Talk to poet Todd Davis for any length of time and the conversation is going to turn to nature—specifically, the place of humans in nature in the twenty-first century and where we are going.
His sixth book of poetry, Native Species (Michigan State Press, 2019), continues the themes of nature and life and death he knows so well. “I’ve always written about the natural world because of my love for it; it’s the place that I feel most at home,” he says. “We should all feel that way because there is no other place for us. So many humans feel more at home with technology, with telling Alexa what we want. I’m not a misanthrope, I like people. But I spend so much time in the woods.”
Reading one of Davis’s books is like taking a walk in the woods. His poems have a natural, relaxed tone—poems, as he says, “of praise for the environment, poems that show what some might perceive as the ugly and the grotesque in the environment.” But these works are not obtuse lines for the reader to puzzle over; his words are both clear and meaningful. Davis says his readers may not “expect what the book ends up doing,” which is “narrative-based poetry. I tell many stories in this book of animal and human relationship.”
Davis travels regularly to read and discuss his work with a variety of audiences; some groups he returns to each year, such as “a local teacher who does trout in the classroom—you raise brook trout in the classroom and then you release them. She uses Winterkill [Davis’s previous book] in her classes—the second section of that book is a long poem about brook trout called “Salvelinus fontinalis,” the scientific name for this species. I go to her classes, I read to the students, and we talk about how art can represent something from the scientific world.”
Conversations about his poetry can lead to some meaningful questions. “Recently in California I read to some classes at a university and also to a group of seniors, 65–98 years old.” Noting his love for the environment, someone asked, “Do you ever worry about the fact that you flew on an airplane to get here?” Davis has indeed given that some thought. “We always leave a footprint. We always face a compromise. I always negotiate with myself, what is this trip going to do? How is this going to play into my life? How will it help others to think about their relationship to the more-than-human world?”
Present environmental concerns weigh on him. “I write because I love nature, I love stories.” But then he drifts into thoughts of “our present time—the extinction rate, the effects of climate change, the plastics that wind up in the ocean. We are in a sixth wave of extinction. It absolutely creates a different kind of motivation besides my love for the natural world.” The world situation, he says, brings out his “protective instinct. All these things go through my mind. Humans obviously belong here but most of us are not living in our original native spaces. We are migratory, with big brains and opposable thumbs and advanced technologies. While we may be a native species to our present place, we are definitely an invasive species in the ways we use resources, especially in the Western world.”
When discussing the effect humans have had on the earth, Davis references the idea of “seventh generation sustainability”—that humans making decisions in the present should consider the impact seven generations from now, a concept credited to the Iroquois. His poem “Denomination” is dedicated to Robin Wall Kimmerer, a Native American and science professor who is herself deeply in tune with nature. “She has a book called Braiding Sweetgrass. She studies mosses. Much of her career has been spent saying, ‘We need Western science.’ But she also points out that we need indigenous knowledge, what she calls Traditional Ecological Knowledge. We need indigenous peoples who have all kinds of knowledge about the natural world. They have science laden with ethics, knowledge of places that has been collected over thousands of years, as well as the idea of reciprocity: ‘If I take, what do I give? What am I going to give back?’”
No matter how far we stray from the natural world and into the manmade creations of the twenty-first century, Todd Davis’s poems are always there to bring us back to where we came from and remind us that “we share one planet, we are all connected intimately. It may not be obvious at first but there will be a culmination.”
—Therese Boyd, ’79