater world and the world of the parents and child, bringing into focus the intimacy and strangeness of both. The poem’s final turn collapses tenderness and mystery together:
…but now like so many
unknowns you call to me from the deep of the next room and I answer
In the space of a few lines, Davis has made the parallel between a shark and a baby seem utterly believable, even natural.
A tension between closeness and distance, strangeness and familiarity, drives many of these poems. In writing about her children, Davis is often searching for a language to express both her love for them and her awareness that they are separate from her. In “The dream of eating,” we see a child’s dream of eating everything in the house in order to become, like “The Very Hungry Caterpillar,” a butterfly. The poem’s final lines imagine, with plainspoken yearning, that the child would
…dreaming
teach me everything except
the what more of how to keep you here
This kind of premonition of loss is a thread that runs through the collection, and yet the awareness of loss is always balanced with the pleasure these poems take in the here and now. Davis maintains a deep engagement with, and investigation of, the world around her. She is able to immerse herself in the newness of things by seeing them through children’s eyes, and describes what she sees with a lovely freshness and excitement:
…the volunteer comes with his feather on a stick
to rouse roof sleepers as if such a thing existing
made the world realer or opened it
(“In the Butterfly Room with Luke at 8 Months”)
If inside the jump castle one’s shoes were off one saw the city
through the fine mesh one saw its steeples bounce as one listened
to the choir…
(“Willem and Rothko (Saturday Farmer’s Market)”)
This marker in your hand is solvent
and on special paper reveals you tell me
a butterfly’s wing its underpinnings colorful
though the surface is black oh my colors
you said the moment you saw it in the basket
the colors I wanted…
(“Easter Morning with Magic Markers”)
Children act and even speak in many of these poems, but Davis doesn’t play up their cuteness or childishness; what comes across instead is her empathy for them and the richness of their experience. The child’s voice in the middle of the poem—“oh my colors”—stops us not because it is charming but because we hear in it an authentic little thrill of satisfaction and pleasure. It is that sense of discovery to which we are granted access in these poems.
Along with motherhood and children, visual art is a central theme in this collection, with many poems titled after specific artists or works of art. Davis is adept at finding new language for the intimate worlds of Vermeer’s domestic scenes, as well as for Rothko’s intense fields of color—both pretty well-trod ground for ekphrastic poetry. In “Inside Two by Rothko,” for example, she brings the experience of looking at a painting into conversation with the artist’s biography, as well as quotes from Rothko himself:
…insisting on this red finally its halo
nearing white something affectionate in it joyful because
you often went to parties you found on this earth people
to love red says so and the yellow
…in the end what you thought
of yourself the big mystery you left us it is really a matter the artist
not the man talking of ending this solitude explaining why colors
must touch of stretching one’s arms again
We get a sense here of the colors of the painting, and something of Rothko’s life, but the poem conveys most strongly the poet’s wish to get closer to the artist, and the great feeling for the art that must engender such a wish.
The wide spacing of Davis’ poems leans toward the paintings she often writes about, almost as if she wanted the page to work as a canvas might: the reader’s eye moving around, gathering information, and the poem not so much progressing as accruing, as in these lines from “Studioese (Vermeer Suite)”:
How long you’ve stood studying glass-grains of half-hearing
nothing one hand poised on leaded windowframe another
on the silver pitcher its reflected stripe of apoplectic blue
Davis’ use of white space and her intense, quiet attention to the world recall George Oppen (to whom one of these poems is dedicated), and like Oppen she is interested in the process of thought—when she writes about visual art, she is writing not just about the visual but about the simultaneity of looking-and-thinking (as evidenced by poem titles such as “Seeing Rothko and Thinking of Crusoe” or “Thinking of You While Looking at a Postcard of the Oratory in El Greco’s House”).
While Davis’ white space pays homage to Oppen, echoes the canvas, and lends the poems a certain meditative quality, it doesn’t always seem quite necessary to me; Davis’ precision of language and the concentrated attention she gives her subjects are effective on their own, and at times I find the spaces-instead-of-punctuation approach to be distracting. This aside, Atlas Hour is a collection of poems both deeply felt and beautifully made. Davis has a great deal to say here, but she says it without shouting.
As she writes in “What takes my breath”: “…where it is dark / we let it be dark, light, light.”