Catch & Release

A Review of Ditch Memory: New and Selected Poems by Todd Davis

“She revered solitude, but only because there was the possibility of breaking it. Of communing at last with another.”
-Amanda Coplin from The Orchardist

In Ditch Memory: New and Selected Poems, Todd Davis’ previous seven books of poetry are on display, including a robust and somber section of new work. Davis’ quality of attention comes to the forefront and this collection, born of deep experience and immersion in nature, demonstrates a seamless reverence for both the ecological and the spiritual. In “Bear-Eater,” from Coffin Honey, he writes:

We mustn’t forget to listen

for the faint singing

that drifts up through the cracks

in the streambed. (79)

Fishing and hunting offer a steady backdrop to his books, serving as a practice for seeing, which Davis aptly translates into poetry. It wouldn’t be far-fetched to imagine the author standing in a river in Pennsylvania (his home state) or Montana, waiting and observing, only to release a beautiful fish back to its ancestral waters. In “Canticle for Native Brook Trout” from Winterkill, he writes, “Their lives/ depend on the coldness/ of water, upon our desire/ to touch their bodies,/ to marvel at the skin/ along their spines” (116).  Throughout his books, Davis shows that these pastimes, often associated with dominion and exploitation of nature, can actually serve as an entryway into the natural world and as avenues for companionship. 

Nature is both feral and awe-inspiring in Todd Davis’ poetry and his direct, and sometimes surreal, interactions with flora and fauna—like fish, foxes, deer, and bear—complicate the spectrum of categories within the field of environmental literature. Davis’ first collection, Ripe, was published in 2002, and his most recent collection, Coffin Honey, was published in 2022. Spanning twenty years, Ditch Memory is exemplative of both nature writing, in its purest form, and of contemporary American ecopoetry. 

In his recent curated collection “Ecopoetry and Water,” Forest Gander explains, “Ecopoets attempt to offer insights, formally and thematically, into the complex interrelationships between nature and culture, language and perception.” Compared to traditional nature writing, ecopoetry speaks directly to environmental issues, like extinction and habitat degradation, and tends to focus on the living world unmarred by human-centric viewpoints and intellectual projection. However, our imperfect species are ubiquitous and impactful and—as agrarians and anglers know inherently—part of the landscape, nevertheless. This reality begs for ecopoetry’s permeable boundaries, allowing for subsistence, interdependence, and beauty.  

While the term nature writing has been rightly criticized for being overly nostalgic and reluctantly inclusive (to its own detriment, I’ll add), fiction writer Laura Pritchett (current director of Western Colorado University’s MFA program in Nature Writing) argues the term is versatile and all-encompassing. “Perhaps my biggest observation is simply that the field is exploding. The sheer number of titles makes my heart sing—after all, many of us consider planetary fate as a top priority, one needing our attention in novels, nonfiction, and poetry. And these books are making a difference in our politics and in our souls.”  

Along this vein, Davis’ poetry echoes Pritchett’s expansive view of nature writing by integrating the pastoral with the political in his place-based confessional work, which resonates with inland ecosystems, rural communities, and perceptions of wildness from East to West. In a poem from Native Species called “Almanac of Faithful Negotiations,” Davis marries direct observation with ethereal musings and environmental concern:

On the first day we find evidence of the elk, but not the elk themselves. 

On the second we see the charred and blackened sleeves, fire leaves but 

not a single flame. 

By the third, the oldest trees have already ascended but the 

microbial mouths buried in the dirt remain (89).

While his poetry is replete with beauty and solace—as fellow writer/angler David James Duncan describes in his introduction to the book—Davis is not remiss from addressing human-induced Earth changes in all their elusive and complicated forms. In a new poem, “Eclogue for an Extractive Economy” (eclogue being a poetic form associated with the pastoral), he writes, “Each day I think this will be the last/warbler (19).” Coupled with the realities of using nature for food, sport, and spiritual sustenance, Ditch Memory: New and Selected Poems describes a life on foot, afloat, awake, and participating in the ecosystem. As he writes in “April Prayer” (13), another new poem, “If I'm to pray, I must become the thing I pray to: flesh rent,/ fur reformed into tufts of hair like the fans my aunt wave/ under their chins in church.”

In an article I wrote for Ecopsychology, I define embodied ecopoetics as “the sensorial and redemptive experience conveyed through creative writing, inspired by direct immersion in nature, and informed by empathy for and awareness of the nonhuman world.” Embodied ecopoetics resonate throughout Ditch Memory: New and Selected Poems, calling to the ever-expanding and diversifying canon of American Nature Writers while also contemplating faith in a voice and tone more akin to the popular writing of mystics and spiritual leaders like Thomas Merton. In “Doctrine” (137) from The Least of These, Davis writes, “I love the church/of the osprey, simple/adoration, no haggling/over the body, the blood.” There is a healing aspect to this work—an acceptance of death and a sense of belonging in nature that is hard-won yet easily shared in verse. 

However, Davis is not alone in the woods. Throughout this retrospective of his work, we see his wife, friends, mentors, admired poets, and most frequently, his sons. The word “nurture,” often associated with mothering, characterizes the fathering Davis dedicates to the page. In “A Prayer for My Sons, after a Line of Reported Conversation by the Poet William Blake to a Child Seated Next to Him at a Dinner Party” from Kingdom of the Ditch, he writes:

But

being a man who has seen

no angels and who at times doubts

what he’s been told in church,

I’ll simply ask what the Poet asked—

that God would make this world 

as beautiful to you as it has been to me. (133)

It might be fair to say that although individual reflection is central to his verse, solitude is not the point here. Davis’ tender embrace of masculinity through husbandry, family, and stewardship draws the reader toward more universal truths, like love versus self-aggrandizement.

In a recent interview with Green Linden Press, Davis says, “I wouldn’t dare say that I’m egoless, but I do find the fixation on one’s own life to be limiting. I’m far more interested in the lives of other people and equally, if not more so, with the lives of other-than-human creatures.” It is important to note that Davis is co-editor of a new anthology called A Literary Field Guide to Northern Appalachia, along with biologist Carolyn Mahan and his son and fellow poet, Noah Davis, which exemplifies his instincts towards stewarding the voices of others. Ditch Memory: New and Selected Poems offers both an evolution and a surrender, and a chance to see the world—from green-sprouted birth to flesh-stripping death—through the eyes of a poet committed equally to craft and care.

Todd Davis is the author of seven full-length poetry collections—Coffin Honey (2022), Native Species (2019), Winterkill (2016), In the Kingdom of the Ditch (2013), The Least of These (2010), Some Heaven (2007), and Ripe (2002). Davis also wrote a limited-edition chapbook, Household of Water, Moon, & Snow (2010). He edited the nonfiction collection Fast Break to Line Break: Poets on the Art of Basketball (2012) and coedited the anthology Making Poems: Forty Poems with Commentary by the Poets (2010).

Davis’s writing has won the Midwest Book Award, the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize, the Chautauqua Editors Prize, the Bloomsburg University Book Prize, and the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Silver and Bronze Awards. His poems appear in such journals and magazines as American Poetry Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Barrow Street, Iowa Review, North American Review, Missouri Review, Gettysburg Review, Orion, Poetry Northwest, Willow Springs, Sycamore Review, Verse Daily, and Poetry Daily.

Davis teaches environmental studies, creative writing, and American literature at Penn State Altoona.