Reviewed by Jen Tynes
4.30.07

In Christina Davis’s poem “O Who May Abide,” the speaker asks, “Why do you say dear god,/ as if you were writing to him?” These couple lines are a good example of the exploration of the relationship between word and action, language and spirituality, that Davis conducts throughout her debut book of poetry, Forth a Raven. Frequently compared to Emily Dickinson, Christina Davis’s voice is both intimate and oratory, individual and choral, personable and estranged. The poems in Forth a Raven are like prayers, acts of language in which the voice ranges from the metaphysical to the extremely personal. Davis makes the spiritual individual.

In an interview with Patrick Bagley, Christina Davis discusses the word ‘humility,’ which appears prominently in “In the Shrine of the Holy Dirt,” a poem included in the second section of Forth a Raven. Davis points out that “humility meaning lowliness [comes] from humus, meaning earth. I also heard the relation (albeit a false cognate) with humanand humor.” Dichotomies like earth and sky, body and spirit, become significant, and significantly shaky, in this book. People “transcend” by getting closer to the ground, and the language of spirituality is deconstructed. Reading Davis, I was also thinking about the word “oracular,” which appears in at least one blurb of Forth a Raven, and what it means to be an oracle. “Oracle” comes from the Latin “orare,” to speak, but the word also had me thinking, associatively, about the “ocular,” Emerson’s “transparent eyeball,” and how seeing and speaking collaborate in Davis’s debut collection of poems.

The first line of the first and title poem of the collection reads, “In the dream, we take god out of the attic and put back the birds.” God is present but lower-cased, suggesting god as a potent yet rearrangeable idea more than an autonomous being; the syntax allows us to see the birds as both synonymous with and in opposition to god (we don’t know where they are being “put back” exactly – in the attic in place of god? Or out of the attic along with god?). The speaker asks a question, which is admittedly euphemistic (“Every question// I have ever asked could be ground down to// Do you love me? Will I die?”), and the birds, in the tradition of the oracle, reply in a manner that is simultaneously straightforward and oblique, never directly referencing the speaker or their question/prayer. The purposes of the oracle and the listener are not necessarily aligned; in fact, the oracle doesn’t express any need or bias at all. The “prediction” or response, then, is to be shaped and interpreted by the listener.

“Advertisement for a Mountain” also seems attentive to the catch-22 of being mortal and close to the ground. Davis describes one “version of life” as including “a dandelion’s-worth of chances,” a phrase that suggests whimsy and childish anticipation even as it recalls something fragile and temporary. Davis ends the poem this way:

Life is eight miles long.

You could walk it, and be there before sundown.
Or swim it, or fall it, or crawl it.)

The second is told from the point
of view of the sky.

The last lines clearly refer to the second of two “versions of life”; escaping elaboration, this version looms, mysterious, clearly other – the point-of-view of the heavens, the mountain-top, the pedestal. The organization of the final lines, however, provides an additional possibility: “the second” refers not only to the second version but also to the second suggestion in the line previous – life is an eight-mile long thing which can be “fallen.” This suggests an upended world, a different perspective, but it also suggests a fall from “grace” into “humility,” its own kind of blessing. The speaker, though spending most of the poem detailing the “first version,” is conscious of existing within or beneath or through that second version. Like the oracle or the “transparent eyeball,” the speaker is a medium between two possibilities, but the speaker does not identify as a particular or special person. The first line of the poem reads (emphasis mine), “there are two versions of every life.”

Other poems in the first section of Forth a Raven are attentive to the power of naming: how calling something shapes and defines it. “Calling” becomes literal as well as figurative here; there is a lot of actual zig-zagging, moving from or toward, coming when called or avoiding address. The lines between people, animals, and landscapes become mutable in some moments (“a deer has fled/ and then turned back/ as it left some part of itself behind”), fixed in others (“It is time.// Home begins/ in the mind”), but always fabricated, composed. When Davis ends “Nostalgia for the Infinite” with the line “O creatures-in-law…,” the turn-of-phrase is again significant, suggesting both connection and separation. It is an address without an end, a prayer that is more like a sigh, expecting no answer. Idiom and wordplay create voice and multiplicity elsewhere in this section; In “In Search of a Jury” the speaker teases: “Am I not many and sweet/ as the bushes, doesn’t the gnat enjoy me/ in plenty of places?” In “Monadnock” the symbolic becomes real: “Though we had no dog, just something urgent and uncurbed/ to which the climbers knelt,/ calling Come and Here to.” In these poems we see the process of evocation, how language calls forth its subject.

The second section of the book looks more specifically at language – how it limits as well as expands. In “The Sadness of the Lingua Franca,” Davis celebrates the value of the unspoken (“After English we never do get to be strangers again”) as well as the relationship between signifier and signified (“the swan will never mouth/ the noun for bread,/ the declension of crumb. Though I could stop// its migration with a crumb”). In these poems language is often a “stripped down” version of something else, a rude and approximate translation which needs action to fill it out. Prayer, an action made of words, is interrogated and explored here (“I looked/ up from my language, so this is what is// meant by prayer”). To whom and how does prayer communicate?

Even before reading the book's end notes, it is clear that "The Raven's Book" is spoken by a particular I to a particular you, and this specificity focuses the latter half of the book's consideration of mortality, of homes both literal and figurative. In poems like "Homesickness" and "How to Play House," home is a false front or fabrication that nonetheless triggers our instincts or needs for identification. The last section of the book includes several poems which consider language as a theatrical act, language as an inexact reenactment. "Two Varieties of Passion Plays" ends, "So what, if it took ten years to make/ a bass of the boy in the field,/ so what, if the mothers must agree/ to raise their girls as voices?" The poem "Third Person" argues "To speak of what was is to hold it above its home//...inside the sea,/ the fishes/ do not drip." Life, in these final poems, is an act both vital and detached from its source, put on by those who "fell to flapping their nothing feathers." In "The Great Fire," one of Forth a Raven's final poems, Davis writes, "everything is loved/ til it spreads." The oracle, then, is as shifting as our understanding of it. Understanding is an intimate act that cannot be translated, cannot be communicated outside of its action; these poems insist upon experiencing this act with you.