Remember that scene from The Jerk where Steve Martin’s character is bankrupt and forced to leave his plush California estate? He says something like, "I don’t need anything…well, except this paddle-game." But then he comes across another small object, like a pen. He admits he needs this pen, too. Then his favorite thermos, then a chair, a lamp, until we see this sensitive man misunderstood and rejected by the world (a poet?) standing on his front steps desperately clutching a wonderful array of seemingly unimportant objects. When you hold Chad Davidson’s book in your hands, and you read these poems, you are holding a vast array of ordinary objects: a pear, a match, a starfish, a mushroom, a bra…but by the time he’s revealed the thing for what it is, you don’t want to let go.

There is a sly wisdom in these poems about the things of this world as remarkable as what we find in Richard Wilbur. In fact, the lines are as well-wrought as Wilbur and as witty as Nemerov or Merrill. Considering Davidson’s ability to teach us so much fact, history and trivia, you might think of Auden, Lowell, or Bishop, but the poems seem to gently coax toward understanding rather than teach.

The introductory poem to the collection, "A," is clearly a touchstone by which the rest of the poems can be approached. This prose poem, like so many of Davidson’s poems, has the clear made-ness of Amish clothing. The very fact of its simplicity, its black-and-white-ness (and some red stitching) helps us understand the hard work that goes into making such a thing. Instead of a flashiness, we admire thread, buttons, dye, lines, punctuation, ink. We don’t think, "Nice outfit." We think, "Someone living has sewn this with their very hands." Here’s the second stanza:

Pin it to an adulterer’s blouse. Shout it as you careen into the rocks, or just before. Or when you rise out of bed at night in sweat, knowing only what you dreamed was so elemental you have no word. An apple a day keeps the doctor away. Apple an and away. And your apple falls away from the page that stays the way it’s able, that lies there, lies to you.

Much the way Robert Hass’s "Meditation at Lagunitas," says, yes, language doesn’t exactly correspond to what we think it should, and good, Davidson’s "A" immerses us in what it is like to be a reader for the first time, defamiliarizing, making a letter new, strange, sad, our nemesis and our very salvation. So many of Chad Davidson’s poems return to the complaint of the failure of language (a sketchy ground on which to situate oneself as a poet). But mortal language, for Davidson, can’t help but get resurrected. In the first few lines of "Cockroaches: Ars Poetica," these lines:

They know that death is merely of the body
not the species, know their putrid chitin
is always memorable.

In "Bite Your Tongue," these:

Speak in tongues, but bite

your tongue when you have spoken too much.
As in Double Indemnity. My favorite line
is shut up, baby: bold, recalcitrant boredom.

Even a yawn, seen at its most violent, is given a voice:

I look in the mirror
witness myself eating air,
agasp, my daily chance to gaze
into this face’s oldest pain,
more than some mute renegade
wail, this tooth-jeweled grenade
thrown out of the well again.

And in "Boxes," a self-conscious double sonnet, we hear:

Lazarus made
whole again. A voiceover begins: It is late
one April afternoon. A typical town
by all respects. The church turns under a flight
of clouds balloonlike. The boy who coaxes
the balloon along hears his own
voice then say rise, rise rise. The light
flicks on. It’s over. The boy is in his box.

Here, language lives as Lazarus himself, as a balloon, as a boy, rising, yet back in the box at the end of the poem. But one thinks, not for long.

Davidson’s grammatical toolbox is open. Readers will notice the glut of conjunctions and transitional fragments that keep a poem swerving into new directions and then back onto the macadam. The imperative verbs give a constant engagement with the reader: "Listen," "imagine," "bite," "take," " and even "video." They steadily appear throughout the book. His use of the flat sentence amid stanzas of rich diction and syntax (stolen from Lowell) is arresting. Sentences and fragments like: "Boredom." "This is wrong." "Dido died." "I am a metaphor." "Take any page." "It is April." Yet, none of these techniques are overdone. And, really, when is the last time you fawned over a poet’s splendid sentence variety?

