Scrimmage of Appetite

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Overview

If Walt Whitman had come back to face America at the end of the 20th Century, these are the poems he might have written. Whether adapting the long Whitmanian line, reinventing the prose poem, or alternating lyric and prose meditations, Jon Davis has taken the measure of these times and found a world where virtue has been devoured by appetite, where the private and familial have been invaded by the tawdry, the commercial, and the vicious, as if our lives were hotwired to our television sets, our minds crackling ...
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Overview

If Walt Whitman had come back to face America at the end of the 20th Century, these are the poems he might have written. Whether adapting the long Whitmanian line, reinventing the prose poem, or alternating lyric and prose meditations, Jon Davis has taken the measure of these times and found a world where virtue has been devoured by appetite, where the private and familial have been invaded by the tawdry, the commercial, and the vicious, as if our lives were hotwired to our television sets, our minds crackling with the loose electricity of an experiment gone wrong. In poems that are ambitious and political without being sententious or partisan, Davis turns to the power of words for a way to reconcile the irreconcilable, praising language as a rich, entangled, and inexhaustible source of solace and meaning. With Scrimmage of Appetite, Jon davis has fulfilled Wallace Stevens's image of a poet "merciless / To accomplish the truth in his intelligence."
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What People Are Saying

Robert Haas
One of the strongest new books I've read in the last year or so is Jon Davis' Scrimmage of Appetite. -- Former U.S. Poet Laureate
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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9781884836114
  • Publisher: University of Akron Press, The
  • Publication date: 10/28/1995
  • Series: Akron Series in Poetry
  • Edition description: 1st ed
  • Pages: 102

Table of Contents

Days of Forgetting 3
Memory 4
What Passeth for a God 6
The Turtle: An Eccentric Ode 7
Marriage 9
Fish Magic 11
The Bait 12
Tumult: Second State 14
Cafe 15
The Sound 16
The Frogs 17
Island Life 18
Blues 19
"Mystery Blend" 21
Solo 22
A Story 25
The Sorry Part 31
Gone 33
The New Americans 35
The Year 2000 36
Relativity 38
American Night 40
The Sixties: Two Scenes 43
The Story of My Life 44
In History 46
Contingency 48
The Wheel of Appetite 51
The Hawk. The Road. The Sunlight After Clouds 53
The Levelled Site of the Page 59
The Held Note of the Past 60
The Eye of Delight 61
A Dazzling Incomprehensibility 62
A Sheen, A Radiance 63
Brutal Squares 64
Tokens from a Lost World 66
A Wave 67
The Valley 68
"The Woman" 69
Interiors 70
God's "Malevolent Eye" 71
A Party of Sorts 72
Ravel 73
Sunlight on Stucco 74
Before the Rains 75
Damage 76
A Closet Full of Excruciations 77
A Desperate Longing for Presence 78
A Letter to the Future 80
The Signature 81
The Ritualized Forms 82
Meanwhile 83
The Common Man 85
A Conspiracy of Lilacs 87
A Broth 88
Gold Card 89
Maxim 90
Heaven 91
Like Teeth 92
The Choir of the Actual 93
An American 95
Inside 96
In the Sleep of Reason 98
Oblivion's Mouth 99
In Privacy 100
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