Booklist reviews Belonging

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America needed a new formalist movement to get poets to write in regular meters and rhyme again, but in Britain formal verse never fell out of fashion. Consequently, what takes obvious effort for American poets flows almost nonchalantly from British pens. Davis, British though for most of his life residing elsewhere, especially in Iran, chimes and scans perfectly but never preens himself about it, even for poems in three–line stanzas, each with a single end–rhyme, or for the lovingly murmuring “Monorhyme for the Shower,” a tribute to his wife’s persistent attractions (every line rhymes with air). Yet his technique isn’t the only thing he could boast of. His poems are full of fine emotion, intelligence, wit, and multinational culture. He lithely celebrates the legendary rake Casanova; poignantly conjures “Kipling’s Kim, Thirty Years On”; economically reports a father’s aching futility in comforting his child (“A Bit of Paternity”); deftly valorizes the power of art (“Just So”); and often muses on the shortness of life and the limitations of being human, so cogently that a single quatrain can take one’s breath away. Perhaps these are old–fashioned poems, but they feel so contemporary, so present, that they persuade one that contemporary and old-fashioned are sometimes the same thing.

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