Winterkill
In Winterkill, Todd Davis, who, according to Gray’s Sporting Journal, “observes nature in the great tradition of Robert Frost, James Dickey, and Jim Harrison,” offers an unflinching portrait of the cycles of birth and death in the woods and streams of Pennsylvania, while never leaving behind the tragedies and joys of the human world. Fusing narrative and lyrical impulses, in his fifth book of poetry Davis seeks to address the living world through a lens of transformation. In poems of praise and sorrow that draw upon the classical Chinese rivers-and-mountains tradition, Davis chronicles the creatures of forest and sky, of streams and lakes, moving through cycles of fecundity and lack, paying witness to the fundamental processes of the earth that offer the possibility of regeneration, even resurrection. Meditations on subjects from native brook trout to the ants that scramble up a compost pile; from a young diabetic girl burning trash in a barrel to a neighbor’s denial of global warming; from an examination of the bone structure in a rabbit’s skull to a depiction of a boy who can name every bird by its far-off song, these are poems that both celebrate and lament the perfectly imperfect world that sustains us.
1122867748
Winterkill
In Winterkill, Todd Davis, who, according to Gray’s Sporting Journal, “observes nature in the great tradition of Robert Frost, James Dickey, and Jim Harrison,” offers an unflinching portrait of the cycles of birth and death in the woods and streams of Pennsylvania, while never leaving behind the tragedies and joys of the human world. Fusing narrative and lyrical impulses, in his fifth book of poetry Davis seeks to address the living world through a lens of transformation. In poems of praise and sorrow that draw upon the classical Chinese rivers-and-mountains tradition, Davis chronicles the creatures of forest and sky, of streams and lakes, moving through cycles of fecundity and lack, paying witness to the fundamental processes of the earth that offer the possibility of regeneration, even resurrection. Meditations on subjects from native brook trout to the ants that scramble up a compost pile; from a young diabetic girl burning trash in a barrel to a neighbor’s denial of global warming; from an examination of the bone structure in a rabbit’s skull to a depiction of a boy who can name every bird by its far-off song, these are poems that both celebrate and lament the perfectly imperfect world that sustains us.
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Winterkill

Winterkill

by Todd Davis
Winterkill

Winterkill

by Todd Davis

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$19.95 
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Overview

In Winterkill, Todd Davis, who, according to Gray’s Sporting Journal, “observes nature in the great tradition of Robert Frost, James Dickey, and Jim Harrison,” offers an unflinching portrait of the cycles of birth and death in the woods and streams of Pennsylvania, while never leaving behind the tragedies and joys of the human world. Fusing narrative and lyrical impulses, in his fifth book of poetry Davis seeks to address the living world through a lens of transformation. In poems of praise and sorrow that draw upon the classical Chinese rivers-and-mountains tradition, Davis chronicles the creatures of forest and sky, of streams and lakes, moving through cycles of fecundity and lack, paying witness to the fundamental processes of the earth that offer the possibility of regeneration, even resurrection. Meditations on subjects from native brook trout to the ants that scramble up a compost pile; from a young diabetic girl burning trash in a barrel to a neighbor’s denial of global warming; from an examination of the bone structure in a rabbit’s skull to a depiction of a boy who can name every bird by its far-off song, these are poems that both celebrate and lament the perfectly imperfect world that sustains us.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781611861969
Publisher: Michigan State University Press
Publication date: 01/01/2016
Edition description: 1
Pages: 114
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

About The Author
Todd Davis is the author of seven full-length collections of poetry—Coffin Honey, Native Species, Winterkill, In the Kingdom of the Ditch, The Least of These, Some Heaven, and Ripe—as well as of a limited-edition chapbook, Household of Water, Moon, and Snow. He edited the nonfiction collection, Fast Break to Line Break: Poets on the Art of Basketball, and coedited the anthologies A Literary Field Guide to Northern Appalachia and Making Poems: Forty Poems with Commentary by the Poets. His writing has won the Midwest Book Award, the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize, the Chautauqua Editors Prize, the Bloomsburg University Book Prize, and the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year silver and bronze awards. His poems appear in such noted journals and magazines as American Poetry Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Iowa Review, North American Review, Missouri Review, Gettysburg Review, Orion, Prairie Schooner, Southern Humanities Review, Western Humanities Review, Verse Daily, and Poetry Daily. He is an emeritus fellow of the Black Earth Institute and teaches environmental studies, creative writing, and American literature at Pennsylvania State University’s Altoona College.

Table of Contents

Nicrophorus 1

I

Homily 5

Phenology: Actias luna 6

Afterlife 7

Sulphur Hatch 8

Mud Dauber 9

In a Dream William Stafford Visits Me 10

By the Rivers of Babylon 11

Drouth 12

After the Third Concussion 13

What My Neighbor Tells Me Isn't Global Warming 14

Grievous 16

Yu 17

Wu 18

After Reading Han Shan 19

Cenotaph 20

Crow's Murder 21

Aesthetics Precedes Ethics 23

Signified 24

Fire Suppression 25

Whip-poor-will 27

II

Salvelinus fontinalis 31

III

At the Raptor Rehabilitation Center 39

Carnivore 40

Burn Barrel 41

Chorale for the Newly Dead 42

October Gloriole 44

Ornithological 45

Fenestration, an Eclogue 46

Winterkill 47

The Field Moving Inside the Field 48

Visible Spectrum 49

After Considering My Retirement Account 51

Self Portrait with Fish and Water 52

Final Complaint 53

The Last Time My Mother Lay Down with My Father 54

Morning along the Little J, before the Hurricane Makes Landfall 55

Brief Meditation at Nightfall 56

Monongahela Nocturne 57

Ash Wednesday 58

Wood Tick 59

How Our Children Know They'll Go to Heaven 61

Circus Train Derailment 62

IV

Turning the Compost at 50 67

Ode Scribbled on the Back of a Hunting Tag 68

How Animals Forgive Us 69

Reading Entrails 71

Translation Problems 72

Epistemology, with July Moon 73

Poem Made of Sadness and Water 74

The Light around the Little Green Heron 75

Monarchs 76

Canticle for Native Brook Trout 78

Silkworm Parable 80

July Letter to Chris D. 81

Revelation 83

Priest 84

Benediction 85

Thieves 86

Transfiguration of the Beekeeper's Daughter 87

April Landscape, with Petals/Furrows/Wife 89

August Hatch: Thinking of My Son after the Goldenrod Blooms 90

What I Know about Death and Resurrection 91

Dreams of the Dead Father 92

Acknowledgments 95

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