![\"Winterkill](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/162\/2016\/04\/Winterkill-by-Todd-Davis-201x300.jpg\")
\u201cThere is another world, but it is in this one<\/em>.\u201d \u2014William Butler Yeats<\/p>\nReading Yeats\u2019s line, I think vaguely incarnational thoughts: heaven enters earth with Christ\u2019s Incarnation; God dwells within<\/em> our world, not separated from it; and so on. I believe these statements. Yet these formulations give me nothing to grasp onto, nothing to engage my imagination.<\/p>\n How astonishingly rich, though, the other world \u201cin this one\u201d becomes in Todd Davis\u2019s latest collection of poems, Winterkill<\/em>, which takes Yeats\u2019s line as its epigraph. For Davis, \u201cthis world\u201d is the world of nature\u2014particularly the mountainous woods, streams, and wildlife around his longtime central Pennsylvania home.<\/p>\n From what I\u2019ve just said, you might think: oh, so his poems are about nature. But, no: something much more enlivening is going on in Davis\u2019s poetry. He doesn\u2019t write about<\/em> nature; rather, he writes from deep within<\/em> nature. The natural world is his ambiance: he so immerses himself in it that he breathes it, he prays it, he caresses each minute detail of it with his eyes and hands, his heart, his soul, his language. From within nature, life\u2019s meanings speak to him.<\/p>\n Take fish and the water they live in. Davis spends a lot of time in these poems fishing. And sometimes it seems as if he catches fish specifically in order to handle them with delicate awe: to trace their wonders with his fingers and words.<\/p>\n The doors of the brook trout\u2019s pink gills open haloing the body\u2026.<\/em> Here, in \u201cAesthetics Precedes Ethics,\u201d as in many of the poems, Davis\u2019s immersion in nature shows him its \u201cdisappearing\u201d from him. He caresses its details not to possess them but to learn how such a possession is forever impossible.<\/p>\n So another fishing poem, \u201c\u201dCanticle for Native Brook Trout,\u201d ends:<\/p>\n as we release them The volume\u2019s longest poem, \u201cSalvelinus fontinalis,\u201d is an homage to brook trout (their scientific name).\u00a0 I find the essence of Todd Davis\u2019s vision and spirit in this major poem. Nature is alive: \u201cThe water\u2019s footsteps descend the stairs \/ of the mountain.\u201d Nature even grants us humans pardon for defiling it by mining: \u201cSprings rise everywhere in this stream, \/ struggling to forgive us\u2026. Davis \u201chungers\u201d for \u201ca connection \/ with that life hidden \/ in rock-seams.\u201d<\/p>\n That hidden life: it belongs to the water, the trees, and of course the fish.<\/p>\n We all worship something. \u201cHoly and godlike\u201d: explicitly religious language like this enters only occasionally into the poems of Winterkill<\/em>. In previous collections, Davis wrote poems that drew often on the language of the Gospels, finding in the natural world the wisdom of Scripture. He\u2019s not sure he needs Christian doctrine and practice, now that he has the fish:<\/p>\n I\u2019ve caught myself praying to them,<\/em> Consider each cell trembling Another core theme of Winterkill<\/em> also enters this poem: the inevitable loss and death that are the lot of all living things. Here in \u201cSalvelinus fontinalis,\u201d it\u2019s the beginning of loss of his eyesight: \u201cAt fifty my eyes have begun to fail.\u201d Elsewhere in the book, many poems reflect on his father\u2019s recent death and on the deaths everywhere around him in the natural world: some quiet, some brutal, some intentional (as when he is hunting), some shocking.<\/p>\n The poem \u201cWood Tick\u201d seems to contain them all. Two red-tailed hawks \u201chunted the back yard\u201d for rabbits, mice, a neighbor\u2019s cat. \u201cThe bones of a ten-year-old girl who\u2019d gone missing were found \/\/ riddled with the teeth mark of coyotes.\u201d \u201cA circle of feathers\u201d belong to a bird snatched by a bobcat; \u201ca white line of scat \/ showed the bird\u2019s surprise.\u201d And finally, that wood tick: Davis sometimes finds it \u201calong my hairline, belly distended, \/\/ bloated on the blood none of us wish to spare.\u201d The tick is removed by a friend who burns it with an ember of tobacco \u201cas I watched \/ the tick\u2019s head blaze, buried dead beneath the flesh.\u201d<\/p>\n Along with this friend, other people enter these poems; I don\u2019t want to leave the impression that Davis\u2019s absorption in nature distances him from fellow humans. Far from it. His wife, sons, and neighbors play their parts. But their parts, as would be expected, are played out within the natural world surrounding their home.<\/p>\n There\u2019s the pastoral image of Davis and his wife working so hard on their land that they fall asleep \u201cbeneath the falling petals of a serviceberry tree\u201d (\u201cApril Landscape, with Petals\/Furrows\/Wife\u201d). There\u2019s the delightfully moving image of a friend\u2019s son who\u2019s so intimately connected to birds\u2019 songs that he can hear and identify them when \u201call we heard was the sound \/ of the stream below\u201d (\u201cOrnithological\u201d). Most startling, there\u2019s the transformative image in \u201cTransfiguration of the Beekeeper\u2019s Daughter,\u201d where the bees swarm so closely around the girl\u2019s body and into her hair and ears that<\/p>\n a girl vanishes What an astounding image of the truth which Yeats utters and which the poems of Winterkill<\/em> embody: \u201cThere is another world, but it is in this one.\u201d<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Peggy Rosenthal<\/a>\u00a0is director of\u00a0Poetry Retreats<\/a>\u00a0and writes widely on poetry as a spiritual resource. Her books include\u00a0Praying through Poetry: Hope for Violent Times\u00a0<\/em>(Franciscan Media), and\u00a0The Poets\u2019 Jesus\u00a0<\/em>(Oxford). See\u00a0Amazon<\/a>\u00a0for a full list. She also teaches an online\u00a0course,\u00a0\u201cPoetry as a Spiritual Practice,\u201d<\/a>\u00a0through\u00a0Image<\/em>\u2019s Glen Online program<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n
\nand close as it wriggles in my palm, back
\nyellow and black, variegated like coral\u2026.
\nIn hand, the caudal fin
\nflays orange and ebony, a nimbus of flame<\/em><\/p>\n
\nI spread the net of my fingers in the water,
\nand the trout disappears beneath a ledge, as the stream
\nwill, if I follow it high up into the mountain.<\/em><\/p>\n
\nand they swim
\nfrom our grasp
\nback into a sliver
\nof sunlight.<\/em><\/p>\n
\nI\u2019ll take the beauty and strength
\nof these fish, holy and godlike,
\nwith backs vermiculated
\nso you can\u2019t see them as they fan
\nabove strewn rocks at your feet.<\/em><\/p>\n
\nhoping such prayers might help them<\/em>
\nsave themselves, and because I can\u2019t<\/em>
\nescape the religion of my youth,<\/em>
\nI still believe God is one, or at least three-<\/em>
\nin-one, the world drenched by the Holy<\/em>
\nSpirit of this fish\u2019s colors.<\/em><\/p>\n
\nin my hand as I hold
\nthis fish that gives me faith.<\/em><\/p>\n
\nand in her place a winged seraph flies.<\/em><\/p>\n
![\"GL](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/162\/2015\/09\/GL-banner-1024x279.jpg\")
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