Natures: On the Way to NatureS

Monday, May 22, 2006

On the Way to NatureS

This past winter, going through a box of old photographs recovered from my mother's house, I came across a faded and cracking color eight by ten of the groom's party from my brother's wedding in 1971; the party, of course, included me, back from British Columbia for the summer. Not wanting to defame any of the other members of that crew, I've cropped it to leave just the guy you see on the left, the poet of NatureS about the time he began the first of the poems which make up the book. That day seems, certainly, quite a while back. Some friends who've known me only in the last ten years tell me that they can't see me in this photo at all, but I know for sure that I'm at least his more-revealed descendant, and every now and then I come across him when I'm digging into the language I (he could claim the same pronoun) still use.

For the reading last month, I actually thought I might make a photo mask from this image and wear it when I was reading from the older material in the book, just so folks would have some visual sense of the person whose statement and song they then heard. Perhaps for a future reading. But, for now, it's here.

Several have written to ask where they might buy the book. Thanks! It's available online now, with the convenience of a shopping interface, through SPD, and also from New Native Press. In Asheville, it's available from the Captain's Bookshelf at 31 Page Avenue, near the Grove Arcade, and at the Black Mountain College Museum + at 56 Broadway (each copy there and at Captain's is signed, if you're interested in that aspect of book collecting, and contains a flier from the Center reading in April or some other piece of cool stuff for the true collector). Malaprop's will have it at some point, I'd assume, since they've scheduled a reading in October, but they didn't have it as of yesterday. More about Malaprop's as the fall approaches. In the meantime ... how does it go? Yes, do buy the book, buy several copies, give them to friends! They'll make great gifts for the holiday of your choice! Etc.

Labels: NatureS

Praise for NatureS

"Way back when, a literary gent by the name of E.L. Pound, from Hailey, Idaho, announced to the world: 'I divide poetry into what I can read and what I cannot read.' I am new to Jeff Davis's work but hit'll read!!! It reminds me that writers named Robert Creeley and Charles Olson once taught at Black Mountain College in Buncombe County NC - and made a difference."

~Jonathan Williams

"These poems are succinct in language and insights - no waste of words here - lovely and moving jewels of the Eleusinian luminous darkness, a magnificent shining in the dark. Poems (all of them) that are gifts, with a sassy bit of awareness to ground them all. At their best, they show an excellent eye and ear for the images and rhythms of nature - fresh, clear, as any sparkling mountain stream - and sing with that limpidity Olson was always trying to drum into my head at Black Mountain. Jeff Davis is a poet who knows what most males thirst to know - and die, not knowing. 'I am written,' Rimbaud said, and he is just that in these poems."

~Michael Rumaker

"Being human and part of nature, what we have in common with the natural world is something we gain then lose, gain then lose, over and over. The continual process of holding and letting go makes up the world we smell, we taste, we see, we feel, we hear, we share. As the custodian of this experience we have none better than Jeff Davis. He has been tireless in his practice of recording these dark and luminous encounters: the flicker of love, or the shadow of leaves in the wind."

~Thomas Meyer