Arias of a Rhapsodic Spirit

Davidson Garrett’s musical suite of poems resists labels. The poet actually acknowledges genres by shattering them. Not unlike a memoir, a narrative starts with [the] “Soggy Hospital Room” where the author was born. Here is a master storyteller drawing us into his “Southern Baroque.” Garrett is also an aficionado of classical music and its precision. Indeed, the book’s sections are defined by musical terms. After all, this is not only a narrative sequence; it is also profoundly lyric and dramatic, fusing the poet’s four categories. Here, distinctions collapse into a richly elegiac opera. Its plots and voices illuminate the poet’s past, “Polishing the soul’s real treasures.” Finally, the tether of punctuation dissolves, allowing an ecstatic aria to shine through: “[W]ildflowers wildflowers wild wild wild wild wild wild wild...

—Dean Kostos, author of The Boy Who Listened To Paintings; and This is Not a Skyscraper; winner of the Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award, selected by Mark Doty

The poems in Davidson Garrett’s new collection, Arias of a Rhapsodic Spirit, sing. They belong to a symphony of vivid verse that touches on opera, art, friendships, place, and fading dreams. The heavy heat in Shreveport, Louisiana, rises in poems set in the segregated South where the author grew up. Readers share in the temptation of luscious bakery buns, as well as loss caused by the “AIDS plague” in New York City, to where Garrett fled as a young adult. Bowing to destiny as an artist, Garrett gazes back. He eulogizes teachers and friends, playwright Edward Albee, soprano Renée Fleming, and composer Gioachino Rossini, among others who shaped his rich life. The book’s sensuous poems—crisp, lyrical, metaphoric gems—dazzle and delight.

—Amy Barone, author of We Became Summer; Kamikaze Dance; and Views from the Driveway

Underpinned by his passion for music, voice, dance, theater, and opera, Davidson Garrett’s lushly accomplished poems propel us from his thickly humid Louisiana childhood into his early travels and then to his years in New York City. Through him, we are touched by the fear and sorrow of the AIDS crisis, the connection and isolation of loving, of dreams and passions morphed into workaday misery, and back to self-redemption as the ghost of Ruth Gordon reminds him to get off your ass, remarry theater, then—risk all for art. With honesty, emotion, and humor throughout, he gifts us the wild wild wild wild wild wild wild of his heart, and ours as well.

—Karen Neuberg, author of PURSUIT; and the elephants are asking