I have hardly mentioned the best poems in the collection: "Cleopatra’s Bra" "The Match" "All the Ashtrays in Rome" and the powerful long lyric "Space." Each deserves a review for itself. All are poems for the next round of anthologies.

Consolation Miracle is a mature collection (a minor miracle?) in a time when so many poets are settling for "poetry" or "the idea of a poem" rather than poems, when poets are praising artifice rather than art. It is as strong a first book of poetry as any in the last ten years. If, for some reason, I were forced from my home—along with the family photos, and my pocketknife and my favorite coffee mug—somewhere in my arms would be my copy of this book.

—Smartishpace (John Poch)

—American Poet

Chad Davidson's first book of poems begins with "A": "Pin it to an adulterer's blouse. Shout it as you careen into the rocks . . . Allah, Adam, Ariel. . . ." The only A-association not invoked is association itself, and witty associative turns are the abiding architecture of these poems. In odes celebrating "Starfish," "Mushrooms," "The Yawn," "The Match," Davidson moves on subtle lines that at times amuse but at times downright astonish. In "A Hand," for example, a litany of hand imagery gives way to this rendering of applause: "which but the most fearful wouldn't rise / up before the encore to beat his twin?" Fratricidal urges suddenly at our fingertips . . . hardly a page in the book is without these dark marvels. That Rome was founded by a similar act is not lost on this poet, whose sense of the growth and decline of the Roman Empire emerges often (notably in "Cleopatra's Bra" and "All the Ashtrays in Rome"). His formal forays into American decadence have shades of the late-empire Roman poet Ausonius, whose literary fault might have been mapping out a bit too much of territory already well charted. Davidson's poem "Space," for example, is a literary lament of unexamined expansion and waste in a sequence of loosely pentameter tercets that remind one of Ammons's sprawling couplets in Garbage. But this first book is lively, ingeniously consoling, and makes humorous leaps out of luminous heaps. Like this one: "you know any generation / by the length of its song and movie titles."

—Virginia Quarterly Review (Kevin McFadden)

You'll find more of the miraculous than the consoling in this collection.  True to form, SIU's first book contest has unearthed a poet both reader-friendly and challenging. Davidson's miracles include a style hybridizing superlative formalism and ageless exuberance; a mania for philosophy and chipotle; a simultaneous sprawl into and control over the topic; leaving the ultimate meaning up to you, but hinting at the omniscience of objects; and an eternal nod to the potential of the subject to dictate the terms of its perception. 

Where many poets go for autobiographical catharsis or exploration of language-based reality in first books, Davidson offers a collection of, primarily, odes, many effortlessly embedded in form, touching on both of the above pursuits with moxy. Here you'll find old standbys, such as paintings and forgotten turning points in history, revitalized, and an exploration of enough new areas that no topic seems out of reach. Call it "extreme adaptability," borrowing a phrase from his sonnet, "Cockroaches:  Ars Poetica." To borrow another, say that he writes under "the godlike eye" of the audience, operating in a public space where image and metaphor cozy up to introspection. 

Take his most-used pronoun, "we," as an acknowledgment of the collective self or the presumption of an audience; you'll come away, regardless, with a photographically vivid, lyrically supercharged collection of subjects, from starfish to Al Gore’s shattered ashtray, as well as a feeling of relief that transient moments deposit sedimentary memories, "that death is merely of the body/not the species," and that what seems most predictable, like an ode or a rhyme scheme, can most easily surprise us. 

