City That Ripens on the Tree of the World by Robin Davidson

Abstract

Alessandro Marzo Magno Bound in Venice Gregory Conti, tr. Europa Editions Described by one reviewer as a “hymn to books,” Bound in Venice is an essential read for anyone who loves books. The book follows the life of the Michelangelo of publishing, Aldus Manutius, and uses him as a springboard to launch into both the historical development of reading for pleasure and the history of the sixteenth-century Venetian empire. Brigitte Lozerec’h Sisters Betsy Wing, tr. Dalkey Archive Press Two talented artists, husband and wife, follow their callings in pre–World War I avant-garde Paris. Life is complicated by the jealous machinations of a younger sister and a variety of friends and relatives. Brigitte Lozerec’h’s narrative is characterized by nuanced emotion and intricately described scenery, resulting in a novel that is itself a work of art. Nota Bene hesitates to say, / afraid to disturb the balance the wheels require.” Still, there is more: a love of life mixed with a keen sense of its brevity , a scintillating appreciation that simultaneously sees the skull grinning at the banquet, the fly crawling among the perfect flowers. There is caution about seeking to escape these terms through the idea of God. In one contemplation of a past time with loved ones now gone, when the speaker’s early notions of God led her to look upward, away from the present, she considers how the word God “can carry you / dangerously up like a balloon over what you’d / give anything to be in the middle of, now.” This poetry justifies itself. Time and again, the weave of sight and insight gathers into luminous statements that have a poetic authority, which we recognize immediately as if they are to-be famous quotations we are experiencing for the first time. As readers we might find ourselves not unlike the speaker in “Venus de Milo,” looking with her grandson at the full moon: “we step / into the dark and enter beauty, where there never was a foothold. // I might have told him that, but just then we were looking at the moon.” Fred Dings University of South Carolina Robin Davidson. City That Ripens on the Tree of the World. Philadelphia. Calypso Editions. 2013. isbn 9780988790308 We are being buried alive under the huge number of poetry titles published not only each year but each month. Most of the books are by younger poets, many of whom are recent graduates of MFA programs. As someone who tries to keep up with the latest trends and preoccupations of poetry, I can attest that much of what’s being written by the emerging poets has no chance of making a lasting impression; that’s how gimmicky and mannered it feels. So when a poet who’s been working on her craft for years finally decides to publish her work, I take notice. Such is the case with Robin Davidson , a professor of English and translator of Polish poetry who published not one but three collections this past year, including the full-length Luminous Other. At the heart of City That Ripens on the Tree of the World is Davidson’s preoccupation with the past and how it informs the present. Dredging up one’s personal history isn’t always a welcome strategy, but Davidson’s poetry shines with insights and riveting images largely because she allows her poems to travel along wherever she goes. For instance, in the gorgeous “Window,” the poet observes “the October Polish sun . . . flooding the room” and recalls a photograph, taken in 1978, featuring her father, “drunk with the presence of all he loves.” The layering of time and place leads to a stark epiphany when the speaker equates the world with a window, that “Porous realm of what is or was or could be.” A keen eye is indispensable to anyone wishing to stop time, if only momentarily. In “Self-Portrait: Trieste ,” Davidson visits her birthplace, but her humility suggests she longs to experience the city metaphorically and physically anew each time. “I am listening for what is not there,” she begins, and then, after a few snapshots of her parents, ends the poem by reminding us of the “forty...