In his selected and new poetry volume Academy of Dreams, Davis transports a reader with precision and grace. These are gorgeous poems of masterful pacing and sound, carrying us deeply into a wide span of considerations—earthbound and ethereal at once. Reckoning with mysteries of time and haunting legacies, never abandoning a compassion broad enough to contemplate even an anonymous graffiti artist drawing “energy from a desire / for rituals,” the great calm and care of a lifetime of profound reflective insight rivets every line. For decades Glover Davis has been writing poetry that commands traditional as well as open forms, one informing the other—a poetry both myth-driven and a vision anchored in experience. Davis’s poems offer elegies and insights with a clarity of imagination and deep humanity. From his tour-de-force nine section poem “August Fires” in the ’70s to a remarkable section of new poems, Academy of Dreams is a masterwork.
Order from any bookstore, local or online. This title is also available from Fleur Fine Books of Galveston, Texas.
Glover Davis is Professor Emeritus of Creative Writing at San Diego State University. His books of poetry are Bandaging Bread, August Fires, Legend, Separate Lives, Spring Drive, and My Cap of Darkness. At Fresno State, he studied with Phillip Levine and attended the Iowa Writers Workshop, where he studied with Donald Justice. Davis’s work has appeared in many journals, including Poetry, Ploughshares, Shenandoah Review, The New England Review, The Southern Review, and Southwest Review.