Belonging

Deepened by Dick Davis's dry wit and the formal rigor of his verse, the poems of Belonging negotiate their way among personal and political divides -- generations in a family; man and woman; the tentative present and our inherited pasts. But much of the writing here is also evidence of a desire for a kind of idealized belonging -- to a clerisy of civilized and humane decency that can be found intermittently in all cultures and is the monopoly of none.