Your first surprise comes in the first sentence of the opening poem, "A":  "Today, you see only the letter a when you read." The only prose poem in the book, "A" could easily be an invocation of pure language, rather than narrative or anything else more grounded, except that Davidson imagizes the letter in a way that Neruda would have loved, grouping it with "the pouting y, the disconcerted r, the liquids caught inside the concave u."  Within his absurd premise, he invokes every common reader connection to "a": "In school, large apples hang on walls, a giant A bright red. Red is the color of a rushing into your first words, barbaric and without shame, stamped as it is on report cards and meat." References to The Scarlet Letter, the elemental importance of apples, and more traditional associations vanguard the ultimate assertion:  language "stays the way it's able . . . lies there, lies to you." The bold simplicity of the references counterpoints the growing realization that A is where language begins, and that an ode to it is an ode to language itself, without which our world wouldn't exist, let alone our speech:

. . . when all the words bow down and lift up their sails to the wind of your voice, your gift to the wind and the world you’re in, your stars, your names for God—say a, say a.  Say a, because one day, one by one, they will disappear, leave the page, your head, and the silent, infant world. Once there was a.  

If every poem is an ode to its own language, Davidson tells it with the most enthusiasm and mastery of range. The strength and playfulness of his voice resonate through the white space, and, continuing into the book proper, give less overt odes both humor and homage. He only lends them enough metaphorical resonance to strengthen their imagistic power, couching the mechanics and autobiographical impetus of each in superbly polished lyricism. A remains a. 

But it doesn't, of course. "The Scarecrow Odes" sets the pomo tone for the collection, offering a metapoetic skeleton in numbered sections, giving the socially constructed context:

Three roads triverged in a yellow wood.
And that makes no difference whatsoever.

If a pomo turn, this poem gives a much-needed playfulness to the movement, with the absurdist litany of, "I am a metaphor./I am a metaphor for myself." 

Within the scarecrow of the poem lies a saint of consumerism, in the form of Michel Lotito, who has eaten "eighteen bicycles, fifteen supermarket food carts, seven televisions, six/chandeliers, a coffin, and a Cessna airplane." In dreams, he flees television-eyed "wraith-cyclists," whose goal is to dismember him. If this represents an angst, it's that these pieces might be dissected for meanings (as I'm doing right now) that destroys the subject, and the lyrical reality that arises from the reading. 

The playful, nicely irreverent ode to Frost is revisited with the next-to-last section, where the three roads' trivergence is revealed on a sign, and "[u]nderneath, in a scrawling script with which one/might write death threats or last minute grocery lists, someone/has written: The three roads are a metaphor, which means this sign is also a metaphor./If one were then to look up, a few stars would burn out." Archaic sources of inspiration are as irrelevant as they are inescapable, and they create the poem just as much as any socially constructed self of the poet. The beauty of the language flows irrepressibly through even the stiff, slightly contorted realization of self as scarecrow, and poem as device, and ultimately carries the piece. Davidson deserves credit for the baldness of his presentation, and, once again, the mixture of playfulness and commitment to beauty with which he presents questions of identity. This anti-ode shoots the furthest in overt philosophical aims, and veers away from the image-laden space that the other pieces occupy with complete lushness and comfort. Ultimately, it articulates the vacuum that separates perceiver from perceived.

In the longest poem, "Space," he arcs from the space above to that of the page and, finally, to the gap between signifier and signified, which echoes the difference between the speaker's family name and own identity, gorgeously and poignantly projected on the treeline outside of his parents' house:

. . . Out there, beyond

the last stand of singed oak, I keep
searching for the end to my parents' rights
as landowners and find only briar,

thick and riddling the treetops. And if I stare
long enough, I can almost feel
each tendril eking out another inch

into our space this side of Earth, some great
buried bulb I picture spindling off,
scrawling up the pined skyline like fingers

on the nape of a genius.  I am close
to something here.

The sense of ineffable presence, whether it be of you, the past, the subject, or the poem, fills any conception that we make of space, which doesn't exist any more than the letter a, or the autonomous I. The dominance of family, of context, of whatever shapes our perceptual lenses, both illuminates and haunts the space in which Davidson's speaker creates, and is created. 

