Fjords Reviews

HOME | BOOK REVIEWS | Revising The Storm by Geffrey Davis
Revising The Storm by Geffrey Davis

 

 

Fjords Review, Revising The Storm by Geffrey Davis

POETRY
REVISING THE STORM
BY GEFFREY DAVIS

BOA Editions, LTD., 2014
96 pages
ISBN 978-1-938160-28-8

 

The Tenor of Silence
by LynleyShimat Lys

 

“I have yet to survey the Irish grit / of my grandmother’s hands, to ask after her first / stumbles with needle and thread – the awkward outline // of butterflies drifting the pillowcase ... I’ve wished I memorized / more – her tenor of silence, say – or chanced being/ the grandchild crouched at the crack in the kitchen door, // catching her voice in song while fudge baked / in the winter.” – “The Epistemology of Hospitals”

The poems in this collection belie the claims of the narrator of this poem, deriving their strength from just that ability to memorize and retain the tenor of silence. What is most striking about the poems, individually and as a group, is their ability to maintain calm in the constant flux of the stormy weather they and their narrators inhabit. Davis takes us through the liminal spaces between experience and memory, compels us to listen as stories unfold, and reminds us to be mindful of silence and breath as landscapes spin out of control.

The first poem in the collection, “What I Mean When I Say Farmhouse,” immerses us in these spaces of thunder and memory, “If only I could settle on / the porch of waiting and listening, / near the big maple bent by children and heat, / just before the sweeping threat of summer / thunderstorms.” The collection cleverly references the meta-poetic with its concepts of revising memory and editing the forces of nature to reinvision and reinscribe them. The narrator of “King County Metro” introduces the recurrent and problematic father figure from a refreshing vantage point, beginning, “In Seattle, in 1982, my mother beholds this man / boarding the bus, the one she’s already / turning into my father,” and ending “My mother will blame all that happens, / both good and bad, on this smile, which glows now, / ready to consume half of everything it gives.” This serves both to foreshadow everything that will happen in relation to the father figure, and to draw us in despite what we know will happen, in the way that we see the mother being drawn in.

Concepts of breath, pause, and waiting also recur in the collection’s poems on fishing and on essays into parenthood. “The Epistemology of Rosemary” approaches the harrowing time following a miscarriage, “One thin month lies between us and our miscarriage, / and I feel her grow silent under the new vastness / of this wreckage. I try to talk about my father / breaking blighted pigeon eggs: at twelve, I thought / patience and pressed him to wait, one week, then two,” – into this new liminal space of mourning, the narrator introduces the forms of hope developed through attempting to instill patience in his father.

The poem “Teaching Twelve-Year-Olds the Trail of Tears,” earlier in the collection hints at some of the difficulties which develop later in the collection, of the failure of parents, relationships, and parenthood, while addressing the failures of American history and the narrator’s Native American heritage. The narrator addresses the students, “Repeat after me: They arrived almost without children / and with few elders, with almost no past and no future. / Now, have a good lunch. Behave. Michael, no running.” This poem-as-lesson encapsulates the skill with which the poems in this collection balance between catastrophe and the need to survive every day events. Like those who were forced to walk the Trail of Tears, the narrators of these poems arrive with missing fathers, missing children, and a series of disruptions to both past and future. Despite this, like the students learning about the Trail of Tears, they are still obligated to go about their daily routines, to behave, and to pace themselves.

Geffrey Davis shows great skill in framing these poems and maintaining their silences and places of calm. The material included in the poems could easily become overly dramatic or overwhelming, and yet through his positioning of the narrators and his use of pause, breath, and silence, he is able to give us the full impact of these stories in a way that lets the stories speak for themselves and make themselves heard. In “The Newakum River,” the narrator relates, “I’ve seen the river bent and falling, / trees bowed along the muddy banks, an early fog hovering / above the water’s current, like some gray ghost out over / the going body. Here each cast is prayer, each slacked retrieval / prayer denied. I have prayed this way since my father taught me,” – these poems hover in liminal spaces to teach us anew about living, listening, and the tenor of silence.

