NIGHT ANGLER BY GEFFREY DAVIS
Geffrey Davis’s latest collection, Night Angler, explores the complexities of memory, landscape, and identity. From love letters and prayers surrounding youth, fatherhood, and family—to a river that holds the solace of fishing and life in the South—the book constantly evolves. His narrative poems comment on the mistreatment, the wonder, and the hope surrounding black lives, not only in the South, but in America as a whole: “. . . so why then, while / fishing shores of the Mississippi, do I feel and fear hooking a diaspora of / drowned faces?”
Davis also casts and reels in other themes to recall his experiences as a father, son, and person of color, including light, water, and music. The images he creates wade between the gloom of trauma against mind and body to the courage that faith brings, if not from earthly fathers, then from a heavenly one. “Let there be fight and faith / still in me / Lord / Let this man / teach another to move / through / the nothing / that begs / to be feared.” Night Angler journeys you through childhood to parenthood, through violence to peace, and through the wilderness to home, leaving you disarmed.
BOA.
—Review by Jenee Skinner
