Bleed Through: New and Selected Poems

Ghost texts-the overheard conversation, the remembered line, the daily paper-clamor to enter the poems in Michael Davidson’s Bleed Through. Here, the page is a plane for working out aesthetic problems, engaging the reader’s intellect and love of beauty. Each new word or phrase calls forth another; attentions create their own nimbus of associations. Davidson’s poems are a kind of battleground, where larger philosophical questions are grappled with through the sieve of language and form, but they are also a response to the vital use people make of everyday speech. Faced with hearing loss, he questions the acoustical models-voice, ear, rhyme, rhythm, text-upon which poetry depends and takes as his subject the problems and questions of our cultural history.

From The Second City :

in the second cityI live out the dream of the firstliving neither for its access and glamour

nor dying from its disregardsimply talking towards the twin spiresof an ancient cathedrallike a person becoming like a person