Naked Tree: Love Sonnets to C. S. Lewis and Other Poems

Although best known as C. S. Lewis’s wife, Joy Davidman (1915-1960) was a gifted writer herself who published, among other things, a volume of poetry and two novels in her short lifetime.

This book is the first comprehensive collection of Davidman’s poetry, including her published collection Letters to a Comrade (1938), forty other published poems, and more than two hundred previously unpublished poems. Of special interest is her sequence of forty-five love sonnets to C. S. Lewis, which offer stunning evidence of Davidman’s spiritual struggles with regard to her feelings for Lewis, her sense of God’s working in her lonely life, and her mounting frustration with Lewis for keeping her at arm’s length emotionally and physically.

This moving collection of poems lends credence to Davidman’s stature as an important twentieth-century American poet.