'the Something Startled Rise of Birds': A Tribute to Leigh Davis, 1955-2009 (In Memoriam‪)‬

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] This from a book-length 2004 essay called 'Back Operation in Mr Cotton's Pictures', a section entitled 'Great Avidity', dealing with Te Kooti's 'rebirth' as a Maori prophet during his incarceration on the Chathams, a transformation Mr. Davis describes as 'an interpretive seizure presenting as a manner of reading' [Te Kooti's] of scripture, his 'research'. The section begins with an extended quotation on the subject from Judith Binney's 'book of greatness' Redemption Songs, 1995. We know the avidity with which Leigh read her book as it is evident in those interpretive seizures his flag-poems of Station of Earth-bound Ghosts, which signaled in 1998, his return to literary writing after a fifteen year absence, and then in the miscellany devoted to them and to Te Kooti's legacy, Te Tangi ate Matuhi, not to mention the essay 'Maori Bay Quarry' of 1999 where 'Te Kooti's strategy is', he writes, 'a remarkable analogue of McCahon's strategy of connecting the biblical with the local'--and so forth.