Books

Review by Francis Sheppard

I puzzled over this title. ‘Bleeding’ love is Shakespearian, words spoken at the end of that tragedy, of heroic recklessness in the name of young love. But ‘Freshly Dipped’? more than a trite recipe-reference and, taken together with the present-tense ‘bleeding’ indicates something that is full of pain, though suggesting a new future that is there to be invited in, despite loss of blood to the (re)birth. And ‘dipped’ is an absolute. An experience that is brief and immediate, resulting in change.

The subtitle A Journey continues this idea of transformation, evident in the sequencing of the poems. The first, Fallen Stars (7) is one of loss, loss particularly of hope. The resultant ‘tears’, imagery counterpoised to that of ‘stars’, take the form initially of reflected light, the ‘passing of a day’, the absence of light, the ice that forms in the night, the quickly-evaporating dew of the morning. Davis’ poetry is never lyrical, closely aligned as it is to the disciplines of performance – but Fallen Stars comes closest to being so, because it refers to a mode of love-relationship that is now abandoned, a thing of the past.

This poetic persona, sometimes speaking voice, sometimes addressed, takes us through a succession of moods and discoveries. A political position, I Stand with the Trans, is established early on. After that it is the story of struggle, with The Black Dog of depression (11) and then the rebuff of daily personal encounter

But the souls of the vapid

The shallow, the meaningless

The thoughtless.

They are wearying. (15)

They, and the ‘safety nets’ are to be ‘left…far behind’. Instead, the journey will take him

… into avenues

Too long unexplored.

Cutting into the jagged black

Closed over and raw beneath.

Raw, weeping red.

The expected course of terminated love is resignation followed by serenity. That is not the case here. While nothing from the past appears to be rejected, everything appears pushes ahead towards a new kind of passionate love that is termed demisexual, where the channeling of engagement begins not from immediate attraction, but from deep trust and affection, established over time. This is something like polyamory, and similar too to WH Auden Universal Love, which that poet saw as part of resistance to the fascism of his day.

Beside that, Freshly Dipped and Bleeding Love is a manifesto for artistic expression.

And while you create you are free and they

cannot control you.

So let your mantra be

Creation foremost.

Belief in oneself, the abjuring of ‘imposter syndrome’ is at the heart of the writing. What it leads to, which I have yet to ponder, is ‘the curve’ mentioned continually in the later poems.

Not lyrical, but ‘freshly dipped’ in the language of our day. Davis is master of the short, pithy sentence. A kind of boldness, that goes hand in hand with this journey.