The Great Ledge
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- ¥710
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- ¥710
発行者による作品情報
James Dickey, in reviewing Peter Davison's last book, Praying Wrong: New and Selected Poems, 1957-1984, said, ' Davison will not let things break him. His voice is his; he has earned it and can use it, and as a result is surely one of our better poets.' That sense of this poet's singularity is one of the great strengths of this new book; these deeply felt poems are uniquely his. From the almost unbearably moving 'Equinox 1980, ' which opens the book, to the delightful 'Peaches, ' The Great Ledge confirms the remark of Vernon Young that Davison is 'one of the few poets of the first order writing in English today.'
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Davison's ( Praying Wrong ) is a moral poetry, the embodiment of unwavering ethical commitment. Accomplished and powerful, the poems in his ninth collection--primarily narratives, some lyrics--are equally distinguished by his confident, lucid voice. Relying on the physical world for inspiration, the author's imagery is tactile and vivid, conveying effectively pleasure derived from nature: when describing with yearning the virtues of a peach, he explains, ``I beseech you, peach, / clench me into the sweetness / of your reaches.'' However, Davison's vision of nature is a complex and even ominous one when he considers the casual destruction humans wreak on earth. Imagining life in some future time when the environment is even more ravaged, he is able to evoke it in a spirit of somber realism uniquely Davison's own: ``If dark and thickness close upon our lungs / . . . we'll mourn like doves, repeating as we grieve / how carbon kept us whole--and though the whole / world turned to coal, then chiefly live.''
