Night Angler

by Geffrey Davis

Overview

WINNER OF THE 2018 JAMES LAUGHLIN AWARD

Geffrey Davis’s second collection of poems reads as an evolving love letter and meditation on what it means to raise an American family. In poems that express a deep sense of gratitude and wonder, Davis delivers a heart-strong prayer that longs for home, for safety for Black lives, and for the messy success of breaking through the trauma of growing up during the crack epidemic to create a new model of fatherhood. Filled with humor and tenderness, Night Angler sings its own version of a song called grace—sung with a heavy and hopeful mix of inherited notes and discovered chords.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781942683797
Publisher:	BOA Editions, Ltd.
Publication date:	04/30/2019
Series:	American Poets Continuum , #172
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Geffrey Davis is the author of Revising the Storm (BOA Editions 2014), winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award Finalist. His honors include the Anne Halley Poetry Prize, the Dogwood Prize in Poetry, the Wabash Prize for Poetry, an Academy of American Poets Prize, and fellowships from Bread Loaf, Cave Canem, and the Vermont Studio Center. His poems have been published in Crazyhorse, The Massachusetts Review, New England Review, New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, PBS NewsHour, and elsewhere. A native of the Pacific Northwest, Davis teaches for the University of Arkansas MFA in Creative Writing&Translation and The Rainier Writing Workshop low-res MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University. He also serves as the poetry editor of Iron Horse Literary Review.

Read an Excerpt

Pillow Kombat with the Ultimate Sleep Fighter

Those who say they “sleep like a baby” haven’t got one. —found fortune cookie proverb

Like in a video game, size does nothing
to decide advantage:—my demure son
throws his demure weight around our family bed
with resolve, and so I revolve inside discomfort’s
orbit, the planet of my sleepiness demoted,
dwarfed—unstudied! Just as I reach my parental

threshold of self-denial, just as I go to reinstate
the matter of physics—energy and force—he executes
his special move: a combo of lovey words struck
half-consciously across the dark, launching me
into another vain-cycle search for deep space
shuteye. Then his favorite toy sheep tucked between

my folded arms (FINISH HIM!). Then the fresh delicacy
of his foot plopped upon my forehead (FATALITY).

The Fidelity of Music

It took time and travel to understand
how the word father sings to me in all
languages—: I want daddy, but father-abuser crosses
the notes or keys I believe have barricaded
the badness of that man. I hear father-addict
in the damn silence. Of course, my whole-

hearted hope had no chance, which I should
have known once I learned guitar—the first instrument
I tried to turn against him: riffed father-liar,
plucked father-thief. But for each piece of music
I make into a door for daddy’s return
father-deserter has orchestrated, without warning,

another empty house of Blues. Do you hear
what it means for me to sing my son to sleep?

Hear the Light

—at The Giant Heart (Philadelphia, PA)

Today the boy won’t rest long enough
for me to burn a single metaphor
back to whether precision or

prayer leavens the language I need
cast into the well of our survival. And then
the boy urges my turn to stay

poised on a floor scale while watching 24
chilling cups of hurt-colored liquid spill
into a clear cylinder. The gutted window

to the privacy of blood harbored
in this body thins the daily belief
that no sick imaginary could cut us

full open. And then the boy gawks around
a carousel of animal hearts, fidgets against
his surprise at the lesser of the lion’s

carnal engine beside the cow’s. Before
I can weigh the un-chambered bellows
of hunger, the boy begins to sound

a panel that plays the pulse of each beast.
He doesn’t linger with a blood-music; he keeps
mashing buttons at random—from the canary’s

constant lift to the cavernous crawl
of the blue whale—until I can’t see living
inside a god-rhythm that soothes

this earthly cacophony pleading
toward the dark effort of tomorrow.
By now, I have a strange image for heart

filling my mouth. I’m remembering
the tiny fleshy pyramids my own father
cleaned from sunfish. When they ceased

their tight contractions, I strained
to recognize the heart-ness in his hand,
sometimes pressing down into the soft

plunge of his palm to witness one
last lunge. This memory dissolves because
the boy dashes off, and then I’m chasing him

through the beating corridors of a giant
vascular room. The way is dim
and narrow—: I’m working hard to keep up.

I’m trying not to lose the boy
inside the heart. But every time I hear the light
of his laughter murmur across another

distance, I breathe into the blessing
his life has kindled from the space between us:—
I think I could survive like this all day.

Table of Contents

I

The Fidelity of Water 13

Hymn or Hum 15

The Radiance 17

The Night Angler 18

Bop: No More Your Mirror | Side A: My Son's Prelude 19

Survivor 20

First Blood 21

Human Note 22

The Epistemology of Cheerios 23

Prayer with Miscarriage / Grant Us the Ruined Grounds 24

A Proposal from the Previously Divorced 25

Pillow Kombat with the Ultimate Sleep Fighter 26

Son's Face 27

What I Mean When I Say Harmony 28

II

Self-Portrait with Headwaters 31

Self-Portrait as a Dead Black Boy 33

III

I Have My Father's Hands 41

Smolder 42

The Book of Family 43

What Make a Man 45

From the Country Notebooks 46

The Fidelity of Music 48

The Night Angler 49

Poem in Which My Son Wakes Crying 50

Arkansas Aubade 51

What I Mean When I Say Harmony 52

3:16 :: Whosoever 53

3:16 :: So Loved 54

3:16 :: For 56

3:16 :: World 57

3:16 :: Blackout 59

IV

Like a River 63

V

From the Suicide Notebooks 69

The Fidelity of Angles 72

What I Mean When I Say Harmony 73

Bop: No More Your Mirror | Side B: My Wife's Fugue 74

Pleasures of Place 76

The Epistemology of Growing Pains 77

West Virginia Nocturne 78

Hear the Light 79

For the Child's Mole 81

The Night Angler 82

Notes 86

Acknowledgments 87

About the Author 90

Colophon 96

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“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”

Editorial Reviews

★ 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.)

Publishers Weekly

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”

From the Publisher