Reviews

Robin Davidson is the co-translator of the Polish poet Ewa Lipska’s The New Century and Lipska’s example radiates through her own work. Robin was crucially influenced by her Fulbright in Kraków. She brings an unusual sense of history, especially as it impacts women, into her own very American poetry. Her work is deeply engendered, and she writes of ordinary women—rooted in earth, reaching for light—caught between personal, social, and historical forces. She is a learned poet—her work rings with the work of photographers, painters, and other poets—who understands the work of poetry to bring light of darkness and music out of silence. She is a poet of harsh luminosity, spiritual alertness, who has been growing into the fully realized artist she was always meant to become. 

— Edward Hirsch

In Robin Davidson’s poems we hear the inner voice of someone who’s vulnerable and yet strong, introverted yet keenly observant—these are blessed tensions…                                                                                           

— Adam Zagajewski

These beautiful, wise and moving poems live in the shadow of history and art. They inscribe a contingent world where, as the sign above the “Main Street Fire Sale” reads, “New losses arrive daily.” In the face of such inescapable loss, the speaker of another poem is prompted to ask the question that haunts all human life: “How can I sing when I know / I will die?” And the answer comes back as another question, the only answer there can be: “When I know I will die, how can I keep silent?” Luckily for us, Davidson can’t keep silent; she sings. 

— Susan Wood

Davidson’s poetry is masterfully Modernist insofar as it re-envisions a shattered world by projecting new coordinates of order and meaning; it is also importantly historical because it bears witness as a literal bearer—and translator—of the memories and perceptions of a multiplicity of public and private histories; it is world-bound, like a Greek temple, in its amazing ability to illuminate the material reality of the non-human within the human context in which we work, love, suffer, hope, and die; it is finally and insistently spiritual in its deft capturing of the inherently spiritual significance of the sensual world. If Heidegger were alive to review her work, he would say that Davidson is among the rare poets who able to illuminate the body by setting the earth into the world.

— Tammis Thomas