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"In a letter Tolstoy wrote late in life to his wife, he laughs at his past naïve and foolish belief that he could easily set up an 'honest little world and lead a peaceful, quiet, faultless life beyond reproach.' He knows, finally, that to live an honest life, he must 'struggle, stray, do battle, make mistakes, begin, give up, start over, quit again, fight and love without end.' This kind of honesty lies at the heart of the Psalms and at the heart of Opening King David. As Davis well knows, 'We test positive for impurity.' These are poems that refuse 'to bypass our humanity' as they seek to find some relief for all that 'drains the soul of [its] will to persevere.' And while they are meditative responses to the Psalms in the tradition of the lectio divina, that fact does not capture the ways his poems zip from one dimension of our experience to another, combining a street smart, popular culture patter with that fundamental Tolstoyan question, How, then, shall we live? I admire particularly Davis' casual humor, his reverent irreverence, his self-effacing grace, and the patient way he allows small things to yield their metaphysical correspondences. And I admire his righteous anger, his biblical sense of what is just and unjust, and the way his poems live so firmly rooted in the here and now without ever ignoring those realities that remain outside our words." - Robert Cording "Brad Davis writes the kind of poem I value most: one that is spoken straight from an open, compassionate heart and shot through with pure intelligence, acerbic wit, and self-displacement. His poems are infused with the transfiguring love he experiences for 'whoever it may be who holds/all this in brilliant fullness.' As I read the poems gathered in Opening King David, I saw that most-privileged of poetic purposes fulfilled: the transmission of deep instruction on how to live with, and bear witness to, all the contraries and complexities of mortal existence. After nearly four decades of reading and studying poetry, I've found precious few contemporary collections that give as much as these poems give." - Gray Jacobik "In an era when subject matter is trivialized by obscurantists and/or trendy post-moderns, what a balm it is to encounter this collection of meditations. Reading Brad Davis' Opening King David, I feel, as the Psalmist himself has it, transported from the Pit onto a wide place. Like the Psalter itself, this book engages everything that matters in our human existence and manifests every mood in response to those matters, from self-anger to anger – period – to very exultation. It is the last of these, the exultation, that fills me when I see so fine an effort in print." - Sydney Lea
Click here to read some sample poems. |
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BOOK STATISTICS ISBN: 0-9762091-7-9 $16.00US
($16.00 Canada) International Shipping and Handling (Global
Priority): $13.00US for 1-3 books, $20.00US for 4 or more |
Born and weaned in southern California, Brad Davis moved north to British Columbia at six weeks of age. Since 1980 and graduation from seminary in Pittsburgh, he has served in universities, schools, and churches in several states. In 1995 he received an MFA from Vermont College, and these days he directs The Writers Studio and teaches creative writing at Pomfret School in Connecticut, where he and his wife Deb, a jazz vocalist, have been on the faculty since 1987. Their son John, a professional musician in New York City, has provided his parents with countless opportunities to escape to the big city to enjoy the clubs of Manhattan's Villages and the restaurants of Brooklyn's Williamsburg. Brad's reading venues include the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival and Oxford University; his work has appears in The Paris Review, Poetry, Michigan Quarterly Review, Puerto del Sol, Tar River Poetry, Ascent, The Anglican Review, and other journals. He has received an AWP Intro Journal Award as well as several Pushcart nominations. Recently his chapbook, Short List of Wonders, was selected by Dick Allen for the 2005 Sunken Garden Poetry Prize. |
I will sing to the Lord, for he has been good to me. AMONG LUMINOUS THINGS In this ocean of ordinary light, or parrot fish or moray, we all do a whole we believe by faith, wrestling I will never regard as wise the fool the voice within, small and still, inspiring all this in brilliant fullness. I say for if this is not the deeper reason |
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He brought me out into a spacious place. SETH’S POND, WEST TISBURY – All things hold together. Colossians 1:17 Two lady’s-slippers up along the path, still hanging in a brilliant, mid-spring sky, thank you. I choose to believe with presence. Yet might the pessimist be With terror in the air, the NBA e-mails to clear by Monday, what is true? A tall reed gives slightly in the cool breeze, |
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The God of glory thunders. NEIGHBOR AS THEOLOGIAN How can she talk about a “word from God”? A snake or the shrinking odds of her spouse As though God were an actual person, Yet this is how she talks, the way I talk hear too much or too often, who’s only my sin were envy, would I begrudge her I long for what she has, embarrassed, pained which, she has told me, is wholly present |
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