by Todd Davis
Michigan State University Press, 2022
Todd Davis’s poetry asks to be read aloud, in the woods or streamside. I’ve carried his books into the spitting snow of a March lambing paddock, read them perched on ash stumps atop the farm’s trace road, and beside the tangled alder of a shadowed beaver pond. I’ve set the poems loose anywhere their twinned precision and mystery might find space and fellowship.
Coffin Honey, Davis’s seventh full-length collection, arrived at a time of convalescence for me, and required stillness. This made for an intense reading experience. Coffin Honey is not an easy book, but a necessary one, displaying steady, insistent witness to crises that fall on rural and wild neighbors and landscapes – ordinary crises and the nearly unspeakable. The poems within are daring and imaginative, extending into the hearts and souls of black bear, small boy, snapping turtle, and mother. The poet brings a welcome confidence to this work, born of humility and his unwavering attention.
From a bounty of layered imagery and exactness, Davis builds familiar, frightening, and lovely worlds at a most basic level: the body. In “Buck Day,” a young hunter “looks forward to these gray days: to sitting quietly / and saying nothing, to absorbing the cold. In the stand, / her shoulder rests against her dad.” This hunter knows too well the thin barrier that exists between skin and pain. Watching a pair of yearlings, “She likes the taste of meat but hopes they’ll keep running. / Her dad won’t let her shoot at a moving deer.”
Coffin Honey is embodiment brought barely to rest on the page. The poems engage with the body of the earth – human, fish, rock and water, the blood of violence and of life – in a manner at times heartbreaking, at times arresting in its beauty. The movement of Ursus, the black bear, through the book threads us closest to this earthly pulse. “Ursus steps onto moss: buoyancy of time / recorded in layers of sphagnum, trapped water / and larch light, the early October red of cranberry.”
Ursus is at once archetypal, mythical, and carnal as he’s met through the seasons by hounds, drones, wildfire, and his mother’s devotion. Ursus slits a fawn’s belly and finds “newly written muscle: / ink the color of ginseng berries, / taste like copper wounded with salt.” Davis enters the bear’s wanderings and deepest dreams, resides in Ursus’ body until the bear knows a May where “the earth warmed / and I slept without / hunger and found / more than enough / to eat in my walking.”
Davis walks into the woods and mountains and meets all his neighbors, on their open porches and in hidden cellars. He refuses to look away from the worst of human doings, to turn from extraction and inequities even as “In disbelief we wave our hands through empty air,” “fingers sticky with our own undoing.” Returning always to the elemental, the viscera and sentience of life, we recall what the young hunter knows, “It’s easy to get lost in the body’s house.” By the end, in “Sitting Shiva,” Coffin Honey has only one ask: “If you find the bones of a bear, sit down and stay with them.”
In our northern forests, where abundance and need keep close company, Davis’s poetry allows an ethic of noticing and attending to find vital ground. The collection reminds us in a “nick of the moon” and “speckled flowers / the color of snow’s memory” that attention is not a rationed tenet. There’s no scarcity in knowing and caring for those around us or in opportunities for redress. Like Davis in Coffin Honey, we can pay heed to our home ground – in all its beauty and challenges.