Under What Stars
By Ryan J. Davison

Reviewed by Edward Mullany

Ampersand Books, 2009
ISBN 978-0984102518
Perfect bound, 74 pp., $10.00

In a poem called ‘That Bottle Has No Label,’ from Ryan J. Davidson’s first full-length collection of poems—Under What Stars—the speaker says something about himself that could also describe the rest of Davidson’s speakers, perhaps even Davidson himself. What the speaker says is this:

                      …I held mystery

like a suitcase while I
wandered and learned not to be
embarrassed to tell people “I’m
a poet.” I still don’t know what to say

when asked if I’m any good
though. Instead I tell them “I fell in love
with a lesbian,” and they seem to understand
that more than “yes” or “no.”

These lines are funny in a way, but they are also solemn in that they describe a paradox that is part of every poet’s identity—a paradox that involves equal degrees of satisfaction and pain. If poetry, in this case, is the lesbian with which the male poet falls in love, then whether or not he is a good poet becomes (for that poet), if not irrelevant, then secondary. Because what’s most relevant to the lover is the object of his love, not how well or poorly he represents that love to others. What the speaker is getting at is the way success, in art, is often as irrelevant as it is elusive. In saying this, he recalls what Donald Barthelme once said: “Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult, but because it wishes to be art.”

Only a little imagination is needed to see how this sentiment might apply to all poets, regardless of gender, though not all poets would necessarily agree with the specifics of Davidson’s vision. Because, for Davidson, the life of the poet is at once romantic and fatalistic. Though not an American by birth, he roots himself in the tradition of the great American wandering poets—Kerouac and Whitman, especially—and conjures in most of his poems a mood in which the self is at once celebrated and blamed. Further, the act of making art, for Davidson, arises less from a choice than from a calling; just as it is difficult for us to decide to not fall in love with someone, the poet cannot decide to not become a poet. He or she simply is one.

I should say that this degree of analysis takes us far from Davidson’s ostensible subject in Under What Stars, but not far from the essence of his subject. Because even the poems that aren’t about poets or poetry are infused with the same sensibility we find in the poem mentioned above; a speaker yearns, or contemplates, or remembers, and yet the object of his yearning, or his contemplation, or his memory, leaves him somehow bereft. In ‘The Perfect Picture,’ for instance, the speaker—a tourist in Italy—watches how a family of fellow tourists reveal something about themselves and about him that is both honest and sad:

The Perfect Picture

A three or four year old boy with the same camera
I have (his parents must’ve bought it for him
so he could play the tourist, too)
stood outside the Italian Maccina E scrive.

While his father took a picture of the typewriter
the boy took a picture of two half smoked cigarettes
in a corner, behind a chain. And I admired
him, and wished I had more film.

The poet is at once blessed and cursed by the singularity of his vision. He sees what others don’t see, but the result is that he is left yearning. The solution, of course, is to give relief to that yearning through the creation of a poem: He “wished [he] had more film,” but now he doesn’t need film, because he has recorded the moment by resorting to a different medium—the poem. Thus, the yearning and the relief of the yearning are one.

Davidson’s strength as a poet derives, in part, from this ability to dramatize contradictions. His poems are less effective, however, when they appear to have been written with a consciousness of this ability. The fifteen-page poem ‘Missed Connections,’ for instance, which consists of fifteen lyrical missives to a lost (or imagined) love, is too relaxed compared to the rest of the book; the title seems too apt, too readily a description of what the speaker is preparing to describe. Each piece in the poem is titled Sarah (with a number—1 through 15—denoting its order), and each attempts to give a unique rendition of the speaker’s feelings for this girl. But the poem tends to repeat itself, and we understand too clearly that Sarah is an idea, an evocation. One piece ends, “Really, I just wanted to say congratulations on your life,” another piece ends, “I still have no idea what I’m looking for in my life,” and yet another ends, “I just wanted to say thank you, I guess.” There’s nothing wrong with these lines per se, but in the context of a long poem they become discursive or repetitive. They are employed to evoke a feeling when what is needed is a continually fresh set of concrete details.

The problem here is not in the poem’s conceit—many of Davidson’s poems arise from a sort of nostalgia for lost or unfulfilled romances—but in its execution. Whereas in other poems, he creates a speaker who is separate from him, and allows language and tone to lead the narratives to their conclusions, here Davidson and the speaker appear to be one, the result of which is that no tension is created, and the poem reads a bit like a lyrical daydream. This isn’t to say that Davidson’s book isn’t a success, but rather that the consistency of his discipline has yet to catch up with his talent.

Most appealing about Davidson is the naturalness of his talent, the ease with which he speaks to the reader, his lyricism, and the unexpected places his poems are capable of going. He is enthusiastic, but not sentimental, meaning he loves life not because it is always fun but because, even when it isn’t, its importance can be distilled and glorified. In the poem ‘At the End of Every Summer I Wish I had Gone Swimming More,’ the poet captures the title’s nostalgia not by approaching that nostalgia directly, but by yielding his power to direct the poem to the speaker, who is free to wind his way back to the title through rhythm and associated images. (Here are the first two stanazas):

At the End of Every Summer I Wish I had Gone Swimming More

I just thought of gardens
a patch behind an aunt’s house
that I only ever remember
like you see a building through a snowstorm.

With that thought I’m washed in hospital
air. I wish there were more
flowers to give. Instead I have the honesty
that scrapes off my teeth in the morning.

What happens here, and in other good poems, is that the poet chooses the title of the poem, as well as the content of the poem—what the speaker will say—without assuming that the speaker would be aware of the title. Thus, we get in the body of the poem more than a reiterated title. We get a lyrical adjustment of the title, and a feeling that we have been slightly transported.

It’s this feeling that is evidence of Davidson’s potential. The ability to transport a reader is achieved through a combination of discipline and risk. It’s an uncommon ability to find in an individual because the two characteristics tend to oppose each other; but they must be given equal respect by the poet, must be allowed to develop in equal measure, because to have one trait without the other is to lack the complicated nature that must, in turn, be dramatized in the poem. Generally, Davidson exhibits more risk than discipline in this book, but there are some poems in which he achieves a balance; these are his best.

Visit Ampersand Books on the web at http://www.ampersandreview.com/Ampersand_Books.html

Edward Mullany lives with his wife, Anjali, in New York, where he writes poetry and fiction, and teaches writing. He is also an editor for matchbook and Anderbo, and is a contributor at BIG OTHER.

© 2010 prickofthespindle.com