`Read Generously--As He Once Read'

Dick Davis’ verse I knew only from three recent volumes -- Touchwood (1996), Belonging (2002) and A Trick of Sunlight (2007) – and a scattering of earlier work online and in anthologies. Everything I read, I liked. This week I ordered Love in Another Language: Collected Poems and Selected Translations (Carcanet, 2017). Reading it is like discovering the rest of the iceberg. The earliest collection included, In the Distance, dates from 1975. From the start he was a craftsman with a delicate touch, focusing on particulars, avoiding grandiose gestures. Davis understands that when he is quiet we listen more intently. Here is “Littoral” from In the Distance:

“Salt smoothes and sand obliterates

The trite, the once-dear vestiges

“Mute hieroglyphs, the hulks of pomp

And sea-worn amulets of love.”

The theme is familiar – mutability, time’s attritions. Davis moves Ozymandias from the desert to the shore. There’s virtue in his brevity. It recalls many Imagist poems but without their lazily undeveloped snapshot quality. Inclusion of the “trite” in the catalog of losses is clear-eyed and inspired. Much of what we lose, much of what we regret losing, was hackneyed in the first place. No loss in such a loss. Here is “With Johnson’s Lives of the Poets” (Devices and Desires, 1989):

“He wrote these quick biographies

To be instructive and to please;

In them we find

“Among judicious anecdotes

The apt quotation that denotes

A taste defined

“And wrested from this record of

His irritable, captious love

For failed mankind—

From fear, from his compassion for

Insanity, the abject poor,

The world’s maligned.

He laboured to be just, and where

Justice eluded him his care

Was to be kind.

Read generously—as once he read

The words of the indifferent dead.

Enter his mind.” 

More than most writers, Johnson makes it difficult to separate him from his work. When we judge the writing, we’re implicitly judging the man. His poems and prose, seldom banally autobiographical, are self-revelatory. When we read his best-known observation on writing – “The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it” – we hear Johnson speaking confidentially. Davis makes this clear in his final line: “Enter his mind.”

Davis dedicates the Johnson poem to the Kentucky poet and publisher R.L. Barth. Some years ago, the late Helen Pinkerton sent me a copy of Samuel Johnson: Selected Latin Poems Translated by Various Hands (1995), edited and published by Barth. On the title page is Davis’ “To the Reader”:

“In these few, graceful pages you will find

Translation of an untranslated mind;

A heart brought home that had aspired to be

At one with a serener clerisy—

Latin and Christian, still, unchanging, true:

And was, as it too intimately knew,

Contingent, fallen, unrelieved by prayer;

The prey of spleen, regret, bad jokes, despair.”