This Poet Pays Attention
In every moment, Carol Ann Davis sees the world.
It is sweltering outside and one suspects the few patrons in Addlestone Library have come inside for the air conditioning as much as for any access to books. Among those taking refuge from the summertime heat is Carol Ann Davis, who’s trudging up to the top floor. Taking charge of a very long table, she unpacks a sheaf of papers several centimeters thick. These are her poems, and she has brought them to the chopping block.
Over the next few hours, Davis spreads sheet after sheet across the table, transforming the wooden tabletop into a white expanse dotted with text. Years of work are before her, and some order and thinning is required. She is about to assemble a book.
She zeroes in on a single page and scans it, lingering on the poem’s last line. If something within it grabs her, she snatches it up. Then she begins to hunt for the next page, scanning other poems’ opening lines, looking for a common thread or thought between the snatched poem’s ending and another’s beginning. When a match is found, she picks that poem up and begins again, searching for a new link. Scurrying around the table, she carries on this way until her hands are full, a collection of poems assembled. She sets the new sheaf aside and gathers the rejected poems. They’ll have to wait a few more years to get their chance for publication, but even then it’s iffy.
“Some summers I say ‘I’m going to come back next summer,’” says Davis. “It’s not a book yet.”
So far, Davis has written and assembled two books of poetry, including her latest, Atlas Hour, published this fall. One of the ideas Atlas Hour explores is what can be discovered in life’s seemingly mundane moments.
“Every hour contains the richness of the world, both beauty and the hard edge of suffering,” says Davis. “Nothing is so limiting you can’t have a rich spiritual and intellectual life wherever you are.”
For example, in the last poem of Atlas Hour, Davis writes of walking home from the pool with her two young children. She watches her oldest child sprint ahead, into darkness and just out of sight. Contemplating the unknown that looms in the darkness is both exhilarating and terrifying, says Davis. This short walk home – normally dismissed as a necessary but time-killing transit – suddenly becomes fraught with meaning.
An examination of children’s limited vocabulary produced similar discovery. Instead of regarding their developing vocabulary as basic, Davis marvels at a child’s use of short noun and verb phrases. She mimics it in her own writing, fascinated with the intimacy conveyed by “simple, pared-down language that doesn’t depend on punctuation but is very clear.”
Beyond writing poetry, Davis teaches it. In her classes, Davis uses a process-based approach of taking stock of the world and funneling experiences and perceptions into writing. Even if her students don’t become professional writers or poets, Davis says, it’s useful for them to pay attention to detail and to use their observations to think through the problems and challenges of life.
“The more open you are, the richer the world becomes,” says Davis. “All the riches are everywhere.”
Check out these poems from Atlas Hour:
Via Nomentana
…and her body was buried close to Rome on the Nomentan Road (Via Nomentana).
Here daylight grows fog-blent in the quiet ruin
of what’s nearby in the harbor a boat called Straggler
no one hauls away and news of boys killed
of torture there down the ancient road
its paving stones still roasting in sun
they’ve buried her little-virign-martyr St. Agnes
outside the walls her church grown up
where mourners first family
then pilgrims dug into soft rock
the book says to be near her on their visits
little left to show for it
but purity made yellow
a tile hand reaching out of frame lamb’s wool
and a body edged toward lilt
not so easy to kill
it turns out and harder to rape
the world finds purity admirable but difficult
the book tells me something easily elided
in the tone of a sermon as if again
to lose clarity in preservation
for her then as now
the stigmata of a sandal-knot
is adoration the circlet of gilded glass
in the chancel a bit like restoration
blown dusty and nearby it all the blond anniversary
of my father’s death marshlands he loved
on either side of a highway given over
to light so like skin on a church wall
easily and for free I would dig
a long time into soft rock to find him near
belief and unbelief changing places to grow blind
Easter Unexplained
because it begins inside affection
the afternoon’s a kept thing the heart
blown and still or nearly
as much of it forgotten
as put away so you find it
suddenly you make a song
about toys lost by accident
a sad list of plate
and fork and knife and cup
but also the siren that called
the firemen to the fire the horn
from the train each a part
of the texture of this each owning
its own sure melody inside us
at least if to explain
that’s what I’d say I’d want something
easy to start with the dyeing of eggs
or the girls who hid them well enough
to be lost the one blue one
I hid in St. Francis’ palm how you ran up to it
bright as anything calling it the live one
and I could barely look at you then
so sure was I you couldn’t be mine
The Birth Hour
So close to dawn. So near
the snowman with the orange feet,
proximate to windstorms
and a snow’s arrival.
So near the cornea
the sky is a shed tear. The feather
pasted into the memory book, its name
forgotten, like yours, like mine. The
hair’s breath.
So as to be
within earshot. So as not to be heard. Put on these quiet socks,
use this, your inside voice. What did your father say?
Quiet as a church mouse. What did my mother?
Bedroom eyes.
Close as a series,
close as uncles, the third one, the fourth,
the one who died on the ice. Legend, as in
a key. Something about arriving first,
about rescue.
You will have wanted
this thing to be born, you will have counted the days
it traveled, known more
than its father knew. You will have held it
close as a second to the next thing, cell to cell,
a wall prone to rupture, its veins prone—
and with all you have seen
and felt still not known.
