“The late poet and novelist, Jim Harrison (1937-2016) once said: “Poetry, at its best, is the language your soul would speak, if you could teach your soul to speak.” He might easily have been talking about Todd Davis, whose latest collections, In the Kingdom of the Ditch (2013) and Winterkill (2016), both read like sacred texts. Trafficking in the speech of what we might call the soul or spirit, Davis invokes those writers whose work traditionally embodies the spiritual-ecstatic (he quotes from Whitman, Levertov and Tu Fu, to name just a few), while rendering scenes from the natural world and ordinary life with a transcendent tenderness and clarity.”
These are the words of the Prairie Schooner Prize winner, Poet James Crews, in his review of Todd Davis’ Winterkill. Check out the link below for the insightful full review.