This collection shows intense dedication to subject over speaker, craft over craftiness, and public over private reality. Whether Davidson goes for more of the same, or delves into other territory, you can expect formidably constructed lines, wonderfully tempered by a philosophical breakdance between Baudrillard and Garcia Marquez (donor of the title). Penultimately, these poems resonate as poignantly personal, in that they arise from a need both for contact and for salvation of the subjects from transience. Ultimately, they're funny as hell, and miraculous as the power of cockroaches to console.

—Pleiades (Chad Parmenter)

From ancient Egyptian underwear to cockroaches and Bigfoot, Chad Davidson manages to draw startlingly poignant connections between the most unexpected subjects. He asks the questions that flit through our minds when we're on the edge of a dream, and he holds them out, examining their facets in the light, weeping and laughing.

—University of Arizona Poetry Center News and Notes

If we depend on the fleshy zero
of their caps, so much is nothing

more than beauty wrapped
in night’s clothes.

In the preceding lines, Chad Davidson is describing a mushroom. This image is characteristic of Davidson's ability to carefully excavate the often predetermined, to invigorate the common, and to conjure the extraordinary. These astonishing and unusual images shape his first collection of poems, Consolation Miracle. In Davidson's attentive and inventive eyes a mushroom becomes "the closest thing we have / to edible encomium," and a match is Prometheus "come as a toothpick." Davidson gives the reader the gift of transformation. While some poets confirm one's view of the world, others like Davidson construct new worlds out of the old. After reading Consolation Miracle, some objects can never be viewed as being as dull and commonplace as they once were.

In Davidson's work all events, as well as objects, are equally revealing. He achieves an overwhelming sense of balance: the large and small receive the same interest and meticulous notice, so that witnessing a fatal car accident and feeling the sensation of a hand falling asleep in the middle of the night possess equal poetic potential. Consequently, it is difficult to accept the poem's assertion in “The Contents of Abraham Lincoln's Pockets," "This / is why we love spectacles. / The better to see ourselves." For these poems reveal just the opposite—spectacles are unnecessary, for we come to understand as much if not more about ourselves from attentive meditation on the small, the everyday, the unassuming. If a starfish can be "such brilliant boredom under the sun," then there is no need for anything more spectacular.

This is most clear in Davidson’s long poem "Space," about the California businessman who paid the Russian government for travel to the space station. Despite the intense curiosities regarding the countless mysteries the expanse might contain, space is "well, / mostly boring." And as some of the great science fiction movies, like Solaris and 2001, attest, space can teach us more about life on earth and human nature than it reveals about itself. Therefore, the speaker wonders less about whether the American space tourist has come to learn anything about the science of space than whether he has become indoctrinated into Russian culture:
 

But, I've come to enjoy his Russian
three-day growth, ask myself under

my breath if he's learned any Russian,
if he's eating borscht, and if they'd had
more space, and they'd asked, would I have gone.

Space, which has the potential for the excitement of a spectacle, is, in the end, defined in earthly, domestic terms. It may be the great unknown, but space, Davidson tells us, is simply a "matter of perception." And our perception is limited by the events and objects that permeate and shape our day to day lives.

Elsewhere, the transformative contemplation of objects allows Davidson to puzzle the line between sex and art, or to question if such a line even exists. In his observation, the sensual and sexual become inherently connected to the impulse of art, as in this description of a pear:
 

Or as their profile
imitates a lover's pendant
breasts, we take them in

as we do our own bodies,
as infants do, wanting anything
to give our wanting form.

The desire for form and the need to give our longing shape in language is at the center of Davidson's project and his talent for close inspection of the small. In the opening poem, "A," Davidson turns his eye to the composite structure of words: letters. He examines them as though they were ideographs, as if their shape could endow them with meaning: "the pouting y, the disconcerted r, the liquids caught inside the concave u." Is this perspective, this skill of perception, the "consolation miracle" of the book's title? The term is taken from a Garcia Marquez story, "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings," in which the miracles performed are more absurdly ironic than useful, never curing the original ailment. But perhaps this too is simply a matter of perception. And the consolation is that the ordinary and the quotidian are miraculous if properly seen.

—Verse (Carrie Adams)