Breathing Room
Poems
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- ¥710
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- ¥710
発行者による作品情報
"Peter Davison, for years, has pondered with clear insight the perspectives of affection, attachment, loss, and memory, his language spare and his tone classical and deceptively quiet. The poems of this new collection look at the same world with surprise and speak of it with a startled and startling freedom, feeling 'entitled to / the liberty of breathing easy'--a freedom that brings with it the old clarity and eloquence."
--W. S. Merwin
The poems in Peter Davison's exuberant new collection contemplate the paradox of growing old--of having a mind still "a juicy swamp of invention" in a body beginning to falter.
Both intimate and generous, these poems celebrate the cycle of the seasons, of death and rebirth: snapping turtles lay their eggs and new ones hatch; a ruffed grouse drums his spring mating dance. Memory is central: a mother's lost face; a father's voice that "plumbed the marrow of poetry as tenderly / as if a darling had crept into his arms"; a wife's "rueful eyes, cornflower blue." And the poet pays tribute to the literary life--to reading, to the precise moment a word rises to consciousness, to getting over Robert Frost, to the mind of Sylvia Plath.
These are poems that expand time for us and deepen place, whether Davison is taking us on a path along a limestone cliff under canopies of holly and ivy, or is revisiting the instant while recovering from surgery when it becomes clear he is going to heal. "To learn poetry," Davison writes in his foreword, "we need to take poems into our breath and blood, and that requires us to hear them as we read them, to learn to read with all the senses, especially with the ear." Breathing Room gives us a splendid array of poems that we want to read with all our senses.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
After more than 35 years of poetry collections, memoirs, criticism and editorial work, Davison announces that the poems of his 11th collection "mostly assume a single poetic form," one he borrows from the late work of a greater ombudsman, William Carlos Williams. But where Williams's achieves an intuitive elegance through triadic-footed tercets that matched the breath, Davison's free verse tends to go slack along with the material it carries, like the old pal the speaker catches "calculating/ whether life with her might not be/ very convenient, considering her parent's/ money." More at home as a naturalist than a nostalgic storyteller, Davison strikes a keener music when strolling through a "Seaside Summer Quarry" ("Sentried by sabers of iris,/ bared granite rocks/ jut up// from the soft starry beds of/ emerald moss") or observing how "Falling Water" will join "its first// brook and amble off into the yielding/ soft-shouldered marsh past fat roots of/ lilies to linger among the slick fronds// of algae paddled by ducks." Davison, however, is more prosaic when taking on the relationship of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, whether problematically adopting Plath herself as the speaker in "Sorry" ("When I woke up my cheek was full of maggots./ In the hospital they broke my head/ with lightning bolts. Everyone was so kind.") or, even more presumptuously, collaging snippets from some of the couple's more famous poems (Hughes's "Lovesong" and Plath's "Daddy" and "Edge") in a "Ballad" commemorating their "immortal mismarriage,/ their language// splintered and splayed/ in the throes/ of brutality." The effect is not cathartic, transgressive or celebratory in any sense. Davison opens his book with "No Escape" and closes it with the very same poem (only in italics), but readers may have already gone out the back by then.
