You’ll find more of the miraculous than the consoling in this collection. True to form, SIU’s first book contest has unearthed a poet both reader-friendly and challenging. Davidson’s miracles include a style hybridizing superlative formalism and ageless exuberance; a mania for philosophy and chipotle; a simultaneous sprawl into and control over the topic, leaving the ultimate meaning up to you, but hinting at the omniscience of objects; and an eternal nod to the potential of the subject to dictate the terms of its perception.
          Where many poets go for autobiographical catharsis or exploration of language-based reality in first books, Davidson offers a collection of, primarily, odes, many effortlessly embedded in form, touching on both of the above pursuits with moxy. Here you’ll find old standbys, such as paintings and forgotten turning points in history, revitalized, and an exploration of enough new areas that no topic seems out of reach. Call it "extreme adaptability," borrowing a phrase from his sonnet, "Cockroaches: Ars Poetica." To borrow another, say that he writes under "the godlike eye" of the audience, operating in a public space where image and metaphor cozy up to introspection.
          Take his most-used pronoun, "we," as an acknowledgment of the collective self or the presumption of an audience; you’ll come away, regardless, with a photographically vivid, lyrically supercharged collection of subjects, from starfish to Al Gore’s shattered ashtray, as well as a feeling of relief that transient moments deposit sedimentary memories, "that death is merely of the body/not the species," and that what seems most predictable, like an ode or a rhyme scheme, can most easily surprise us.
          Your first surprise comes in the first sentence of the opening poem, "A": "Today, you see only the letter a when you read." The only prose poem in the book, "A" could easily be an invocation of pure language, rather than narrative or anything else more grounded, except that Davidson imagizes the letter in a way that Neruda would have loved, grouping it with "the pouting y, the disconcerted r, the liquids caught inside the concave u." Within his absurd premise, he invokes every common reader connection to "a": "In school, large apples hang on walls, a giant A bright red. Red is the color of a rushing into your first words, barbaric and without shame, stamped as it is on report cards and meat." References to The Scarlet Letter, the elemental importance of apples, and more traditional associations vanguard the ultimate assertion: language "stays the way it’s able . . . lies there, lies to you." The bold simplicity of the references counterpoints the growing realization that A is where language begins, and that an ode to it is an ode to language itself, without which our world wouldn’t exist, let alone our speech:

. . . when all the words bow down and lift up their sails to the wind
of your voice, your gift to the wind and the world you’re in, your stars,
your names for God–say a, say a. Say a, because one day, one by one,
they will disappear, leave the page, your head, and the silent, infant world.
Once there was a.

If every poem is an ode to its own language, Davidson tells it with the most enthusiasm and mastery of range. The strength and playfulness of his voice resonate through the white space, and, continuing into the book proper, give less overt odes both humor and homage. He only lends them enough metaphorical resonance to strengthen their imagistic power, couching the mechanics and autobiographical impetus of each in superbly polished lyricism. A remains a.
          But it doesn’t, of course. "The Scarecrow Odes" sets the pomo tone for the collection, offering a metapoetic skeleton in numbered sections, giving the socially constructed context:

Three roads triverged in a yellow wood.
And that makes no difference whatsoever.

If a pomo turn, this poem gives a much-needed playfulness to the movement, with the absurdist litany of, "I am a metaphor./I am a metaphor for myself."
          Within the scarecrow of the poem lies a saint of consumerism, in the form of Michel Lotito, who has eaten "eighteen bicycles, fifteen supermarket food carts, seven televisions, six/chandeliers, a coffin, and a Cessna airplane." In dreams, he flees television-eyed "wraith-cyclists," whose goal is to dismember him. If this represents an angst, it’s that these pieces might be dissected for meanings (as I’m doing right now) that destroys the subject, and the lyrical reality that arises from the reading.
          The playful, nicely irreverent ode to Frost is revisited with the next-to-last section, where the three roads’ trivergence is revealed on a sign, and "[u]nderneath, in a scrawling script with which one/might write death threats or last minute grocery lists, someone/has written: The three roads are a metaphor, which means this sign is also a metaphor./If one were then to look up, a few stars would burn out." Archaic sources of inspiration are as irrelevant as they are inescapable, and they create the poem just as much as any socially constructed self of the poet. The beauty of the language flows irrepressibly through even the stiff, slightly contorted realization of self as scarecrow, and poem as device, and ultimately carries the piece. Davidson deserves credit for the baldness of his presentation, and, once again, the mixture of playfulness and commitment to beauty with which he presents questions of identity. This anti-ode shoots the furthest in overt philosophical aims, and veers away from the image-laden space that the other pieces occupy with complete lushness and comfort. Ultimately, it articulates the vacuum that separates perceiver from perceived.
          In the longest poem, "Space," he arcs from the space above to that of the page and, finally, to the gap between signifier and signified, which echoes the difference between the speaker’s family name and own identity, gorgeously and poignantly projected on the treeline outside of his parents’ house:

           Out there, beyond

the last stand of singed oak, I keep
searching for the end to my parents’ rights
as landowners and find only briar,

thick and riddling the treetops. And if I stare
long enough, I can almost feel
each tendril eking out another inch

into our space this side of Earth, some great
buried bulb I picture spindling off,
scrawling up the pined skyline like fingers

on the nape of a genius. I am close
to something here.

The sense of ineffable presence, whether it be of you, the past, the subject, or the poem, fills any conception that we make of space, which doesn’t exist any more than the letter a, or the autonomous I. The dominance of family, of context, of whatever shapes our perceptual lenses, both illuminates and haunts the space in which Davidson’s speaker creates, and is created.
          This collection shows intense dedication to subject over speaker, craft over craftiness, and public over private reality. Whether Davidson goes for more of the same, or delves into other territory, you can expect formidably constructed lines, wonderfully tempered by a philosophical breakdance between Baudrillard and Garcia Marquez (donor of the title). Penultimately, these poems resonate as poignantly personal, in that they arise from a need both for contact and for salvation of the subjects from transience. Ultimately, they’re funny as hell, and miraculous as the power of cockroaches to console.