POEMS, etc.
poetry, books, & readings
Welcome, all.
Announcing my new collection of poems!
On the Way to Putnam (new, selected, & early poems), is now available either through the link or the publisher, Grayson Books.
Poems have appeared or are forthcoming in a wide variety of journals, among them Poetry, Paris Review, Image, LETTERS, Michigan Quarterly Review, JAMA, Brilliant Corners, Solum, The Cafe Review, St. Katherine Review, Puerto del Sol, Ekstasis, Connecticut River Review, Spiritus, Vallum, and Presence. Some have won awards: e.g., AWP Intro Journal Award, Sunken Garden Poetry Prize (selected by Dick Allen), International Arts Movement Poetry Prize (selected by Bret Lott). Others have been finalists or nominated for awards. A few have found their way into anthologies: Sunken Garden Poetry, 1992-2011 (Wesleyan University Press), The Turning Aside (Cascade Books), Waking Up to the Earth (Grayson).
I've had ten collections of poems published. Four with Antrim House: Though War Break Out, Song of the Drunkards, No Vile Thing, and Like Those Who Dream. Three with Wipf & Stock/Cascade: Opening King David (an all-in-one of the four Antrim books), Still Working It Out, and Trespassing on the Mount of Olives. Two are chapbooks: Short List of Wonders (winner, Sunken Garden Poetry Competition) and Self Portrait w/ Disposable Camera (Finishing Line: finalist, Black River Chapbook Contest and White Eagle Coffee Store Chapbook Contest). In 2011, I was hired by Hill-Stead Museum, home to the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival, to edit the festival's 20th anniversary anthology, Sunken Garden Poetry, 1992-2011 (Wesleyan University Press).
I've taught in two boarding schools (Pomfret School, The Stony Brook School) and as an adjunct at College of Holy Cross and Eastern Connecticut State University. I've given featured readings in some very cool places: Yale's Literature & Spirituality Series, Sunken Garden Poetry Festival, Bryant Park Reading Room Poetry Series, Gordon College's Princemere Writers Series, and Curbstone Foundation's Julia de Burgos Park.
Born in San Diego, California, to a Canadian from Vancouver, I am a citizen of the U.S. and Canada. I earned two high school diplomas (good story there), an undergrad degree (Sociology), and two masters degrees (MDiv and MFA). Following my MDiv, I served as an Episcopal priest for 25 years, fifteen as the chaplain of Pomfret School. While there, I completed my MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and inaugurated a signature program in creative writing for the school. Then, after three wonderful years on Long Island at Stony Brook, I moved to Putnam, CT, with my partner Deb and our cat Mr. Bibbs (RIP). Our only child John is married to Mariko; they live in Brooklyn, NY.
Three poems
Just Visiting
and thinking of Whitman
I love looking downriver—under
the last two bridges before the harbor
toward the lady and where the ferry
still crosses from island to island—
and imagining what you’d make of
what we’ve made of the busy docks
of your Brooklyn, the rhythms of so
many masts coming in and going out
replaced by these glassy monstrosities,
wart-like clear to the water’s edge.
Though I’ve a friend who swam
around the lesser island, another who
rowed around the greater one, I am
just now content with loafing right
where I am on this rent stabilized
couch in a Williamsburg high-rise,
my soul reclined doglike beside me
and like me taking in the view of two
cities waking—the cat in the window
apparently loving it too, an early train
on the bridge behind us grumbling
its high way above the hasting current.
(first appeared in Vallum)
The First to Settle
Silent witnesses
here by the will of receding
glaciers, among us
to remind us
our kind came late to these parts.
Whether by ice bridge
or open water,
we are the wandering invasive,
some listening to the land
as to a life partner,
most subduing it, as if the stubborn
vassal requires a firm hand.
With whom to make common cause?
I choose those glacial
erratics—constant, methodical,
patient of needle drop, leaf
fall, snow and winter kill, passersby
of every hide and hoof—
and I choose too all who, whether
by temperament or
necessity, pause
their ceaseless wandering
to honor the elder stones
distributed across
the lands they, for millennia
well before our kind, have overseen.
