It has always been poetry's domain to gather the slivers of our separate selves while living, or to come to terms with—that is, find terms for—the prospect of our selves realizing their finite forms. This is the work of lyric. You find it in the Greek pastoral elegies of Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus, or in Roman Catullus' short, furious expression of the divided heart, rendered powerfully in a version by the poet Frank Bidart: "I hate and—love. The sleepless body hammering a nail nails itself, hanging crucified." Shakespeare punningly gets at this first self-division when he speaks of a "perjured eye" in the Dark Lady sonnets, and Keats broods on the second dissolution, as in the sonnet beginning "When I have fears that I may cease to be."

The contemporary poet Todd Davis is firmly in that Keatsian orbit in his latest, chock-full volume, The Least of These, where many poems remind us that that the natural world can often feel transcendent but is invariably transient. A speaker encounters carrion beetles scuttling across a shrew carcass, "showing us / how the spirit departs, how / the flesh vanishes, too." The effect is not to stir one's melancholy into a froth, but rather the opposite. At their best, Davis' meditations on nature, spirit, and the rhythms of nature that can teach the spirit, will leave readers feeling healthily bracing, as if just having dipped in cold, clear mountain waters found in the backwoods. This is the predominant setting for the poems in this third collection.

On the other hand, Kathleen Graber's project is to examine the "disquieted self, which, / startled almost at the start from itself, seems always now / to be awaiting its own return." She has found a fitting, inexhaustible metaphor in the city of Rome, whose very soil is layered with successive historical strata. Graber takes as the epigraph for her second poetry collection Freud's famous comparison of Rome's hills with the human psyche: "nothing that has once come into existence will have passed away and all the earlier phases of development continue to exist alongside the latest one." These phases accumulate, and we never fully dispense with all of the experiences and memories of past times. In other words, suggest the poems that follow, we can conceal but never escape our personal histories.

An early poem captures the meditations and self-examinations of this collection, when a speaker remarks that each day she smashes dishes and then glues them back together again "in new ways" [emphasis mine]. This composite action influences various aspects of the poetry—the syntax is dense, the lines long, the poems block-like. Sharp description and copious examples prevail, which will please some but leave others complaining of a prosy language or a perceived lack of form. Graber's book also represents a restoration of a different sort: it marks the resumption of the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poetry, under the new editorship of Paul Muldoon.

A few of Graber's poems deserve special mention, starting with her excursions across intellectual history: the opening poem, "Tolle! Lege!", is an idea-constellation deriving from Augustine, Issa, William James, and St Paul. Other poems address Linnaeus or, in the two final poems, the contemporary poets Stephen Dunn and Gerald Stern. Alternately, they evoke the films of Jim Jarmusch or Werner Herzog. Walter Benjamin, Joseph Brodsky, and Milan Kundera represent this author's more European literary inspirations. "The Drunkenness of Noah," which some readers may remember from The New Yorker, is "after Jean-Louis Chré tien," particularly his Hand to Hand: Listening to the Work of Art. This poem memorably ranges from scenes of human frailty to more aspiring views of our species ("Even in our silence, / we are told, we carry the Word"). The opening image, of a friend's father passed out and exposed in his recliner, establishes the Noah parallel. It is soon matched by the institutionalization of the speaker's mother, who in her madness seems naked, "a soul caught out in the open not wearing / anything at all." The images or scenes can be gritty or pleasingly common in Graber's poetry, such as the crumpled Pabst cans here and, elsewhere, a "red sleeve from Netflix" and "Ziplocs of Pepperidge Farm Goldfish." One speaker has just locked herself out of an apartment complex's laundry room. Yet there is also a gentleness in the narration, a quiet dignity in the deeds: the crazed mother, we are told, has gone to "the kind of place / someone very tired goes to rest," and the neighborhood children routinely cover that drunken father with his fallen shirt. These moments illustrate well what a later poem speaks of as the "weight / & roll of the ordinary-fantastic."

