Carol Ann Davis a poet of precision and beauty

I have waited a long time to read the first book of poems by College of Charleston associate professor of English Carol Ann Davis.

Davis was the runner-up for the esteemed Dorset Prize offered by Tupelo Press, and her book "Psalm" was released by this well-known literary publisher. It is the best first collection of poems I have ever read. Each poem is its own exquisite reliquary, and the poems require the kind of reverence one associates with a reliquary.

It is also a beautifully designed book. The cover is edged with a bit of the painting "St. Agnes" by Domenchino. Like the poems inside, the cover is dipped into a painting that expresses faith. Art, photography and music are the cultural well that Davis draws from to process the intense emotions contained in her poetry. She makes associations with many visual artists, and she connects us with the culture that defines us. Part of art's function is to express the inexplicable and, in this way, it enables humans to survive and make sense of all experience. The poems, paintings and music that endure are the ones that teach us how to cope and find joy in unexpected places. Our faith serves the same function. "Psalm" is filled with poems accomplishing all this.

It is no surprise to learn this is Davis' third book of poems. She attributes the successful publication of this manuscript to its inherent narrative arc, which moves between the death of her father and the birth of her first child, Willem. It's as if the poems bridge the gap between the two extremes. None of us are exempt from loss and grief, and we all experience the wonder of birth directly or indirectly. Sometimes it happens all at once.

In "Listening to Willem Squeal While a Selmer Guitar Reminds Me of the Existence of All Things," Davis begins with a description of the psalms and ends with "Our world quickly made/of stones and river water/and grief transmuted into fire."

Willem, named for abstract expressionist painter Willem de Kooning, is Davis and Garret Doherty's oldest son. This poem, so grounded in the things of the physical world — a baby squealing while music is playing in the background ... the water and the stones of the Earth, ending with the emotional state literally "transmuted into fire" — is a literal description of Davis' aesthetic approach. Her work, which springs from the personal and emotional details of her own life, is lifted into the rarefied aesthetic realm of a poem. John Donne's description of "spiritual things, of a more rarefied nature than knowledge" could be an epigraph for this collection.

Many of these poems are elegiac in nature. Three, "Grief Daybook I," "Grief Daybook II" and "Grief Daybook III," are placed at intervals in the book and hold the other poems down like ropes through a sail. "Grief Daybook I" begins with a meditation on things that preoccupy the poet in her daily life — "orange juice, on the table/papers still heavy/with requests." Then comes the longing that comes with grief:

This morning I want to drive the six hours home

just to touch the stone

over my father's heart,

his name chiseled into vowels

and consonants. I want to camp there,

to sleep there

where other mourners

come looking for someone else

and cross over us. What is the heart

but a request? What is it

to be long dead, dead a week,

a year?

"Grief Daybook II" refers to a Walker Evans photograph taken in Davis' home state of Florida in 1934. This is home, where her father is buried. The third poem in this trilogy ends:

Where you've gone, there will be a night sky of psalms —

a cello's goose neck. Fingers waiting

above a stalled note.

Oh, ear of my ear,

there's hardly anything

left of you now.

The poem facing "Grief Daybook III" is "An Understanding Between Living and Dead." It could be a subtitle for "Psalm," which ends with "Corn Maze Afternoon." This poem, inspired by a visit to a corn maze with her family, is a hopeful vision of our capacity to absorb grief and experience ordinary and extraordinary joy. "Nothing but grass and the three of us/adrift in the orchard. Much as we will be ..."

Marjory Wentworth is South Carolina's poet laureate.