Publishers Weekly
★ 05/20/2019
Winner of the James Laughlin Award, the second collection from Davis (Revising the Storm) is a tender prayer to the everyday anchored in the experience of fatherhood. Poems that share the title “The Night Angler” emerge in different permutations. While out on the water fishing, the speaker reflects: “in time I will lead my own boy/ into the precision of this contraction/ inside the throat this animal alarum in the dark.” But just as each father’s identity is unique to him, so does the meaning of “angler” shift and change. It appears redefined “as in one who stumbles through the dark house” (a portrait of the poet’s father who struggled with addiction). Davis toggles back and forth between these lenses, building emotion through skillful contrasts in language. At the center of the collection, five poems titled “3:16” riff off the famous biblical passage from the book of John. In one, Davis watches his only son dance to live music, observing with the terror and awe of being a father, “how open to perish we have become how freed from/ first intent how surrendered to believeth only as my begotten sways.” He addresses his son and, in so doing, addresses us all: “there are those/ who touch a body and leave it/ graceful: be that kind/ of wonder.” Davis has written one of the most moving collections about fatherhood to come along in years. (Apr.)
From the Publisher
A strong second work after Revising the Storm that will resonate with any reader interested in the ties that lovingly bind.” —Library Journal
“From love letters and prayers surrounding youth, fatherhood, and family—to a river that holds the solace of fishing and life in the South—the book constantly evolves. Davis’s narrative poems comment on the mistreatment, the wonder, and the hope surrounding black lives, not only in the South, but in America as a whole.” —Arkansas International
“The poems in Geffrey Davis’s Night Angler sing in both ecstatic joy and tremendous lament. We partake in the rituals of fatherhood—both coming into and growing out of the spiritual bond. We witness the anguish of loss but also the possibilities of childhood. And in that threshold between life and death where all fathers and sons traverse, the brilliant harmonies of understanding arise in rainbowed arcs like epiphanic trout rising to kiss the sun. Poetry and prayer have never shared so close a breath.” —Oliver de la Paz
“In Geffrey Davis’s stunning collection Night Angler there is a grace fathered by risk, a wonder mothered by worry. These lines cast and cast through generations of fathers to find music and floods and hands that can deliver both tenderness and violence. This is the book I want to give to all the parents in my life so they can see their own struggles and songs and be reminded that the lessons we offer our children are often the ones we need most, that ‘there are those who touch a body and leave it graceful: be that kind of wonder.’” —Traci Brimhall, author of Saudade
”Geffrey Davis’s poems reveal the small slants of light, the unusual turns of fate, the near invisible machinations—of humans and nature—that ripple through everything with consequences yet also always with a breathless and radiant redemption. Love, fatherhood, family, loss are all engaged with lyrically and with a deeply engaging and persuasive insight. Davis is a quietly brilliant poet.” —Chris Abani, author of Sanctificum
“Geffrey is a master of the turn … Geffrey’s work tackles manhood, fatherhood, sonhood… love, and sexuality with a boxer’s hands: firm and weathered, capable of so much violence and wreckage, but purposefully gentle and fond when handling our fragile humanity … Folks, get into Geffrey Davis. This man is a wonder of strength & delicacy, someone that we will watch for years and he muscles his way to the venerable & quiet.” —Muzzle Magazine, “30 under 30”
