Forth A Raven
Christina Davis
Christina Davis’ deeply-felt lyric poems will seduce the reader with their spare elegance. In the Book of Genesis, Noah sends forth a raven and a dove to test the status of the flood. The return of the quiet dove is widely celebrated, but the fate of the garrulous raven is left ambiguous. In Christina Davis’ luminous first collection of poems, her questions are those raised by the journey of the raven and what it represents: language and the potential for truth, the nature of exile and mortality. Flight may be physical or emotional but in either case begs the question of how to communicate, how to remain connected to people and places left behind. These ethereal poems, curious and necessary, remind us of all that we risk when we venture forth.
“Davis brings a psychological acuity and a mythic, laconic approach (reminiscent sometimes of Louise Gluck) to a spare universe of ravens, mountains and purgatorial reminiscences….a head-turning debut.”
—Publishers Weekly
“The poems in this first collection from Davis…are taut and spare and show an obvious love of language. A fine, compelling collection.”
—Library Journal
"Christina Davis sends forth a wild bird in her magical first collection, and it carries messages that are at once oracular, urgent, and utterly authentic. She has inscribed a true book of mysteries."
—Edward Hirsch
"These poems are so bright they hurt: urgent and necessary, they explode and shatter into original wholeness, reclaiming for Soul its own language—fierce, challenging, and spare. This is a book Emily would have kept by her bedside. About it, she might have said, 'Here is a newness in the wind to trouble your attention.'"
—Susan Mitchell
"In the oddity and rightness of these poems, it’s 'As if there were just
one/of each word, and the one/who used it, used it up.' Out of this
economy, the voice that emerges—rueful like Dickinson, wryly charming
like Szymborska—pushes the boundaries of contemporary lyric by being
both runic and absolutely clear."
—Tom Sleigh
about the author
Christina Davis received her B.A. and M.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and her M.Phil. in Modernist Literature from the University of Oxford. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Gettysburg Review, Jubilat, LIT, The May Anthologies (selected by Ted Hughes), New England Review, New Republic, Paris Review, and Provincetown Arts (selected by Susan Mitchell). The recipient of several residencies to Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, she currently works at Poets House and lives in the heart of Greenwich Village.
Author photo by Jo Eldredge Morrissey.
two poems from forth a raven
electronic press kit (pdf file)
interview with christina davis
