'The Heart, Ravaged, Grieves'

Few of us knew of the American poet Catherine Breese Davis (1924-2002). She was a lost soul, little more than a rumor among readers. Her academic pedigree was impeccable. Among her teachers were Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, J.V.  Cunningham, Yvor Winters and Donald Justice, but her life was a private torment. There was nothing poetically romantic about her suffering. Her father went to prison for armed robbery when she was an infant and she never saw him again. Her mother was a police-blotter monster. Davis suffered a mild case of cerebral palsy, misdiagnosed as polio. When her mother discovered Davis was a lesbian, she threw her out of the house and never saw her again. She suffered from mental illness, alcoholism and Alzheimer’s disease, and she was a brilliant poet. 

The book to get is Catherine Breese Davis: On the Life & Work of an American Master (Pleiades Press, 2015). Before its publication, Davis as a poet and woman hardly existed. As of 3:24 a.m. (CST) today, summer has arrived, and in the past I celebrated its coming with childhood memories of blue skies and blissful freedom. School was over for three months and we could swim, collect butterflies, play Army and read what we wanted. Davis has a poem, “The Summer Leaves,” in which the title is the start of the poem’s first line:

 

“nothing unscathed. Desires,

once tender stalks, grow brittle;

the first and clear-eyed dew

that clung thereto

expires.

 

“The summer leaves—the trees’

dense growth—that, dying little

by little, turn red, brown,

go down and down

and these

 

“still leaves long winds will shake

and put me on my mettle—

here, rusted as dead blood,

there, bright, my good—

both make

 

“the most of light. And then,

as, torn, the leaves resettle,

and the heart, ravaged, grieves,

the summer leaves

again.”

 

At first, “leaves” is a verb. In the second stanza it's a noun. This is no celebration of picnics on the beach. Inherent in summer’s arrival is its departure. Along the way, “the heart, ravaged, grieves.” The source of such suffering is never specified. Some souls cannot ignore the hurt at the heart of existence. In an essay included in the collection mentioned above, the late Helen Pinkerton, who knew Davis and tried for years to get her work published, writes:

 

“Much of her best poetry deals with the theme of loss – that is, it concerns itself with evil in the older sense of privation of being and, hence, with experiences that range from the perception of death to the awareness of personal shortcomings. She deals with loss almost as a metaphysical absolute.”

 

As Helen notes, Davis is a rigorously formal poet with a “faultless command of the traditional iambic line.” She doesn’t gush in free verse. Her poems, though often hinting at the most difficult emotions, do so with exacting discipline.