Craft

Reading the poems in CRAFT, I could not help but think of the WTO protests and those regarding China's entry into that organization. Loss of jobs and manufacturing bases, national security, child labor, pay priority: all valid concerns. But nowhere did I hear discussions of the nature of work, of making stuff, of using one's hands and what of that might be lost. Somewhere people will continue ro make things, and where that happens there will be a community of hand and mind--and, I think, community. At such a site will be Andrew Davis, pen and chisel at hand.

Andrew Davis is a craftsman in both poetry and woodworking. The 64 sonnets that make up this book are linked by the story of his coming into his own in both constructive activities, his learning of his craft. The word "craft" implies for him both skill and cunning in the making of things and poems, but happily escapes implications of the lofty attiudinizing that has too often become associated with the self-proclaimed "Poet" on the theme of his life as an "Artist." Emerson claims that words are signs of natural facts and that natural facts are signs of spritiual facts. Davis makes us realize that Emerson leaves out man-made facts and their spirit, most especially here tools and their products. Davis asks most generally, "What is the relation between words and things?" His answers are most often serious and stimulating while maintaining a workman's good-humored mixture of pride and modesty in the face of the difference between his artifact and how it might have been still better. In his last sonnet he imagines God's being stimlated in just this way when he looked upon the world and found in good, not perfect. He eyed it with his head cocked on one shoulder;/ Then realized that he'd fallen in a trap/ Tempted by a blaze of preconceptions,/ And dazzled by the image of his mind,/ He'd sacrificed the perfection of inexistence/ For a compromised incursion into time./ This sestet provides a fair example of the poet's prosody--loosely and sometimes tightly iambic, generally pentametric, with (sometimes) rhymes, near-rhymes, or off-rhymees at the end to polish up the production.