Author: Todd Davis

An award-winning poet, Todd Davis (website) is professor of environmental studies at Penn State University’s Altoona College. He brings to bear a lived knowledge of the natural world and writes accessible poems based upon a life in rural regions in the Rust Belt, specifically along the Allegheny Front for the past two decades. Harvard Review describes Davis’s poetry as “unflinchingly candid and enduringly compassionate,” and Orion Magazine declares that “like poets Wendell Berry and Mary Oliver, Davis is committed and spiritually anchored to his home ground.” He's the author of seven full-length collections of poetry— Coffin Honey, Native Species, Winterkill, In the Kingdom of the Ditch, The Least of These, Some Heaven, and Ripe—as well as of a limited edition chapbook, Household of Water, Moon, and Snow. He edited the nonfiction collection, Fast Break to Line Break: Poets on the Art of Basketball, and co-edited Making Poems: Forty Poems with Commentary by the Poets. His poetry has appeared in Ted Kooser's syndicated newspaper column American Life in Poetry and has been anthologized in such books as The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry and Bedford/St. Martin's textbook, Approaching Literature. His poems have won the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize, the Chautauqua Editor's Prize, the ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Bronze and Silver Awards, and have been nominated several times for the Pushcart Prize. More than 300 of his poems have appeared in such noted journals and magazines as American Poetry Review, Iowa Review, Ecotone, North American Review, Indiana Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Missouri Review, Poetry Northwest, Sycamore Review, Gettysburg Review, Orion, West Branch, River Styx, and Poetry Daily.
Posted on by Todd Davis

Second Nature

This entry is part 3 of 15 in the series Ridge and Valley: an exchange of poems

 

Dear Dave,

Sun slowly burns away the gray tissue
of morning, and bees, who have spent the night
beneath the long flower of goldenrod, sway
with the stalk, stiff from cold and fog. Yesterday

a red-tailed hawk lifted from a tamarack to take
a small rabbit at the edge of the field. On this walk
I find owl pellets near a downed oak, as well as
the torn limb of a warbler, the discarded head

of a shrew. These are the beautiful deaths
of usefulness: one life to feed another, consumed
by the belly’s furnace, only to wake to heavy wing-
beat as it passes over the tallest spruce.

The best we can hope for is to scatter ourselves
across the darkest parts of the earth, rain relinquishing
these late flowers and our passing love, which mostly
lusted after the self, too often forgetting the sweet

tenacity of the bee, the waxen comb of delight.

—Todd Davis

Posted on by Todd Davis

Lake

This entry is part 1 of 15 in the series Ridge and Valley: an exchange of poems

 

Dear Dave,

The lake is half drained
and now looks like the mud
puddle of some enormous child.
Where water slid away fast, cracks
appear, as does the detritus
of our living. Geese find
the few places fish still swim,
and killdeer have set up home
near the cinderblocks and tires
that once served as nests
of another kind. Tree stumps
line the lakebed, solid despite
their years underwater. I imagine
this grove before any saw cleared it,
before the stream at the far side
was dammed, before this depression
in the earth accepted the weight
we filled it with. A blue jay
in an ash tree sneers at our efforts,
and I smell the harsh smell
of wet earth drying.

—Todd Davis