Holding the Curve, a lovely new book of poems by Perry County native Melody Davis, owes a certain debt to Robert Frost, whose poem “Devotion,” was, I presume, the source of Ms. Davis’s title.
With apologies to Ms. Davis for quoting another poet in her review, here is Frost’s “Devotion” in its entirety:
The heart can think of no devotion
Greater than being shore to ocean —
Holding the curve of one’s position,
Counting an endless repetition.
Although its meaning opens onto the infinite, in the way of all great poems, it seems to me that “Devotion” is a fair description of the poet’s work: i.e., to let the vast ocean of experience wash upon one’s shore; to be shaped by it, yes, but also to hold one’s self — one’s “curve,” if you will — in readiness to bear witness to it day after day, through storm and calm, in high tide and low, by making poems.
Poetry can be an antidote for the oceanic repetition of our days, the vast ordinariness of them, and the way that that ordinariness numbs and diminishes us.
A talented poet is an alchemist, someone able to take the raw material of everyday life and transform it into something astonishing and new. The ode, a poem of praise, is a form ideally suited for this transformation. Early English poets tended to write odes about objects they found beautiful or sublime, but in Ms. Davis’s collection you’ll find odes to such humble subjects as a vacuum cleaner, poison ivy, crime TV, and even the flu.
But rather than treating her subjects with irony or condescension, Ms. Davis really means to elevate them with her meditations. She hears the roar of the ocean in her old Hoover, and likens the sound of the vacuum cleaner to the bellowing of some great Leviathan:
and you cry your great longings
endlessly on, as unseen monsters
who drive lakes and carve shores.
The humble act of vacuuming invokes a memory of climbing onto an island of chairs as a child, terrified by the noise; and yet her own child sleeps soundly through it:
as though the womb she remembers
were tight with the noise
of wind droning motors
and vast mechanical seas.
In “Ode to the Vacuum Cleaner,” the sound of the vacuum cleaner isn’t the signifier of domestic misery; instead, it’s a springboard for imagination and memory, made possible by the act of writing a poem.
In “Ode to the Flu,” Ms. Davis invokes the idea of purification through suffering — a common theme in traditional devotional poetry — but patience and humility are not the only lessons here. There’s something deeper to be found in suffering: call it ecstasy, a kind of creative delirium, exemplified by Saint Theresa. The flu has elevated the narrator of the poem, taken her outside of herself:
touched with operatic consumption,
not me with pots of tea and antibiotics
but some predictably comforting tragedy,
Kleenex billowing curtain calls endlessly.
The humor of the last line, which envisions a billowing Kleenex as a curtain in a tiny opera house, is typical of the wry self-awareness that suffuses these poems. Yes, it’s the flu. And yes, having the flu is awful. But given its proper scope, a case of the flu can also connect us to the heroes of our imagination. The power of poetry is its ability to link a humble fever to the most sublime suffering — and, just a few lines later, to drive it further, into laughter.
I’ve focused on Ms. Davis’s odes, which are limited to the first of three sections in her collection, just to give a sense of the way she seeks the transcendent in the everyday. Her ceaseless beachcombing on the shore of experience yields poems that are sometimes painful, sometimes humorous, but always clear-eyed and penetrating.
You could certainly call this devotional poetry, even if it seems to be in a secular mode. Whatever your faith, I think you’ll agree that the best poetry is deeply spiritual, and, as in the case of this collection, inspired and inspiring.
Ms. Davis’s “Holding the Curve” reminds us of the hard work — and the great rewards — of bearing witness to our own lives.
