“The poet Olena Kalytiak Davis’s new book, her third, is “The Poem She Didn’t Write and Other Poems.” The title echoes, even as it undermines, an old formula that seems to have gone out of favor: Eliot’s “The Waste Land and Other Poems,” Yeats’s “The Green Helmet and Other Poems,” Ginsberg’s “Howl and Other Poems,” Plath’s “The Colossus and Other Poems” all come readily to mind, along with many slim but stately volumes before them. These titles conjure a world in which poetry was a game played across the ages, masterpiece versus masterpiece. The struggle was dynastic; the combatants were male, unless, like Plath, they had internalized (in Plath’s case, tragically) the patrilineal rules for advancement. Anthologies were printed and syllabi distributed, and so the canon was formed.”
“The medium of poetry isn’t language, really; it’s human loneliness, a loneliness that poets, having received it themselves from earlier poets, transfer to their readers. Like bees in a honeycomb, writers and readers experience isolation and solitude communally and collaboratively. This is what Harold Bloom speaks of when, in a remark that Davis quotes, he says that poets create an “otherness” such that loneliness is “created and alleviated at once.” Writing a poem, you create that vivid otherness; reading one, you re-create it in your own person. These two lonely souls, writer and reader, are bound to one another. They can be miles or centuries apart, but in Davis’s book the passage between them sees some heavy traffic. Her final poem, a single couplet called “Threshold,” invites us to cross it: “what i should of softly sweetly surely said: / ‘o wingèd boy, come read with me in bed.’””