Adam O. Davis, Pyrrhic Symphony

 

The Nurse on the Nature of Silence

In winter, my body
is a tree.
            In summer
my body is a tree.
A bunch of dumb
birds
            brood in
            its branches.
A bunch of dumb
                        birds
bust each other up in
its delicious
            branches.
Let the sun draw me
            to harbor.
            Let the sun
feed me to sleep.

The second full-length poetry title by San Diego, California poet Adam O. Davis is Pyrrhic Symphony (Lincoln NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2026), following their full-length debut, Index of Haunted Houses (Louisville KY: Sarabande Books, 2020) [see my review of such here]. There’s a storytelling clarity across the short lyric, able to travel miles across short distances, articulating moments from within, stretched and rolled and thick. “Where will I become / what it is I will be / when I go so far / that I find me?” he writes, to open the poem “Stations of the Crossed,” “What I mean is, / When will be there?” There is a curious way his lyrics extend, almost endlessly, even beyond the boundaries of this particular collection, as though the poems included here are but a contained selection of a more ongoing, extended process, begun well before the first page, and continuing well into what might come next. His debut was composed as a suite of self-contained prose poems, but these pieces stretch out into incredible meditative lengths, writing, as the back cover offers, “wry lullabies for apocalypses public, person, and politic,” all within the intimacies of deeply personal and domestic. His attention manages to delve into layers of consideration well below the surface of those interactions and small moments, offering a familiar music that almost bleeds into dream. “Such talk,” a parenthetical node within the five-page extended “Future Tense” offers, “the nurse says, / and I smile / as the future must smile— / she doesn’t know / the half / of what I have / to give.”