Folks, poet Garrick Davis has done it. His latest, I assume, Terminal Diagrams, is an astounding literary accomplishment. Some 34 poems along with some pertinent notes I confess helped me to navigate this Kubrick-esque terminal I walked into when I started reading them. I find myself drawn to them at that hour known by the farmer, the middle of the night, the middle of the sleep cycle when a man gets up to check on the livestock, to have an hour of activity before feeling calm again. These are not calm times. The creature still wants to get up 4 hours in to the night, if only to have a glass of milk, a beer, to listen to everyone sleeping, to enjoy, for an urban moment, silence. That is one way this correspondent deals with high anxiety.

This little book is a reading experience. Like, to a lot of people, Birthday Letters, they might read hard at first try, and not seem that poetic. (Too many readers immersed in too much theory will dismiss the Hughes series. It takes someone down to earth to say, 'well, at least he could have written good poems," to honor his wife. That is a critique I do not at all agree with, and would think that only a writer without sin, such not existing, could think such a thing. Yet, one of the finest critic of our times, as far as I know, agrees, not seeing much poetry... but that is gossip, and I'll shut up.) But these poems of Mr. Davis render up their poetic justice and the terms of their language to the psyche of whatever medieval modern serfdom we have found ourselves in, and maybe these poems identify some of the powers that be and exist quite beyond our control.

Mr. Davis has aimed high. He has brought us a natural experience akin to listening to a voice from the early blossoms of our childhood from when we first listened to discourse, enjoyed whatever form of salon we could find in humble teenage form, listening to a respected buddy, or reading Mark Twain's alter ego's voice.

Terminal Diagrams is the first poetic experience I've had in a long time, and not reading a voice of the past, honoring a Larkin, an Eliot, or even a Dryden (thank you, W.H. Pritchard) but man of our own times, who has expressed our experiences in fresh language. I cannot say enough about their perfection, a vision matched to earth and words.