Chad Davidson
Southern Illinois University Press, 2008
Review by Rebecah Pulsifer
. . . . .At once a swaggering sensory jumble, a renewal of the urban pastoral, and a wise illumination of the everyday commercial ritual, Chad Davidson’s The Last Predicta invites its readers to find beauty where they least expect it: the franchise, the gas station, the cheerleader. In The Last Predicta, disaster is a place, and we’re standing on its corner. It is “a small store selling gasoline, / coffee, cigarette lighters, Starburst;” it is also “Like the American finch, building / its nest so tight its nestlings drown / in storms….” Splitting open the insides of Gold’s Gym and Target, Davidson reveals the sometimes elegant, sometimes gritty machinery of an urban life fueled by dollars and knickknacks: “the Milano-style whatnot” that is so familiar and so rarely examined.. . . . .In some ways, The Last Predicta chips away at a literary taboo by opening the door on contemporary American capitalism without apology and without regret. The speaker in these poems is at once persistent and playful, facing the “dear church of the cherished storage bin, / dear Cheerios and the bowl to drown you in” head-on. Although the book will numb the reader with its brand names—the Maglite, the Chevy, the transfigured Predicta—it will revive the reader with its reverence for words, sound, and syntax. In “Diva,” Davidson writes:
. . . . . . . . . . . . . …I’d like to
. . . . . . . . . . . . . slip out and slide to the spout
. . . . . . . . . . . . . end of that buoy throatwise
. . . . . . . . . . . . . and risen to song. This is weird,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . I tell myself, by which I mean
. . . . . . . . . . . . . the Anglo-Saxon kind, which kills
. . . . . . . . . . . . . the very veery my heart adores.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . Heart, if you have the heart,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . help me swing the dinghy round.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . We have but one tongue between us.
The tongue of the reader becomes the text of the speaker; moments of “Tequila-Sunrise sun” and “the iPod snug in its skin” reveal that the absolution for our spending and our Hollywood-ized melodramas is that by these we unearth new coincidences of adjective and noun that can further piece together the scraps of meaning we are given. Despite the hopelessness of lines like “the watermelon… / and the black seeds pregnant with possibility, / aching for their hour, which passed some time ago,” The Last Predicta is at best a starry-eyed cynic. It mourns lives that succumb to the malaise of consumption, but delights in that same act, which offers a new path for language.
. . . . .Perhaps the most concrete identity in The Last Predicta is the city of Los Angeles. Davidson often nods to the movie industry and the car culture so often associated with the California coast; in addition, his swift yet sprawling images and rollicking enjambment build a city of their own across the page: it mirrors the physical space from which the speaker watches “a new star scarring the night’s black bay / above Los Angeles.” Nature is not absent from L.A., but it is only a “forgettable desert,” one of the reasons The Last Predicta seeks new deltas of image and sound in glossy store aisles and the “warehouse sky.” In turning away from nature, Davidson often turns to the television—“the Brady Bunch who aged sixty minutes each week;” in short, towards the forced reality of entertainment. But does the glamorized cheerleader—whose choreography “is nothing / if not naked prophecy”—reflect Hollywood’s glitter, or does the Predicta simply capture and stage the consumer’s own complex patterns? It is a question that follows Oscar Wilde’s central paradox in “The Decay of Lying,” and one that Davidson argues both sides of. Los Angeles is a place where this can happen. Davidson uses the city for its vibrancy and re-shelves it at more intimate moments, when the landscape of The Last Predicta is undefined or scattered: it becomes any place where “The sun chokes on the fishbones of TV antennae.”
. . . . .In its later sections, The Last Predicta seems to grow older, calling up Byron and Eliot where before the reader met Sheila in the gym or a naked woman serving sushi. The language-games of the book’s earlier sections are pressed by the weight of titles like “The Divine,” “Advent,” and “Idol.” Yet the poems here still retain their earlier energy even as they turn towards more familiar literary spaces. In “The Death of Byron,” Davidson’s variation on his earlier themes is perhaps more somber or more introspective:
. . . . . . . . . . . . . The unpeopled landscape was that much more
. . . . . . . . . . . . . unbearable after we invented nature.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . We picked up our futures, what little we could
. . . . . . . . . . . . . find in the rumped commotion of the back-heavy,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . while entire pastures, whole heaps, waited for us
. . . . . . . . . . . . . where we had come from. Had you looked up then
. . . . . . . . . . . . . (I did), you would have seen the moon open its hinges
. . . . . . . . . . . . . like a jaw and shut. Shut up. Shut down.
Albeit without some of The Last Predicta’s initial spunk, the later poems gracefully consider questions first introduced wittily yet fleetingly. Here, Davidson gives the speaker more time to reflect on what before were joyful fragments: glass shards waiting to be softened by the ocean.
. . . . .The Last Predicta lets a little more light into the world we already are living in. It toys with the reader; it both offers up a new vocabulary and commissions it to build a town, towers and all. Davidson’s latest book sparkles and flirts, “mock[s] sacrificial rites,” and holds forth both the question and the answer in a voice at once challenging and wise.
Rebecah Pulsifer is the Associate Editor of OT!M.