Long is their wisdom
how to be
observer and participant among
the ever-changing—
silent, unflappable, first
witnesses to the wonder of being here.
(first appeared in Traces)
On the Way to Putnam
Were you to tell him how,
in late summer's
westering light,
his yellow cornfields and,
toward the middle,
that lone, misshapen tree
become your very own
Serengeti, complete
with buzzards
ascending and descending
upon some bloated corpse,
likely a wildebeest,
Mr. Amaral, a businessman,
would nod politely.
(first appeared in Poetry)
From Reviews & blurbs
I am grateful for the kind words of these poets who have read my work:
Mary Oliver: "Brad Davis’ poems are modest and intense at the same time. His subject—all of us, and all things, considered as they are, sorrowful and joyful, and as they might be—invites us to remember the old irreplaceable story of our making: its divinity, its possibility."
Shane McCrea: “His Trespassing on the Mount of Olives asks one long and audacious question: Can speaking back be also speaking with? From the beginning of the book to its end, Brad Davis makes the answering yes surprising, as he somehow makes deeply known stories new. His is resurrection poetry."
Dick Allen: "Beautifully felt and thought, with a religious element that pervades but never overwhelms the poetry—it is specific and timeless at once. Compassionate, praiseful, confident, but never sentimental or dogmatic."
Clare Rossini: "These are poems that think and wonder and yes, by God, that pray. They do so with a cosmopolitan tongue and a formal sense acutely measured against the expansive possibilities of the poet’s intellect and spirit. Brad Davis is a storyteller, has a marvelous touch with detail, and can be awfully funny."
Margaret Gibson: "Davis has mastered the art of presenting the ordinary moment with all its stunning strangeness. Reading these poems, we become mindful that we live by mystery, by beauty, and by grace."
Sydney Lea: "Over the span of his sustained and sustaining vocation, no matter all the world’s deep defects—posturing and deceptions of late capitalist powers, widespread war, starvation, bigotry, hypocrisy, and plain callousness—for him a cautious optimism and an incautious joie de vivre and delight in the natural world prevail. Those who accept Auden’s dictum that poetry makes nothing happen might consider On the Way to Putnam. What happens for me is a strong measure of spiritual refreshment."
David Wojahn: "Davis writes in the tradition of Herbert and Hopkins: which is to say his subject is how matters of spiritual crisis can alchemize—through empathy and a fastidious attention to craft—first into matters of devotion, and ultimately into matters of revelation. He understands, in a deep and abiding fashion, what Eluard meant when he said that there is another world, but it is in this one."
Gray Jacobik: "Brad Davis writes the kind of poem I value most: one that is spoken straight from an open, compassionate heart and shot through with pure intelligence, acerbic wit, and self-displacement. His poems are infused with the transfiguring love he experiences for 'whoever it may be who holds / all this in brilliant fullness.'"
Robert Cording: “From start to finish in his wonderful On the Way to Putnam, Davis has ‘faith enough to do the next thing / and hope.’ Language is a gift, a form of grace, and for Davis, poems are a ‘momentary fling under a generous sun,’ his every word aimed, without aiming, at the sanctity of our lives. This is a mature, terrific book that does what Wallace Stevens said poetry should do: ‘refresh life.'"
Betsy Sholl: "As he says in one poem, he’s here ‘to A-men love and a nine-piece funk band.’ And indeed he does, taking on the great classical conundrums with a delicious and sometimes bluesy backbeat. It’s a great relief to read poems that address the moral malaise of our times, the seduction of nihilism, with so much clarity and intelligence. Davis does not offer easy answers, but rather lets faith and doubt spar until hope becomes the clear winner.”
Jeffrey Harrison: "Davis' poems move with Whitmanian inclusiveness, taking us by surprise not only with their delights but with their clear-eyed look at suffering, death, and those moments when we feel ourselves 'without purchase.' Here is a poet who knows how to entertain us and move us deeply."
