Photo by
Ann Leslie McKellar

Psalm

by Carol Ann Davis

The Southern Review

Spring, 2008

In Brief, p. 381-382

Psalm by Carol Ann Davis
Dorset, VT: Tupelo Press. $16.95 (paper).

Given its title, it should come as no surprise that the poems in Carol Ann Davis’s Psalm are psalm-like, each of them conveying a yearning to praise whatever the speaker encounters in the world. Like many of the poems within it, the book is a beautiful object; its French flaps, creamy paper, and pleasing cover art make it a standard example of the type of product one can expect from Tupelo Press of Dorset, Vermont. The opening poem of the collection, “Invocation inside a Line by Orozco,” invites the reader, à la Elizabeth Bishop in “Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore,” to “come this small morning.” Of course, the reader learns quickly that in Carol Ann Davis’s work, there is no “small morning.” Instead, in the poem the dawn is “this purple color,” and it breaks over a world filled with the noise of wonder.

The totality of these poems suggests that Davis recognizes praise as the most fundamental duty of the poet, which is fine as a theory but difficult to put into practice. One of the most likable things about Davis’s work is to observe her walking this tightrope. In the poem “Small Boy,” she handles this with metaphor when she writes:

                                Or it’s the square of a window
        in a monk’s cell, quick daylight where no monk has slept in years,
        but somehow, one last question of faith
        moistens the air
                                 until it is no longer a small matter.

As hinted in the lines above, Davis is frequently guided in the poems, or through the poems, by something she can’t see—call it faith, call it inspiration. When she is successful in these endeavors, it is to great effect, gilding the ordinary with a beauty most would overlook.

Despite its strengths, the book is not without its pitfalls, chief among them a sort of haze that descends on the ends of poems that develop quite well but resist resolution. This sort of blur occurs in “Winter Mix,” a poem with a wonderful beginning: “This is a day with ghosts in it, / with husks and some kind of confession.” After a muscular start, with nice images and words that are physical in the mouth, the poet’s concentration dissipates within the closing lines:

        into cumulus and cirrus,
        into ganglia and spine,
        into zephyrs and waves. I’m sorry
        to come up with empty hands.

The risk of a misstep like this results from the book’s dominant theme. As the praise of all things becomes louder and louder, in places it seems to numb the poet’s instincts.

The finest poems in Psalm dwell on small things, itself a reminder that under the watch of the right eyes, everything can be sacred. In “Grief Daybook III,” Davis quotes some liner notes from a Coltrane record, which read, “it all has to do with it,” and she certainly adheres to that premise in her collection, with a song of praise for everything from grief and death, the sound of a child squealing, to stave church paintings.

Davis’s poems are all the more powerful for not trying hard to make a bold statement. The poems in this collection do not really lift their voices up to the reader—instead, you must bow your head and tune out all distractions, because at her best, Davis has you worshiping alongside of her, as in “Plainsong,” here given in its entirety:

        And the dogs will have their routes,
        the birds will be uncovered breathing
        in the trees, the delivery boys

        will hold their fancy books of orders. Coming in low
        in the fog, the Remembrance Day bombers

        fly their rotations, the ocean grown senile,
        the intersections safe
        in their half-drawn Xs

        —Love’s Car Service
        and the boys outside it
        smoking.

Alison Pelegrin
Covington, Louisiana