Above the Bejeweled City

THE BOOK: Above the Bejeweled City.

PUBLISHED IN: 2021

THE AUTHOR: Jon Davis.

THE EDITOR: Elizabeth Murphy.

THE PUBLISHER: Grid Books, Boston, MA. (See link below.)

SUMMARY: The official book description probably captures the essence of the book: “In his seventh poetry collection, Jon Davis exhibits the range and mastery that is the result of fifty years of study, teaching, and practice. Above the Bejeweled City opens and closes with homages to Federico Garcia Lorca’s dream-struck ballad “Romance Sonámbulo.” In between, he inhabits what the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty calls the “inexplicable existence” that marks our passage here on Earth.

Part absurdist, part satirist, part tender correspondent, Davis writes in the slipstream of writers like James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Nicanor Parra, and Sylvia Plath. In an age that calls out for hopeful verse, Above the Bejeweled City offers, instead, a treatise on defeat and despair—and on how letting go is a way of holding on.”

THE BACK STORY: I wrote Above the Bejeweled City simultaneously with my two previous collections from Grid Books, Improbable Creatures and An Amiable Reception for the Acrobat. The three books form a loose triptych whose subjects and themes reverberate, though each book also stands alone. Written over the course of ten years, Above the Bejeweled City anticipates and then embodies the past several years of political and personal turmoil. But not without humor and hope. Not without the perspective of 68 years of study and living and introspection.

WHY THIS TITLE?: Early in the pandemic, I began waking at four in the morning, sometimes having had a nightmare or a dream, sometimes for no apparent reason. One night, I woke having had the elaborate dream that would form the basis of the poem that ends the book. The title arrived suddenly in that pre-dawn gray. The “jewels” of the title are the lights of emergency vehicles in the streets below the balcony where the poem’s events unfold. The title seemed perfect both for the poem and the book, as it speaks of the intensity with which we are all living and of the beauty that lurks within the terror we are often feeling. When I went looking for a cover photo, I found a painting by my late friend Dirk DeBruycker that resonated perfectly with the theme.

WHY WOULD SOMEONE WANT TO READ IT? Although I might have made the collection seem topical or political with the above descriptions, my goal was never to approach any particular subject or embody any particular point of view. I was always trying to write one poem, then another and to fashion each one to the best of my ability, to revise, as William Butler Yeats once said, “toward a more passionate syntax.” In these poems, my goal is not to change the world, but to let the world reveal itself to and through me. “Poetry,” as my friend Chuck Calabreze says, “does not explain the world. It rescues the world from explanation.” I would hope the readers would find, first of all, pleasure in these poems–the pleasures of language, depth, and complexity. Some of the poems are direct, others more elusive. All were, for me, voyages of discovery.

REVIEW COMMENTS:

“A cinder held between hearths—this masterful collection could only be written by a poet who gazed outward from a ‘balcony above the dying world,’ and saw that poetry remained even as the sirens of a pandemic drew ever closer. There is a sage presence here, so much about language, beauty, depth of emotion that tugs at what’s left of possibility and imagination.” – Sherwin Bitsui, author of Flood Song.

“Jon Davis has an uncanny ability to detect the deepest currents in our collective imagination and follow them wherever they may emerge, leaving in their wake astonishing poems that map his clear-eyed vision of the world. ‘All the hurts inside all the hooks,’ he writes. And in Above the Bejeweled City he transforms those hurts and hooks, griefs and loves, into a meditation on the full range of human experience. ‘What is this silence?’ he asks in ‘A Catechism.’ ‘The ache of the arc of the finch’s flight.’ That arc is everywhere in Above the Bejeweled City.” – Christopher Merrill, author of Flares.

In a review of anthologized poems from an earlier book, David Foster Wallace had this to say: “Jon Davis’s pieces in this anthology are so off-the-charts terrific that the reviewer has gone out and bought the one Jon Davis book mentioned in his bio-note and has advertised it in this magazine, at reviewer’s own expense—that’s how good this guy is.”

AUTHOR PROFILE: I was born into a family of construction workers, heavy equipment operators, and truck drivers. I came to poetry in my late teens out of a deep need to create meaning in my life. I had no real grasp of how one became a poet, so I began teaching myself by reading and imitating poet after poet–mostly contemporary poets, but also Wallace Stevens, Theodore Roethke, Dylan Thomas, and Sylvia Plath, among many others. I eventually found my way to study with Dick Allen at the University of Bridgeport–a night course at first, but then he insisted I enroll, so I did. I later studied with Richard Hugo at the University of Montana, where I earned my MFA. I went on to teach creative writing for 30 years, 28 of them at the Institute of American Indian Arts, where I helped develop both the BFA creative writing program and the low residency MFA, which I directed until my retirement in 2018. Along the way, I received two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Literary Award, and the Lavan Prize from the Academy of American Poets.

AUTHOR COMMENTS: I like to think the book is a complex weave of tones and approaches and has something to offer the casual reader as well as the more scholarly reader of poetry, those interested in more traditional forms and those looking for poetry that pushes boundaries.

SAMPLE: Three poems from the book: