by Noah Davis
Michigan State University Press, 2020
Of This River, Noah Davis’s rich debut poetry collection, centers on a series of poems featuring Short-Haired Girl, a young woman who drowns in the second poem “in the old water / running behind the potato patch.” Short-Haired Girl, alive and dead, returns as the heart of this book, to tell us about her life and home in central Pennsylvania.
From Short-Haired Girl, we echo outward through the Allegheny Front, which is an escarpment running through central Pennsylvania. Of This River becomes a gorgeous cacophony of voices singing the songs of this valley “where bees build honeycomb / between railroad ties.” In this region, the people own “hands made for / factory work and / driving trucks.” We learn about Saint Francis, who pulls dead deer off the highway “leaving behind a bloody language” and the man who stares off at the river with “a whisper of mayflies / on his lips.” And we hear from the natural world, including Brown Trout who speaks across the water to Short-Haired Girl about the deer who also drown in this river, and Snapping Turtle, who explains loneliness as lasting “until fireflies / called against the black / in the hope someone / would answer.”
The poems in Of This River highlight how every part of this world is of a larger whole, that is both beautiful and grotesque. Short-Haired Girl’s brother asks her what it is like to gut a deer; Short-Haired Girl replies, “Like us, they’re made of water.” Short-Haired Girl tells us, “the fire we used to boil the water / that scalded the skin so we could scrape / off the hog’s hair was of the fire that burned / off the mountain side and left blueberries / where blueberries had never been.” In another poem, a dead cousin who overdosed says, “Let me unzip my shadow and hook it to yours. / When the light shifts / you’ll feel me tug / the bottoms of your feet / and you’ll remember me.” Even our dead Short-Haired Girl beautifully whispers, “I had water in my body / where water had never been. / But my body found it familiar.”
Davis, through his deft use of language and image, asks us to consider if these connections remain beyond death. Short-Haired Girl asks of her brother, “Someday, when we both became the ground, would a / pumpjack find the oil our bodies left in the clay?” In another poem, Short-Haired Girl asks her Sunday school teacher about “what we’re supposed to do / when the mountains / are all dust and rubble?” These ideas of how all of the Alleghany Front – all of our worlds – are connected is the central theme woven through Of This River.
Along with being a beautiful collection of poems, Of This River is an elegy to Short-Haired Girl and a reminder of our interconnectedness with both the wondrous and depraved parts of the world. Reflecting on Short-Haired Girl’s death, Davis reminds us of this when he writes, “Water must return to earth.”