Coffin Honey

by Todd Davis

Overview

In Coffin Honey, his seventh book of poems, celebrated poet Todd Davis explores the many forms of violence we do to each other and to the other living beings with whom we share the planet. Here racism, climate collapse, and pandemic, as well as the very real threat of extinction—both personal and across ecosystems—are dramatized in intimate portraits of Rust-Belt Appalachia: a young boy who has been sexually assaulted struggles with dreams of revenge and the possible solace that nature might provide; a girl whose boyfriend has enlisted in the military faces pregnancy alone; and a bear named Ursus navigates the fecundity of the forest after his own mother’s death, literally crashing into the encroaching human world. Each poem in Coffin Honey seeks to illuminate beauty and suffering, the harrowing precipice we find ourselves walking nearer to in the twenty-first century. As with his past prize-winning volumes, Davis, whose work Orion Magazine likens to that of Wendell Berry and Mary Oliver, names the world with love and care, demonstrating what one reviewer describes as his knowledge of “Latin names, common names, habitats, and habits . . . steeped in the exactness of the earth and the science that unfolds in wildness.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781611864250
Publisher:	Michigan State University Press
Publication date:	02/01/2022
Pages:	140
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d)

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

If We Have to Go 1

Buck Day 3

Hunting with Dogs 5

Music for Film before the Destruction of a Drone 6

Taxidermy: Cathartes aura 8

Rooster 11

What I Know about the Last Lynching in Jeff Davis County 13

Bad Seed 14

As the Mountain Grows Dark 15

Before the Miscarriage 17

Churching the Cow 18

Ursus in the Underworld 19

Dream elevator 21

Mother 29

What Her Father Taught Her 30

Coffin Honey 31

Dowser 46

Field Sermon 47

Lambing 50

Tattoos Cataract Her Back 51

Bog Parable 53

Dream elevator 55

Extinction 58

Possum 59

Up on Blue Knob 60

Foot Washing 61

Blind Horse 62

The Book of Miracles 64

Foxfire 66

Snapper 68

Relics 69

Dream elevator 71

Bear-Eater 74

Bodies in May 77

A Map 78

What the Market Will Bear 79

Pawpaw Elegy 80

Ursus Considers the First Gospel of Snake 82

The Cedars in the Pasture 83

Ursus Grows Wings 86

Learning to Tie a Fly 89

Lost Blue 92

Dream elevator 95

This Tired Flesh 100

Snow's Memory 101

Learning to Walk Upright 103

Until Darkness Comes 104

Of This World 106

Watershed 107

Winter Solstice 108

When I Survey the Wondrous Cross 109

Museum: Ursus americanus 112

How to Measure Sea Level Rise 113

When the Stones Are Undone 114

In the Garden 115

To Wake from Long Sleep in Darkness 117

What We Died For 119

Sitting Shiva 120

Acknowledgments 123

Editorial Reviews

Reading Todd Davis’s gorgeous poems, you can’t help but feel that the capacities of human vision, and also our appetite for exactly this way of seeing and naming, have been mysteriously, precisely increased. —Jane Hirshfield, author of Come, Thief and The Beauty

Todd Davis is one of America’s most capacious and imaginative poets. He has an unparalleled ability to weave a new history from the immediate, meditating on the natural world with imagistic elegance and lyric dignity. In his exquisite seventh book Coffin Honey, Davis is in tune with both the mundane and the spiritual in revelatory ways. Every poem here teaches us something more about need, something more about compassion, and the nuanced violence we encounter in between.  
—Adrian Matejka, author of Somebody Else Sold the World 

“All prey is ensouled . . . their souls are snared in the same sprung trap,” Davis declares in Coffin Honey. In his seventh, perhaps most daring book to date, Davis invokes the geography that marks his distinctive voice in an array of dramatic monologues, character-driven narratives, and lyrics that brim with emotional complexity, social and historical witness, and sonic richness. Ursus, actual bear and as spirit, is a guide and moral compass in this constellation of poems that deftly exposes the precarity of our existence and the violence we enact on one another and the environment. In Coffin Honey, Davis delivers riveting, gut-wrenching poems, artfully pitched between elegy and hope for our collective past, present, and future. —Shara McCallum, author of No Ruined Stone

Line by line, poem after poem, Coffin Honey delights with its music, energy, and revelations. Todd Davis depicts a vanishing rural world, but he never sentimentalizes the place and its people. He is an immensely talented poet, one of our country’s best.—Ron Rash, author of Serena

"Many poets feel that they know the natural world, but Todd Davis has absorbed this world fully into his heart and mind. He is a fine, rare poet."—Jim Harrison, author of Legends of the Fall and The Shape of the Journey 

From the Publisher