Description:
Clearly this is a tricky, delicate business. Davidson, who has experienced and adapted to severe hearing loss, knows quite a lot about inhabiting the gaps between speech and understanding, or, as he puts it,"...the hiatus before the image." Like Creeley, he has heard "words full of holes." It is the job of the poet to attend to such spaces and Davidson does this masterfully. Grace speaks to this moment when, it seems, we are all losing the ability to hear one another. It may be my personal favorite among Michael Davidson's numerous books.
Brief description: Michael Davidson is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of California, San Diego. His work has focused on modern and contemporary American poetry, gender and sexuality studies, disability studies and deaf studies. His books on poetics include The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-Century (Cambridge U Press, 1989), Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material Word (U of California Press, 1997), Guys Like Us: Citing Masculinity in Cold War Poetics (U of Chicago, 2003), and Outskirts of Form: Practicing Cultural Poetics (Wesleyan U Press, 2011). His work in disability studies includes Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability and the Defamiliar Body (U of Michigan, 2008), Invalid Modernism: Disability and the Missing Body of the Aesthetic (Oxford U Press, 2019) and Distressing Language: Disability and the Poetics of Error (New York U Press, 2022). He is the author of six books of poetry, the most recent of which is Bleed Through: New and Selected Poems (Coffee House Press, 2013). He is the co-author, with Lyn Hejinian, Barrett Watten, and Ron Silliman, of Leningrad (Mercury House Press, 1991). He is the editor of The New Collected Poems of George Oppen (New Directions, 2002).
Review Quotes:
Michael Davidson's acclaimed work in disability studies takes a deeply personal turn in Grace, whose sharply chiseled lines and stanzas "chronicle a period of gradual hearing loss that began in the mid 1990s and continues into the present day." "[W]hat is left when sound dies" leads to what he calls "a poetics of error"-"big not pig, / cat not hat," "'A' becomes 'F'," the articulation of sound in words disappearing into a "drone [that] captures silence in its slithery net." Swimming in the ocean, which for years has been a regular part of Davidson's life on the coast of Southern California, becomes "paddling down to the littoral . . . tuning on that low drone [that] locks the body into itself."
Stephen Ratcliffe, author of m o m e n t
"Between the motion/And the act/Falls the shadow," wrote T.S. Eliot long ago. In Grace Michael Davidson explores this shadowy intervening space with less drama and, in my opinion, more grace than Eliot did, looking for what connects and disconnects us. When we converse, for instance, we don't simply exchange words. It's also the case that:
............silences
must be inspected for what must not
be mentioned, but considered
for the conversation to continue.
Clearly this is a tricky, delicate business. Davidson, who has experienced and adapted to severe hearing loss, knows quite a lot about inhabiting the gaps between speech and understanding, or, as he puts it,"...the hiatus before the image." Like Creeley, he has heard "words full of holes." It is the job of the poet to attend to such spaces and Davidson does this masterfully. Grace speaks to this moment when, it seems, we are all losing the ability to hear one another. It may be my personal favorite among Michael Davidson's numerous books.
Rae Armentrout
Few poets incite in me such measured quiet as Michael Davidson, who lends in this collection his signature voice to agile rumination: what does it mean to reposition oneself in regard to the materiality of language as access to that material shifts? Through descriptive engagement and lyrical association-which may vibrate differently in readers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing-Davidson recounts with patience the fickle nature of sonics and the intimacies therein. These poems balance insight and erasure from within the intellectual and emotional generosity of vulnerability; Davidson has created in Grace a stunning blend of both attention to and desertion of sound, weighing equally what is lost and what is gained.
Meg Day, author of Last Psalm at Sea Level
Michael Davidson fulfills the promise of 'a new knowledge of reality': a ghostly "audiogram" of deafness, deftly conjuring poems of incarnate difference. His "fall into language" is both a failing and flailing into grace. It is raised: a social body.
Charles Bernstein