THE LITTLE SPOKANE

ISBN: 0966861272

Pub Date: Spring 2000

Pages: 52

By Tom Davis

Nothing too prissy about this poetry: it's coming right at you, frank and genial, delivered as a good tavern raconteur would, conveyed in the rough-hewn speech and clipped rhythms of the Northwest USA citizenry, God Bless every damned one of them. Tom Davis is working in the unmistakable tradition of poets like Stephen Crane, Carl Sandburg, Robinson Jeffers, Richard Hugo, Tom Wayman—the kind of writing that doesn't get discussed much. . . . Details—place names, hair color, local and personal histories, features of dogs and CETA "clients," landscapes and trawlers—refresh the old inescapable themes of La Comédie Humaine, "birth, copulation, and death." . . . But what I'll cherish most are the story-poems, so rich with that speech, redolent of chew-tobacco and insomnia, and that off-the-cuff, yet exactly observed, description of scene and character.

—James J. McAuley