by Noah Davis
CavanKerry Press, 2024
A few summers ago, we removed two ash trees – infected by emerald ash borer – from our yard. Grass has grown where the trees used to be, but every time I look into my backyard, I think about the crowns that used to shade that space and feel the trees’ absence. I want to plant something in their place, but I’ve felt the need to keep it open, as a reminder of what was once there. After reading Noah Davis’s The Last Beast We Revel In, I think I’ll plant some native redbuds, a hopeful act of resilience much like his poems, and an homage to the native plants and animals that comprise the landscape of his work. Davis’s latest collection explores the many types of loss felt throughout these Appalachian Mountains, whether trees dying from invasive species, exploding meth labs, or a trout “hooked deep in his throat.” As Davis writes in “Poem Sewn into My Hunting Jacket,” to sow seed is to “be woven with the folding knowledge of the woods, / which is always unfolding.”
Although this book explores loss in many ways, it doesn’t linger on absence or perseverate on the pain that the creatures of these mountains feel. Instead, these poems use that suffering to move us into a deeper companionship with the vibrant, beautiful world that is left, that we must connect with in order to stave off the impending doom we sometimes feel about the natural world. In the opening poem, “After felling every beetle-blighted ash on the ridge,” Davis writes to his love – after the trees are gone – that he’ll “...cup the egg of your ankle / bone in my mouth, now safe / from shattering.” This deeply intimate moment reminds us that even in pain, we can and we must move toward intimacy with our lovers and landscapes – a frequent motif throughout the book.
Davis’s “beloved” appears in many of the poems, sometimes taking on a form other than his partner: that of a “wet river stone,” or a compost pile of “ant-stripped cantaloupe / rinds and browned bell peppers.” No matter who or what the “beloved” is, Davis urges us to look for it in our own lives, perhaps in our partner, as Davis does, or in our connection with the ecologies that we live within, that we feed off, that we are intimate with.
The title poem focuses on a group of men following “taillights up Laurel Mountain / the same way we follow wives and girlfriends / down hallways or upstairs to bed, always within / an arm’s length…” on their way to hunt bear. This long poem explores the many ways we are always within arm’s reach of fellowship and violence. What do we choose? What chooses us? We follow as they hunt, traversing back to their ancestors who have shaped these mountains with mining and logging, the birds that went into the mines alongside the men, and the many lives that are long gone: elk, mammoth, mountain lions, wolves, “trees that could be churches.” We return to the present with a dead bear and the coal dust that still covers everything, a reminder that the past is always shaping the present and begging us to pay attention to what we pull “from the mountain / the company said was empty.”
Davis’s lyrical tenderness is a balm for the grief that seems woven into our Appalachian Mountains and their communities. We are blessed as readers because Davis loves these landscapes and the lives within them enough to believe his “heart is a trout,” and he buries himself “like a hellbender / creased in rocks” in the animals, plants, and humans he writes about. The Last Beast We Revel In is a joyful, playfully erotic salve for the cynicism and painful losses we endure; it is a wonderful book that captures, in an honest, nuanced way, the landscapes and lives of the Appalachian Mountains.