ABOUT
A native of Nebraska, Travis Davis has spent two decades exploring the mountains, streams, and prairies of the inland West, from the Wind River to Wallowa, from the Sandhills to the Sierra Nevada. He studied Political Science and English at Nebraska Wesleyan University, and is currently a designer and on the Board of Directors at California’s first ever employee-owned solar cooperative. A committed naturalist, former professional athlete, and passionate river rat, Davis has been writing for over 20 years.
His chapbook Hands Grabbing for the Light that Moves Through Them was published by SPCE Poetry Studio. His new collection, American Zen, is a quest for the place of modern man in this wild land. He lives in Nevada City, California.
“In American Zen, Travis Davis maps an intimate western landscape he yearns to wholly occupy, and finds it both elusive and fragile. The push and pull of modern modes of life are at odds with the “The god-hole.... that speaks in a rainbow of language.”
Davis is listening deeply to that landscape, and sharing with us what he hears. Caught between the intangible and the terminal—the sacred and the temporal—these are vivid poems of place that are filled with the labor of being fully present in the sorrow of the world, while fully awake to the sensual pleasures of it.
...what a strange occasion to be flesh / what a day to sweat in the sun / civilization burns along without you...
All poets draw from the colors of the land, but Davis seems to find the landscape inside himself. It occupies him, not some horizon.
...a knot in my heart / doesn’t know how / to make itself more meaningful...
...draped in skin .... our lungs filling and unfilling / in a temporary manifestation / that feels like the only home we ever knew.
Taken together these poems create a journey, a crossing reminiscent of parched canyon walls narrowing—and finally revealing—a course of clear water.”
— B. Campbell Ford
“Travis Davis’ spare and nature-infused poems send us into meditations on life and death, the soul-depleting effects of capitalism, and the necessity for personal rebirth. These poems invite us to stop and breathe in the beauty of landscapes and to rejoice in the primal nature that lives within us as we seek to authentically navigate our earth-bound cares.”
"The rain, the rivers, the smells, the seasons - Travis absorbs god through nature. In that embrace, his words flow."
- Liz Collins
Photo: Travis Davis Ruby Mountain