Hard Inheritance

The poems in Hard Inheritance are set firmly in the poet’s “ancestral terrain” of small-town Florida. The landscape is lovingly but unsentimentally brought to the page, and it is peopled by the poet’s family, friends, neighbors, and fellow parishioners, with “the calm assurance of traveled/trails with familiar footholds.” These truly are “songs sculpted by home’s hard structures.” ~Andrew Hudgins, National Book Award Finalist and author of The Joker: A Memoir and American Rendering: New and Selected Poems and other critically acclaimed worksWhat is architecture, without its inhabitants? “In our heart pine handmade farm house, / my grandparents were window weights: // cast iron bars tethered in country wood, / plumb and place-holding pendulums.” What is a field, without the hands that tend it? In Hard Inheritance, John Davis Jr. recognizes the potent ecosystems of everyday life, as in “What the Grove Knows”: “Stirred soil lifts its secrets to the sky. / Revealed and overturned crickets / invite snowy egrets who eat them.” Readers will enjoy taking a joy ride on an untethered dock, hunting down poisonous white frogs, harvesting worms before a father and son’s angling expedition, and hand-nestling one newspaper section into another before the morning’s delivery. Yet these poems resist mere nostalgia; the author's voice is attentive, conversational, and wise to how class shapes the landscape at hand. Given graceful and balanced stanzas, consonance of word choice, and the unexpected glimmer of a pantoum, I admire both Davis's rigors of craft and vitality of spirit. ~Sandra Beasley, author of I Was the Jukebox and Count the WavesJohn Davis Jr.’s Hard Inheritance offers us a fine collection of well-built poems. Vivid images drawn from Florida’s flora and fauna, the pressures and rewards of family life, and work ranging from the orange grove to the printing press balance Davis Jr.’s heart-breaking restraint and precise diction. Heir in part to Seamus Heaney and to Claudia Emerson, Davis Jr. has made of his literary and literal ancestry a singular twenty-first century voice.~John Hennessy, author of Coney Island Pilgrims, poetry editor of The Common