Above the Bejeweled City
In his seventh poetry collection, Jon Davis exhibits the range and mastery that is the result of fifty years of study, teaching, and practice. Above the Bejeweled City opens and closes with homages to Federico Garcia Lorca’s dream-struck ballad “Romance Sonámbulo.” In between, he inhabits what the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty calls the “inexplicable existence” that marks our passage here on Earth.
Part absurdist, part satirist, part tender correspondent, Davis writes in the slipstream of writers like Joyce, Beckett, Parra, and Plath. In an age that calls out for hopeful verse, Above the Bejeweled City offers, instead, a treatise on defeat and despair—and on how letting go is a way of holding on.
“A cinder held between hearths—this masterful collection could only be written by a poet who gazed outward from a ‘balcony above the dying world,’ and saw that poetry remained even as the sirens of a pandemic drew ever closer. There is a sage presence here, so much about language, beauty, depth of emotion that tugs at what’s left of possibility and imagination.”
About the Author
Jon Davis is the author of five poetry chapbooks and six previous full-length collections of poetry: Improbable Creatures, An Amiable Reception for the Acrobat, Heteronymy: An Anthology, Preliminary Report, Scrimmage of Appetite, and Dangerous Amusements. He was co-translator, with the author, of Iraqi poet Naseer Hassan’s Dayplaces. Davis has received a Lannan Literary Award in Poetry, the Peter I.B. Lavan Prize from the Academy of American Poets, the Off the Grid Poetry Prize, and two National Endowment for the Arts’ poetry fellowships. He was the city of Santa Fe’s fourth Poet Laureate and taught for 23 years at the Institute of American Indian Arts before founding, in 2013, the IAIA low residency MFA in Creative Writing, which he directed until his retirement in 2018.
“Jon Davis has an uncanny ability to detect the deepest currents in our collective imagination and follow them wherever they may emerge, leaving in their wake astonishing poems that map his clear-eyed vision of the world.”
