Ditch Memory

In his foreword to Todd Davis’s Ditch Memory, the novelist David James Duncan praises the poet’s storytelling skills: “His work teems with stories, some terse, some elaborate, and his books, over time, have become as cohesive as well-wrought novellas.” This is evident in poems like “The Bear Inside the Bear,” in which the author builds momentum line by line, with content and form mirroring one another:

Within the womb

            of his mother’s

                         mother’s

making

            the bear inside

the bear wakes

and walks

            the curved space of the world

he inhabits.

Davis’s poems center family and community relations in connection with environmental concerns. This centering requires not only the ability to observe without judgment but also to write with “precision, mystery, and clear connection to Earth’s natural order in every poem,” as Duncan so aptly says. The lives of plants and animals are as important as those of the humans Davis writes about. “Pit Ponies,” for instance, addresses forced animal reproduction and the use of ponies in coal mines:

                                            An echo
of a mare’s whicker as she’s forced to mate

in darkness, offspring birthed from dust
to reshape the world with labor.

Ditch Memory contains at least 30 new poems, as well as carefully selected ones from Davis’s previous seven books. In all of them, the author creates awareness about the consequences of human intervention in nature, drawing our attention to the ways in which beauty coexists with rot and decay: “As a child you were taught / to care for carcasses, to salvage roadkill.”

The speaker of these poems expresses concern for the future: “When our species is extinct, // what animal will carry the memory / of our lives?” At the same time, there’s a sense of hope borne of witnessing how nature continues to regenerate despite pollution, deforestation, and the destruction of habitats due to overpopulation:

    so many animals, who just by eating and shitting plant
a new world: fences brought down, barriers returned to earth,
furrows forgotten, and a forest I will never see
already growing.