Ditch Memory: New and Selected Poems

by Todd Davis

Overview

In an age when many find themselves disconnected from the natural world, celebrated poet Todd Davis offers the possibilities of reconnection, of listening to the earth’s labored breathing, to the thoughts of other-than-human animals and the languages trees speak. In thirty new poems, and with ample selections from his previous seven books, Davis’s roots run deep in Rust-Belt Appalachia, attending to the harmed but healing landscape, the people whose lives are too often neglected, and the looming threat of climate collapse and extinction. Orion Magazine likens Davis’s work to Wendell Berry and Mary Oliver, as he continues to demonstrate 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.” Known for both narrative and lyrical impulses, Davis asks readers to acknowledge their kinship with all living beings, which demands some grieving for past sins but also suggests a way toward restoration. With a Foreword by David James Duncan.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781628955316
Publisher:	Michigan State University Press
Publication date:	08/01/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	440
File size:	1 MB

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

Contents Foreword: Solaces Gleaned from an Earth Poet’s Poem-Stories | David James Duncan New Poems Midsentence Goat Dream The Bear inside the Bear Tributary The Dam on Loup Run April Prayer For a Stray Dog near the Paper Mill in Tyrone, Pennsylvania The Taxidermist’s Daughter Retrieves a Head Free Write Before My Mother’s Funeral Pit Ponies Eclogue for an Extractive Economy Silt Psalm Fishing with My Seventeen-Year-Old Self The Wind Turbine Tech Speaks of Revolutions After the Elk Hunt Of This Failing Vernal Pond Apostate Reservoir/Crows/Climate Change The Doctor Asks My Friend to Follow the Light at the End of Her Pen At Last I Can Understand What the Birds Are Saying Wayfaring Fishing with Nightcrawlers Bare Limbs This Shared Life Deposition: What Was Lost Last Baptism A Friend Writes to Tell Me How Hildegard of Bingen Cried Viriditas! Ditch Memory from Coffin Honey Buck Day What I Know about the Last Lynching in Jeff Davis County Ursus in the Underworld Coffin Honey Possum Field Sermon Taxidermy: Cathartes aura dream elevator Mother Bear-Eater Until Darkness Comes In the Garden Sitting Shiva from Native Species Almanac of Faithful Negotiations Decadence Goat’s Milk After Twenty-Seven Years of Marriage Native Species How Our Names Turn into Light The Rain that Holds Light in the Trees The Turtle Coltrane Eclogue Gnosis Returning to Earth Thankful for Now from Winterkill Homily Thieves What My Neighbor Tells Me Isn’t Global Warming Burn Barrel Sulphur Hatch By the Rivers of Babylon The Last Time My Mother Lay Down with My Father Poem Made of Sadness and Water Canticle for Native Brook Trout from In the Kingdom of the Ditch Taxonomy What I Told My Sons after My Father Died Apophatic Fishing for Large Mouth in a Strip-Mining Reclamation Pond near Lloydsville, Pennsylvania The Poet Stumbles upon a Buddha in Game Lands 158 above Tipton, Pennsylvania Crow Counsels Me in the Ways of Love Nurse Log The Sound of Sunlight A Prayer for My Sons, after a Line of Reported Conversation by the Poet William Blake to a Child Seated Next to Him at a Dinner Party from The Least of These Doctrine April Poem Questions for the Artist The Face of Jesus Ananias Lays Hands on Saul Confession Puberty Accident Letter to Galway Kinnell at the End of September Tree of Heaven from Some Heaven The Possibility of Rain Somewhere Else Prayer Requests at a Mennonite Church Sleep Jacklighting Some Heaven from Ripe For an Uncle, Twenty-Four Years after His Passing Fear of Flying Building Walls The Blind Man Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

To read a new and selected collection is to experience the evolution of a voice, in this case an essential voice in American poetry. To sit with the whole of these transportive, immersive poems is to awaken like a wild riparian corridor in spring. Wildflowers on the banks. Birdsong in the branches. The reader’s heart is a bud: open. Beautiful work.”
—Chris Dombrowski, author of The River You Touch

From the Publisher