City That Ripens on the Tree of the World

for Ewa Lipska & for Kraków

The city of Kraków, where Davidson taught for a year as a Fulbright scholar, figures prominently in this collection. Strolling around Jordan Park, surrounded by the busts of esteemed Poles, including poets, the American poet experiences “history’s pulse,” perhaps without realizing that she herself wills that experience into being and is thus part of the commemoration. After all, she is, not unlike her heroine Mrs. Schmetterling, “Any century’s woman,” whose “imagination is / pressed like a tiny chestnut blossom between the pages.” But ironically, and victoriously, Davidson is also after mapping out “the enormity of space,” where one’s sense of belonging evaporates as much as it allows one to cling to “a possibility for more // than dissolution.” Indeed, this book is filled with poems that sing and cry, and while doing so they echo with “an ancient call” that keeps us company when we search for God, watch “cumulous clouds rising above a death camp,” or free the “soul’s wilderness” to spread “like milkweed / in the garden plot that no one owns.”

—Piotr Florczyk

World Literature Today