Bleed Through: New and Selected Poems

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. From "The Second City": in the second cityI live out the dream of the firstliving neither for its access and glamour nor dying from its disregardsimply talking towards the twin spiresof an ancient cathedrallike a person becoming like a person