Winterkill

“Reading Todd Davis’s gorgeous poems, you can’t help but feel that the capacities of human vision, and also our appetite for exactly this way of seeing and naming, have been mysteriously, precisely increased.”
—Jane Hirshfield, author of Come, Thief and The Beauty
 

"In his fifth collection, Davis (In the Kingdom of the Ditch) again tackles the nature of nature, how it both affects humans and is in turn affected by them. Through meditations on the flora and fauna of his Pennsylvania home, Davis brings readers into a world rife with danger and darkness as well as quietude and splendor. . . . Given its meditative qualities, the book is a slow burn, and some readers may find that the poems' steady, deliberate pacing makes the collection feel longer than it really is. Those who appreciate a subtle word and an eye for the trees will find much to savor. Davis reverently observes nature's own poetry and how it illuminates the process of change." ~Publishers Weekly

"This collection's negative capability of faith and doubt, spirituality and science, myth and natural history charges nearly every poem in both traditional and viscerally original ways. . . . Like so much in this fine book, the empty impressions speak softly and clearly of what Wallace Stevens called the "nothing that is not there, and the nothing that is." Winter's absence and death remind us to feast on poems, remember, imagine, and survive into spring."—Harvard Review Online ~Henry Hughes, Harvard Review Online