Archives

Hush by Nikki Ummel

Alexis Rhone Fancher’s Erotic: New and Selected Poems

Chasing Homer by László Krasznahorkai

Eight Perfect Murders by Peter Swanson

The Death of Sitting Bear by N. Scott Momaday

WHILE YOU WERE GONE BY SYBIL BAKER

MY STUNT DOUBLE BY TRAVIS DENTON

Made by Mary by Laura Catherine Brown

THE RAVENMASTER: My Life with the Ravens at the Tower of London

Children of the New World By Alexander Weinstein

Canons by Consensus by Joseph Csicsila

And Then by Donald Breckenridge

Dear Everyone by Matt Shears

Magic City Gospel by Ashley M. Jones

Intimacy by Stanley Crawford

Lunch Poems by Deborah Kuan

The Best American Poetry 2016

One with the Tiger by Steven Church

Crosstalk by Connie Willis

The King of White Collar Boxing by David Lawrence

They Were Coming for Him by Berta Vias-Mahou

Verse for the Averse: a Review of Ben Lerner’s The Hatred of Poetry

That Other Me by Maha Gargash

Simone by Eduardo Lalo

Swimming by Karl Luntt

Ghost/ Landscape by Kristina Marie Darling and John Gallaher

Enchantment Lake by Margi Preus

Bad Light by Carlos Castán

Diaboliques by Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly

Staying Alive by Laura Sims

Core of the Sun by Johanna Sinisalo

Maze of Blood by Marly Youmans

Tender the Maker by Christina Hutchkins

Little Anodynes by Jon Pineda

Conjuror by Holly Sullivan McClure

Someone's Trying To Find You by Marc Augé

The Four Corners of Palermo by Giuseppe Di Piazza

Now You Have Many Legs to Stand On by Ashley-Elizabeth Best

The Knowledge by Robert Peake

The Darling by Lorraine M. López

How To Be Drawn by Terrance Hayes

Watershed Days: Adventures (A Little Thorny and Familiar) in the Home Range by Thorpe Moeckel

[INSERT] BOY by Danez Smith

Demigods on Speedway by Aurelie Sheehan

Find Me by Laura Van Den Berg

Singing Bones by Kate Schmitt

Knuckleball by Tom Pitts

Wandering Time by Luis Alberto Urrea

Teaching a Man to Unstick His Tail by Ralph Hamilton

Domenica Martinello: The Abject in the Interzones

Control Bird Alt Delete by Alexandria Peary

Twelve Clocks by Julie Sophia Paegle

Love You To a Pulp by C.S. DeWildt

Even Though I Don’t Miss You by Chelsea Martin

Women by Chloe Caldwell

Fifteen Dogs by Andre Alexis

ESSAY 2:12 A.M. by Kat Meads

Quality Snacks by Andy Mozina

Midnight in Siberia by David Greene

Strings Attached by Diane Decillis

Down from the Mountaintop: From Belief to Belonging by Joshua Dolezal

The New Testament by Jericho Brown

You Don't Know Me by James Nolan

Phoning Home: Essays by Jacob M. Appel

Words We Might One Day Say by Holly Karapetkova

Murder by Danielle Collobert

Sorrow by Catherine Gammon

The Americans by David Roderick

Put Your Hands In by Chris Hosea

I Think I Am in Friends-Love With You by Yumi Sakugawa

Third Wife by Jiri Klobouk

box of blue horses by Lisa Graley

Review of Hilary Plum’s They Dragged Them Through the Streets

The Sleep of Reason by Morri Creech

The Hush before the Animals Attack by Carol Matos

Regina Derieva, In Memoriam by Frederick Smock

Review of The House Began to Pitch by Kelly Whiddon

Hill William by Scott McClanahan

Seamus Heaney Aloft

The Bounteous World by Frederick Smock

American Neolithic by Terence Hawkins

Review of The Tide King by Jen Michalski

Going Down by Chris Campanioni

Review of Empire in the Shade of a Grass Blade by Rob Cook

Review of The Day Judge Spencer Learned the Power of Metaphor

Review of The Figure of a Man Being Swallowed by a Fish

Review of Life Cycle Poems by Dena Rash Guzman

Review of Saint X by Kirk Nesset

Review of Jessica Treadway's Please Come Back to Me

Eve Asks by Christine Redman-Waldeyer