Crafting Connection: Christina Davis Reaches Out

Christina Davis is “carving out a place in the noise.” Hers is a syntax stripped bare, absent of the “ums,” the “likes,” the half-starts and premature stops of everyday speech. In that syntax one finds evidence of the contemporaneous density and paucity of text. A few words in succession reveal the locked chambers of childhood, loves longed for and lost, the vigor of grief.

We are each what never leaves us, what we never see
the back of
is the self. But what loves us

is at the back, as Eurydice was
escorting him out
without his knowing.

Her concerns are the interchangeability of opposites and the human community; the need not only to speak, but for speech to reach an intended.

I want to tell you all the little wrongs between us,
the ones they don’t arrest.

If you were here, you’d bend into me,
low as a fountain’s stump of water, and whisper

“Once everyone’s dreamed, we will sleep.”

In “Forth a Raven,” her first collection of poetry, this is embodied by the raven itself. It is the bird, and the flight of the bird. It is the recollection of mourning, and the act of having loved. So we learn to read these poems not only as independent vessels, but also as a poetic sequence.

Thus, in the deep of winter, we find ourselves on foot in a New England landscape where the seasonal cycles are in gentle juxtaposition with the cycles of human experience: life being lived, imbued as it is with loss, and loathing, and loneliness. Overhead, the birds fly south.         —   Carlin M. Wragg, Editor