Within this melody
It fill you up, it fill you up, it fill you up now
There’s more than you can see
It fill you up, it fill you up, it fill you up now
There’s another realm
There’s another world
……..~ Van Morrison, “It Fills You Up” from A Period of Transition (1977)
Author: Daniel Cross Turner
For All Weather: A Review of David Havird’s Weathering: Poems and Recollections
Weathering: Poems and Recollections.
by David Havird
(Mercer University Press, 2020. 136pp. $20)
There are many gripping titles for poetry collections. Sometimes the title overpromises, the poems underperform. David Havird’s Weathering: Poems and Recollections, though, strikes a clarion tone that rings true throughout the book. The poems—and prose (three autobiographical essays are included)—re-collect various personal erosions, family struggles, passions spent, times lapsed. Yet it’s not all bad news. There’s a steady value found in memory, its reconstructive power, and in the good-faith ventures to which the poet commits himself: love, literature, family, wildlife, art. Plus, those weathering storms, as reanimated by Havird’s memorable touch, contain rough beauty in themselves, and help us learn to appreciate more the remembered calms. After a prodigious start—Havird published in The New Yorker as a fledgling writer in 1975— Weathering proves he has aged well.