Poetry by Michael Davidson
December 3, 2013 • 6 x 8.25 • 256 pages • 978-1-56689-339-8
The best of Davidson’s forty-year career, these poems grapple with larger philosophical questions through the sieve of language and form.
Ghost texts—the overheard conversation, the remembered line, the daily paper—clamor to enter the poems in Michael Davidson’s Bleed Through. Here, the page is a plane for working out aesthetic problems, engaging the reader’s intellect and love of beauty. Each new word or phrase calls forth another; attentions create their own nimbus of associations. Davidson’s poems are a kind of battleground, where larger philosophical questions are grappled with through the sieve of language and form, but they are also a response to the vital use people make of everyday speech. Faced with hearing loss, he questions the acoustical models—voice, ear, rhyme, rhythm, text—upon which poetry depends and takes as his subject the problems and questions of our cultural history.
About the Author
Michael Davidson is a Professor of Literature at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of several critical works, including Guys Like Us: Citing Masculinity in Cold War Poetics and Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability and the Defamiliar Body, and five books of poetry, most recently The Arcades in 1998.