Luke Davies, Totem [In the yellow time of pollen]

from Totem Poem [In the yellow time of pollen] by Luke Davies : The Poetry Foundation

Thanks to this early, early spring and once again to the Poetry Foundation, I’ve stumbled onto Luke Davies, an Australian poet, novelist, and screenwriter (b. 1962). I’m usually uninterested in long poems, but in this section of his Totem, I immediately admire the way each line or short passage offers a richness of language, thought, emotion, and experience. As I’ve argued before, poems need to offer gifts, and the sections of Totem offered at Poetry Foundation surely do. Listening to Davies’ skillful reading is an added bonus, but as always, the poetry must speak for itself, and in this case it does.  

Maybe the thematic and tonal center of this section of Totem is this:

            And the evening shuddered, since everything is connected.

            I was licking the cream from the universal saucer.

For now, I like and will probably end up admiring the way Davies helps us see the connections between or among disparate elements, especially given his willingness to fuse the conversational, casual, and humorous

Anhinga

with the elegant, cosmic, and grand.

Tri-Colored Heron

Red-Shouldered(?) Hawk

The human and erotic heat of his naked lover, for example, is juxtaposed to the warm, ticking engine of a jeep:

            How the bonnet was warm on your bottom! And the metal

            continued tick-ticking though the engine was off.

About birds, Davies is more serious and might just offer the best thing there is to say about those creatures' essential nature and mystery: 

                                                       Indeed the birds

            may have broken the sky

And,

            those birds were all released again. Such buoyancy.

            They go on forever like that. How else to say thank you

            in a foreign place?

At the end of that passage and in other places, here is a poet in love with language but also aware of its limits, along with other devices (here, the camera) that try to capture the fullness of experience:

            Words split in our grasp.

            The sparrows flew away so fast a camera could not catch them.

I wonder if those lines are at all akin to the language poets’ issue:  the dichotomy between meaning and the human effort to express it (Banjo52, March 11).

Ruddy Turnstone, Witness

I also wonder if fans of Dylan Thomas might hear echoes of the Welshman’s chanting in Davies’ exuberance about nature. Both poets might be considered over the top in their Romanticism, but I see both as witnesses to what’s there, a universe almost begging to be seen and loved. It doesn't need a human to articulate or honor it, though Davies honorably tries his best.

from Totem Poem [In the yellow time of pollen] by Luke Davies : The Poetry Foundation