“Now, with the publication of his fourth collection of poems, it’s time to recognize what an important voice in American poetry we have in Todd Davis.”
--Image
--Image
"As readers encounter the ordinary miracles that Davis reveals as both father and son within 'the kingdom of the ditch,' they also are reminded that the human is not apart from nature but a part of it."
--Chicago Tribune
--Chicago Tribune
"These poems are really lyric meditations on the way life and the world turns, done in stillness yet shared through a poet’s trust in the world and the word...."
--New York Journal of Books
--New York Journal of Books
"The beauty of this work is that Davis takes the seed of impermanence in every living thing and shows it growing to the good. This is the transformative power of poetry…."
--Washington Independent Review of Books
--Washington Independent Review of Books
"Through sensitive portrayals of family life and encounters with the environment, Todd Davis’s fourth full-length collection, In the Kingdom of the Ditch, casts spirituality and a sense of home into a contemporary light."
--Green Mountains Review
--Green Mountains Review
"The poems that comprise In the Kingdom of the Ditch hold quiet wisdom, not unlike the solemnity and silence of personal prayer."
--Los Angeles Review
--Los Angeles Review
"The poems in The Least of These are more a poetry of seeking than a poetry of declaration...Overall, this collection beckons the reader to pause, step away from the bright distraction of modern life, and consider the profound beauty of the natural world."
--The Bloomsbury Review
--The Bloomsbury Review
"Readers familiar with Davis will find his truest gift somehow continues to sharpen. He has that unique ability to link, in a single sentence, the natural world we’ve become increasingly isolated from to the unnatural world many of us now view as natural."
--Rattle
--Rattle
"The Least of These seeks to move beyond self-reflection and come to some greater truth about the collective human experience. Wisdom, more than anything, characterizes his poems."
--Arts & Letters
--Arts & Letters
"In The Least of These, man is not master of all he surveys but a creature like any other, smaller and less important that the land he inhabits. This quiet reverence permeates the book."
--West Branch
--West Branch
"Davis’s poetry is deeply sacramental precisely because nature acts not as symbol but as a lens. It pushes the poet and reader past nature and into the mystery of the human condition."
--Englewood Review of Books
--Englewood Review of Books
"Surrounded by nature, Davis’s speakers find patterns and make metaphors. They often read the dark wood or the outgoing or incoming seasons as mortal intimation or with hints of spiritual allegory found in Bonaventure’s The Mind’s Journey to God…. More precisely, Davis forges intense observation with the revelatory, akin to Dante’s celebrated realism in his epic about the afterlife."
--Books & Culture
--Books & Culture
"Todd Davis has touched life: the dirt is under his fingernails, the honest sweat is on the brow. He leads the way back to poetry when it had value, passion, and imagination, when the doings of everyday life had a place in lush narratives, songs, and the elegies all humans know."
--Blueline
--Blueline
"Davis hunts, fishes, and observes nature in the great tradition of Robert Frost, James Dickey, and Jim Harrison, among others. His poems lead us from the tangible to the intangible and about halfway back again."
--Gray's Sporting Journal
--Gray's Sporting Journal