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A VOICE IN THE MOUNTAIN by Peter Davison

A VOICE IN THE MOUNTAIN

By

Pub Date: Oct. 13th, 1977
Publisher: Atheneum

Peter Davison is our foremost pastoral poet. From memories of his childhood in Colorado, and more from deeply felt experience in and around his Massachusetts house, he has sharpened his eye and his ear to the point of being an accomplished naturalist, able to describe with precision the woodcock's odd spiraling flight. Remarkably, this ample volume follows one published only in 1974, Walking the Boundaries, which drew upon writings since adolescence and might have been subtitled Poems New and Selected. But these are all fresh poems. Influences remain evident: ancient and modern Arcadians, yes, Robert Frost, yes--and his father the minor poet Edward Davison. In this book (attesting to some degree of personal peace) the poetry is elegant, elegaic, Arnoldian. ""Haskell's Mill"" is a little too practical, so knowledgeable about milling procedures, to have been written by the scholar.gypsy, but ""Insularity"" says this: ""Islands are honored still behind our shoulder./ Selected princely navigators set/ their course against the currents, winds, and tides/ to walk on islands that are truly desert,/ . . . / and worship, on the mountains of the moon,/ blind faces squinting up towards stars."" ""Not for me--not yet if ever--the attempt at a Supreme Fiction,"" wrote Davison in his 1973 autobiography, Half Remembered. He has stuck, with grace, to this resolve.