American Book Review

A battered brass saxophone, rusted by the trials of time, orchestrates a melodic literary performance as it graces the cover of Steve Davenport's Bruise Songs. Davenport, born in Illinois' American Bottom floodplain and father to self-coined Davendaughters aplenty, provides an album for the withered and an anthem of convalescence in his third poetry collection, succeeding [End Page 112] his former publications Overpass (2012) and Uncontainable Noise (2006). Established by earlier projects and entrenched by his most recent, Davenport delivers a markedly unique and undeniably evocative literary voice that tugs at the heartstrings by venturing to find treasure amidst life's traumas.

Already lauded for his mastery of place, Davenport explores the complexities of people—their tribulations, anxieties, willpower—in a diverse collection occasioned by the contemporary. Each poem rings like song, rhythmic and layered blues song, save the intricacies of form. Davenport's writing is open and accessible, his balance between poetic and prosaic style an infallible concoction that contributes to an album-like formation, intentionally instrumented. The collection is an expanded musing on how best to formulate purpose through the lens of a decaying existence, a ubiquitous concept in some capacity, possessing a sense of impermanence and forthcoming silence all the while screaming its earnest message of the beauty in life's decay. Equipped with the lyrical craft of a poet and the candor of anyone but, Davenport shares his unmediated bruise songs with the world, the

… shavedbarkings of all these linesor limes I cut and squeeze

and the

… pipe bombsof poems I calibrated

all but mirrors into a world of a life, lived. Hurt becomes the text's cadence and retrospect its instrumentation. The audience is invited, if not induced, into the revisitation of Davenport's most potent experiences, his "pipe bombs," including the stroke that turned one man dependent on words, mute. In a message to his cerebral angiogram, Davenport finds

the clot you leave under the bruise. I ask that youopen lines of time.I bend a knee to your reach, your perfect nose.Flower Pot, I love your crazy hair.

Davenport transforms into our Bob Dylan. The world, small in the doctor's [End Page 113] grasp, becomes wildly expansive. The pain, flowery. Meaning prevails in the wake of a stroke. We are "not yet dead." Maybe only "a sock/of consonants in the ER," but when life gives us even the drip of one lemon, one lime cut and squeezed, on a gurney or in the trying times we find ourselves in, there is meaning to be had, meaning that Davenport hand-cuts and squeezes himself. That Davenport finds the words to explicate wordlessness is striking; that he renders us speechless is masterful. Only can bruises become blues in the hands of those who bear them.

The cohesion of Bruise Songs is realized by the organic experience that Davenport undergoes during the writing of past experiences. His reliving of each since solidified occurrence or idea reads as though, as pen touches paper, the sensations are being experienced for the first time and the happenings studied for the thousandth. Davenport's poems, therefore, do not pose messages and answers. They instead give rise to interests and questions, such as the contrast between what is deserved and what deserves taking, or the interest in hurt and recovery. At an intersection between righteousness and punishment, Davenport assembles a medium uninterested in dogma, for he is "the Lord" over each page, but one rather palpably curious in the consciousness of decay. Accusatory of the glorified picture formerly painted by a younger self, Davenport writes in "Dear Happy Ending" of a fantasy:

I too want to livein a tall, round house …On the roofa water park with lightsand a helicopter.It's not a lotto ask.

Here resides the chorus, the bloodstream of our bruise songs, to which Davenport graciously returns throughout the text. With a zip code close to home through all-encompassing prose, lyrics find...