Ditch Memory: New & Selected Poems
(Michigan State University Press, 2024)
In an age when many find themselves disconnected from the natural world, award-winning poet Todd Davis offers the possibilities of reconnection, of listening to the earth’s labored breathing, to the thoughts of other-than-human animals and the languages trees speak. In thirty new poems, and with ample selections from his previous seven books, Davis’s roots run deep in Rust-Belt Appalachia, attending to the harmed but healing landscape, the people whose lives are too often neglected, and the looming threat of climate collapse and extinction. Orion Magazine likens Davis’s work to Wendell Berry and Mary Oliver, as he continues to demonstrate what one reviewer describes as his knowledge of “Latin names, common names, habitats and habits . . . steeped in the exactness of the earth and the science that unfolds in wildness.” Known for both narrative and lyrical impulses, Davis asks readers to acknowledge their kinship with all living beings, which demands some grieving for past sins but also suggests a way toward restoration. With a Foreword by David James Duncan.
Praise for Ditch Memory: New & Selected Poems
To read a new and selected is to experience the evolution of a voice, in this case an essential voice in American poetry. To sit with the whole of these transportive, immersive poems is to awaken like a wild riparian corridor in spring. Wildflowers on the banks. Birdsong in the branches. The reader’s heart is a bud: open. Beautiful work.
—Chris Dombrowski, author of The River You Touch
Since the turn of the millennium, Todd Davis’s humble poetics has been proving for this devoted reader how lip and maw, foot and hoof––the earth’s skins and its viscera––are worthy of long study; of grief, yes, and of joy, of wonderment. This is a book to keep on the nightstand, to reach for in the night.
—K.A. Hays, author of Anthropocene Lullaby
By yoking witness with wonder and tracking an abiding faith in the unique awe that comes from knowing yourself deeply or dearly placed, Todd Davis raises observation to a numinous art, one that holds the ability to relight the essential state of our spiritual attunement with nature. Ditch Memory establishes Davis’s literary powers for building poems that “gnaw the world open” so we can “taste what is good.”
—Geffrey Davis, author of One Wild Word Away
Buy: Ditch Memory: New & Selected Poems