poems by

Phebe Davidson

Poetry book, 90 pages, $14 cover price

($12 if ordered from the MSR Online Bookstore)

ISBN: 978-1-59948-110-4

Released: 2008

Phebe Davidson, a staff writer for The Asheville Poetry Review, is author of several collections of poetry. Her poems and reviews appear in a wide assortment of journals and online publications. Self-described as a recovering academic, she lives in Westminster, SC with her husband Steve & their cat Fripp.

Phebe Davidson’s poems are bridges into stillness. Without the shrill overtones of political agenda or the easy cliché of roadside rural postcards, she speaks for the blues-haunted dispossessed of America. Her aim is the other side of silence, where Wallace Stevens tells us “the poet is the priest of the invisible.” If so, she is a priestess of the unspoken, the mythical, the tactile smoky grist of human interaction, and she weaves her apt, indestructible lines balanced on this unseen air.

Keith Flynn
Author: The Golden Ratio,
Editor: The Asheville Poetry Review

Phebe Davidson’s Fat Moon Rising, like an irresistible, generous confidante, invites a reader to return, and often. The eloquent lamentations for losses past and pending and the keen, pithy images of nature and of our natures, are reasons enough to savor this new collection. At the book’s heart lie Davidson’s updated perspectives on classic fairy tales. These passionate poems haunt memory with wit, lyricism and sure technique which lead us into dark forests of love and betrayal and home again.

Linda Lee Harper
Author: Kiss, Kiss

In Fat Moon Rising, Phebe Davison creates a world populated by mythic animals and passionate men and women. As in good short fiction, her characters encounter each other. She is fearless, formally playful and, above all, wild. She’s a little like Wile E. Coyote, who takes risks regardless of odds: “Time after time he’s flatter/ Than a pancake but he always pops// Back into shape.”

Davidson says things in her poems most contemporary poets wouldn’t dare to.

Sebastian Matthews
Author: We Generous

This Silence

Often now we sleep a tangled knot
of arms and legs. I wake up kissing the hollows

around your eyes. Your hand tracks
my knuckled spine from neck to buttock cleft.

Kiss. Touch. In the leftover warmth
of last night’s sleep, we are silent, unable to speak.

Circling

Lately they come to me in dreams.
Car-stricken, shivering, maimed.
All the household pets I never saved.
Sleek fur. Slitted eyes.
I see the wounds, the fluid seep.
The children are spooned in one great bed.
Full of desires. Full of sleep.
Every one is hungry.
Every one is hurt.

I have a friend
who danced in the moonlight
after her son had drowned.
She was shimmer of skin
and music rising, glide of feet
on a concrete yard.
I heard the scrape
of lawn chairs being dragged.
I saw the jagged glass that glittered
everywhere she stepped.

Staying Cool
She is sitting on her screened porch on an August night. She can hear them. The yips and yodels fade and get louder, fade and get louder. Her dress is pale green and where its scooped neck lifts a little from her collar bone the skin glistens with the delicate skim of sweat that she always wears on summer nights. She sips from a glass of gin and tonic then holds the glass against her cheek for the coolness. She has lost one barn cat and old dog so far. She sits here evenings to listen. Sometimes she turns on the flood lights and watches the yard. She likes things to be consistent. She always has her gin and her delicate skim of sweat.