Kneeling in the Dojo by Robin Davidson (NWVS, #96)

“I dance with fire to stay alive,” Robin Davidson writes in this small fiery book, which has such a large reach. A hidden garden, a dark chapel, an urban dojo—these are the spaces that come alive in this work of harsh luminosity, of spiritual alertness.
–Edward Hirsch

The title of Robin Davidson’s masterly chapbook Kneeling in the Dojo seems to me a metaphor for the lives lived in these poems, indeed for life itself. Here is a place of longing, of our life-long desire to unite the body and the soul. But these moving poems are not abstractions; they live in this world—in a very specific August garden, under magnolia trees, on a university campus, in the Rothko Chapel, on the dojo’s hard floor—anywhere humans struggle—futilely, painfully, joyously—“to live as long as they can.”
–Susan Wood

Behind Robin Davidson’s meditative poems seems to be a soft chant or a contemplative’s continuous hum gathering the body’s efforts and the mind’s fits into a taut, crystal sound. We discover that moving in the background is a restorative and abandoning silence, that the poems are discrete moments of ascent and descent, beautiful embodiments of discovery and disappointment that are all the more stark for the paradoxes they risk—contentment and desire, union and rupture—a conclave that offers us, in gorgeous lyrics, the prolific insights Davidson has assured us are only, remarkably, temporary.
–Martha Serpas

Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!]