Author: Daniel Cross Turner

Daniel Cross Turner’s poetry appears in Birmingham Poetry Review, James Dickey Review, and Talking River (edited by Rebecca Gayle Howell). In addition to numerous scholarly essays, he has published three books: a scholarly monograph, Southern Crossings: Poetry, Memory, and the Transcultural South; an anthology, Hard Lines: Rough South Poetry; and an essay collection, Undead Souths: The Gothic and Beyond in Southern Literature and Culture. He earned his doctorate at Vanderbilt, where he worked with poets Kate Daniels and Mark Jarman, and he has published several interviews with contemporary writers, including Patrick Phillips, Yusef Komunyakaa, Natasha Trethewey, Daniel Wallace, and Charles Wright.

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.

For All Weather: A Review of David Havird’s Weathering: Poems and Recollections full post

(3229 words, estimated 12:55 mins reading time)