HAUNTED HOUSE, 1780
In august the sun held a
coin to the silverberries. They ripened to cake among the gunshot, among the
wounded with their piecemeal apples and parchment lips. Big houses roes bright
as bezants from the soup bones of that bayou. In the cellars of the earth gandy
dancers danced, singing, Gulp what the fountain gives, give this in return.
Davis
populates these poems with ghost towns, abandoned hotels, small town lore,
mosquitoes and ramshackle houses, amid an array of incredibly memorable and provocative
lines, whether “The sky of New Jersey / is imitation crocodile.” (from “THE
BODY OF NEW JERSEY, 1980”), “Time is / the colony that / farms our ruin.”
(from “A HOUSE UNFIT EVEN / FOR GHOSTS”) or “June is the first / month in bank
/ robbery season.” (from “NATIONAL ANTHEM”). The book is rife with unexpected
images, writing poems anchored through these ghost stories, including a thread
of haunted house poems throughout—“Ghost of Macondo,” “Haunted House, 1780,” “Ghost
of Motel 6,” “Ghost Story, 1971,” “Ghost of General Electric,” “Haunted House,
1978,” “Ghost of Polaroid,” “Haunted City, 1967,” “Haunted House, 1980,”
“Ghosts of the Bell System,” “Haunted House, 1692,” “Ghost Story, 1848,” “Ghost
of NASA,” “Index of Haunted Houses” and “Ghost Story, 2020,” before ending the
collection with the stand-alone coda, “Ghost of a Ghost Story.” The poems
suggest less a series or sequence of ghosts than houses haunted through their
own histories, and what had been abandoned, left behind or left unfinished. And
what, exactly, is it about 1980 that causes it to be crossed out twice in his
titles? “House, I feel altogether / brisk,” he writes, to open “GHOST OF
GENERAL ELECTRIC,” “bundled in nerves // that won’t quiet.” Later on, to end
the poem “PACIFIC AMERICANA,” he writes, “Forgive us, history. // We orphan ///
everything // we touch.” These are poems that examine the notion of ghosts and
their impact, and the ways in which sites themselves, whether towns or hotels
or houses, are themselves what hold the haunting; the ghosts of all the remnants,
memories and abandoned possibilities. As Sarah Gorham and Jeffrey Skinner collaboratively
write to open their short introduction to the collection:
The poems of Adam O.
Davis’s debut collection are epigrammatic, apocalyptic, and downright scary at
times. Of course they are. This is a book of ghost stories, and for the most
part, ghosts are jealous monsters, intent upon our destruction. They never appear
overtly here, yet their presence tiptoes into the book the way we gradually
become aware of spirits in haunted houses who tread over creaky floors and slam
doors and issue sudden gusts of wind.
Fortunately, Davis recognizes all the standard tropes and
approaches his subject in a self-reflective way, coming up with new forms and
visionary occupations for the disembodied spirits. They are consistently surprising,
convincing, and even delightful. We begin to understand that haunting cam be a
way of life. And there are metaphoric wonders everywhere: “A spell / of soapy /
weather. // A milk-solemn / spinster.”
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