Poetry by Michael Davidson
December 3, 2013 6 x 8.25 256 pages 978-1-56689-339-8
The best of Davidsons forty-year career, these poems grapple with larger philosophical questions through the sieve of language and form.
Ghost textsthe overheard conversation, the remembered line, the daily paperclamor to enter the poems in Michael Davidsons Bleed Through. Here, the page is a plane for working out aesthetic problems, engaging the readers intellect and love of beauty. Each new word or phrase calls forth another; attentions create their own nimbus of associations. Davidsons poems are a kind of battleground, where larger philosophical questions are grappled with through the sieve of language and form, but they are also a response to the vital use people make of everyday speech. Faced with hearing loss, he questions the acoustical modelsvoice, ear, rhyme, rhythm, textupon which poetry depends and takes as his subject the problems and questions of our cultural history.
About the Author
Michael Davidson is a Professor of Literature at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of several critical works, including Guys Like Us: Citing Masculinity in Cold War Poetics and Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability and the Defamiliar Body, and five books of poetry, most recently The Arcades in 1998.