Natures: Back to Waynesville

Friday, August 04, 2006

Back to Waynesville

I'll be cruising back to Waynesville tonight for an authors' reception at Windows On Main, in the heart of town. It's a prelude to the Book Fair tomorrow, across the street at the Justice Center. Like many other authors, I'll be there at the Fair, hopefully signing copies of books for interested readers.

The reception starts at 6:00 tonight. "Heavy hors d'oeuvres will be served and door prizes will be given. Tickets are $15.00 and are available at" Osondu Booksellers, according to Osondu's website. Other authors scheduled to be there tonight include Darnell Arnoult, Michael Beadle, Billie Bierer, Regan Black, Marian Coe, Scott Dickson, Sherry Fair, Struan Forbes, Marshall Frank, Alan Gratz, Tommy Hays, James Joyce, Schuyler Kaufman, Vicki Lane, John Malone, Roger Meadows, Clyde Ray, Elva Sieg and Haywood Smith. Hmm, James Joyce? I know just a few of these folks, and am curious to meet others - especially mystery writer Vicki Lane, who sets her stories in Madison County. As it turns out, we have mutual friends.

If you've thought you might eventually get a copy of NatureS, the Book Fair might be a good time to do it; there are other readings coming up, several in and around Asheville in October, but the first printing is almost gone. If you're involved in that side of book collecting, and prize first printings, unique states of publication, and the like (as I confess I do at this stage of my life) you've been advised. Just saying ...

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