English 210
Prof. Ann Hostetler
February 25, 2011
The World and Its Natural Wonder
An endless warm October day. Owls flying across the sky. Geraniums crunching underfoot. The growth of offspring from toddler to child. These are all moments in life usually enjoyed and recalled fondly, but rarely given much significance from a literary perspective. These are also the moments which Todd Davis relishes, as evidenced by the content of his 2007 book, Some Heaven – more accurately, the evidence is contained in the endorsements on the back cover of the Michigan State University Press edition, which suggests that both the author and the reviewer thought it to be true. Davis’s love of nature is evident throughout the volume; in addition, the settings in which he has lived are the same settings about which he writes. In this paper, several of Davis’s poems and his biographical information will be used to examine the ways in which these things are evident in his work.
Some Heaven is a collection of 106 poems divided into four parts. Several of the longer poems are further subdivided into sections, an arrangement which mimics the divisions of flowers and petals on numerous plants. For clarity, this paper will refer to the book’s divisions as “parts” and the divisions of poems as “sections.” The work is the second of Davis’s trio of published books, joining Ripe (2002) and The Least of These (2010); in addition, five of his poems were included in A Cappella, an anthology of Mennonite poetry published by the University of Iowa Press in 2003.
As mentioned above, Davis references extensively his own locations in his work, as well as events that occur in his life. There is one major caveat to that statement, however: these events are not used as biographical in the sense of telling the story of his life, but rather to tell the story of a life through the lens of one person’s observations. Because his observations are set in and around his various hometowns, then, it is important to note that Davis was born in Elkhart, Indiana, where he graduated in 1983 from Concord High School after spending part of his childhood in Massachusetts; after a stint in the English department at Goshen College, he now teaches at The Pennsylvania State University, Altoona, in the Appalachian mountains of that state’s center. Davis was raised in the United Methodist Church, the son of a lay minister, but had joined the Mennonite Church by the time his first collection was published in 2002; this accounts for his inclusion in the Mennonite-poet anthology a year later.
Moving from the poet’s life to its effect on his work, Davis’s descriptive and naturalistic writing style is notably evidenced in “12 Songs for a Long Winter,” a poem from the third part of Some Heaven. Loosely speaking, each of these parts has a seasonal theme to it, although sometimes these seasons correspond more to parts of life cycles or other, more specialized seasons rather than the calendar month. The first part, conveniently, is about beginnings, such as the morning dew, the first snow of winter, or the first steps of a fawn. The second part deals with growing up, the proverbial part of the year when pleasant spring transforms into warm summer. Here, Davis speaks of going to school, the groundhog from his hole emerging, or the firm but gentle discipline of a parent. The third part is a tome of winding down and getting ready – preparing to pick potatoes, steeling oneself for surgery to correct an eye defect, receiving a pass in the free-throw lane and envisioning the two points to follow. Finally, the fourth part speaks of packing up and leaving, traveling across states, hiking the Appalachian Trail, or watching geese in migration.
However important the structure of the book may be, it is still not a substitute for the structure of the poem and its meaning. Like nature itself, “12 Songs for a Long Winter’s Night” is sectioned off into smaller parts, each of which is organized; these sections come together to form a coherent poem or world, but taken individually do not seem to fit together. In the case of this poem, the sections vary between six and 18 lines each, but have no standard meter or line length; even with this variety, none of the sections seems out of place. More notable from the poem, however, is the description. To ensure that I have your attention, the second section includes Davis’ description of animals roosting behind the house: “Come morning / the ground is littered with shit: / muddy-yellow, black against white.” If the reader and this writer have thought patterns that are at all similar, this description is vivid enough that the usually-tolerable concepts of passing by an occupied toilet or seeing peanut butter next to milk will be difficult for the next couple of weeks.
Moving to less-evocative descriptions, the poem’s title itself could serve as an example. As every member of English 210 will know from their time at Goshen College, many nights from November through February feel as though they will never end. Elkhart, located in the same county, experiences a very similar phenomenon enhanced by dilapidation and abandoned factories – this makes an Elkhart native such as Davis a perfect choice to write of the never-ending perils of dreary, monochromatic gray-white skies and fields. The neutral, dull shades of winter permeate nearly section, mixing sky with earth and blurring the horizon with the falling snow. The line between human and animal is also blurred, as it is frequently hard to tell the exact antecedent of a particular pronoun. In certain cases this is intentional; a den in section IV could be the dwelling of an animal narrator or the room where my dad falls asleep with the television on. In either case, stepping in the wrong place could have dire consequences.
While the concept of avoiding the profane in that paragraph was almost entirely undone by the final clause, Davis’s poem “Building Walls” will have no such problem as it is that poem’s sound I wish to discuss. The poem consists of four stanzas, each with five lines of varying lengths in free verse. To a relatively untrained ear, it sounds less like Shakespeare’s classical iambic poetry than Jim McKay or Al Michaels waxing poetic about the thrill of victory, each with only his voice to carry through the airwaves. Like the world of broadcasting should be, the poem is already in comprehensible terms, but unlike any traditional broadcaster of which this writer is aware, the poem has a noticeable lisp from its enormous contingent of “s” sounds – 12 of them begin words alone in the poem’s 20 lines. But is that sibilance and simplicity not reflected in nature itself?
The world is a place of amazing natural beauty and simplicity, and most of the time it can make sense with no additional symbolism added to it. These attributes are reflected in the content of Some Heaven by Todd Davis as well as noted in the front-cover endorsement by author Jim Harrison. Harrison says that”[m]any poets feel that they know the natural world, but Todd Davis has absorbed this world fully into his heart and mind. He is a fine, rare poet.” His work may not conform to traditional standards of four lines to a stanza, five iambs to a line, et cetera, but when it comes to describing the world around him, I would certainly agree with Harrison’s assessment.
Davis Bibliography
Davis, Todd F. The Least of These: Poems. East Lansing: Michigan State UP, 2010. Print.
Davis, Todd F. Ripe: Poems. Huron, Ohio: Bottom Dog, 2002. Print.
Davis, Todd F. Some Heaven: Poems. East Lansing: Michigan State UP, 2007. Print.
Anthology Appearance
Hostetler, Ann Elizabeth. A Cappella: Mennonite Voices in Poetry. Iowa City: University of Iowa, 2003. 140-46. Print.
References Referenced But Not Cited
Davis, Todd. "Todd Davis." Penn State University. Web. 07 Feb. 2011.
"Todd Davis - Mennonite Poetry." Mennonite Poets. Web. 07 Feb. 2011.
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