The title work, consisting of an opening poem and twelve subsequent "books," anchors the collection at its center point. Engaging with Marcus Aurelius, these "books" (actually poems of about twenty to twenty-five lines that align with the twelve books of Aurelius' Meditations) present a sequence of reflections on mortality, memory, and consolations— of being able to touch "whatever remains," or the prospect of parenthood. In examining the essence of our living, Graber worthily evokes her classical interlocutor: "It is a shame / to be surprised if it has been, after all, a good thing to have been born." The comment captures well that mix of insouciance and sententiousness that emerges in other poems: "We don't want to be lonely but we are. Disappointment? / More like the promise of a disappointment we're disappointed hasn't come."

For all of the historical surveying and philosophical scrutinizing in The Eternal City, it becomes clear that these are strategies for self-orientation and renewal. The voices work toward a growing self-awareness, an openness to experience. The prospect of new life in one's family helps one to stare more unflinchingly into the past "& not be bent," and the poems' dramas of transmogrification, migration, and conversion have similar goals. "Tell yourself / something you have no faith in has already begun to occur," says one speaker, resiliently and maybe, just maybe, a little hopefully.

Most writers cherish some ambition or other, and poets often take it to extreme levels. Why write poems unless one intends to write great poems, asks Donald Hall in "Poetry and Ambition." In other words, many a poet dreams of scaling Mount Parnassus, and surveying the rest of us from that exalted spot. Seamus Heaney captures the lyrically inspired, illumined writing experience familiar to poets, and the uninspired darkness surrounding it, in his poem "North": "Expect aurora borealis / in the long foray / but no cascade of light." I speak cautiously, therefore, when saying that one virtue of Todd Davis' poetry is its reliability, a word of damning praise for a poet if ever there was one. I do not mean it so. I speak of his poetry as reliable because, most simply, I encounter his poems in literary journals frequently, and am always glad for what is found there. There is also, in considering The Least of These overall, a steady reliability or, better, a faithfulness and consistency as the author returns to the natural scenes and home fires to which his art is clearly dedicated.

Surrounded by nature, Davis' speakers find patterns and make metaphors. They often read the dark wood or the outgoing or incoming seasons as mortal intimation or with hints of spiritual allegory found in Bonaventure's The Mind's Journey to God. Davis refers to the author-saint, next to the fireweed and lilies of the field. The "necessity of growing old," in a poem addressed Galway Kinnell, emerges from the "bald fact that a month from now / all this beauty will crumble," while elsewhere the vehicle and tenor of the metaphor are reversed, so that the soul's coming and going is "like a kettle of kestrel that fly up against a ridge / and back out along its face," or time passes "like the cattail's unraveling after its growth is spent."

More precisely, Davis forges intense observation with the revelatory, akin to Dante's celebrated realism in his epic about the afterlife. Some poems resemble Luci Shaw's carefully articulated spiritual geographies. Nature for these speakers can seem the "church of the osprey"; blackbirds bring to mind the sparrows of Matthew's gospel. Mainly metaphor becomes a means to see more deeply, and apprehend better the bustling worlds or micro-worlds there:

I want to know how to see inside a thing,
understand the contour of its shapeliness, see the stars float

in each cell of the hickory, […]

The collection's most political poem, "On the eve of the Iraqi invasion, my wife says," features air that is "too warm, / invasive as well," and Davis smoothly marshals the natural imagery to support a protesting voice. Some poems feature the rehearsal or recasting of biblical incidents or characters in natural settings, and these fusions can be striking: "Weasel wears the happy face of Jesus, yolk smeared / at the smiling corners of his mouth." Another begins by asking what if Adam, and not Eve, first ate of the fruit? Several poems describe, enact, or otherwise respond to works by the American painter Andrew Wyeth, and one, dedicated to the poet and Iraq war veteran Brian Turner, movingly reacts to post-traumatic stress and poems sent in the wake of it.

To his credit, Davis also interrogates poets' over-easy fashioning of metaphorical lessons from their surroundings. In "None of This Could be Metaphor," he imagines dolphins leaping, out in deeper waters and away from humans, "not for some abstract notion / of joy, but because it feels good to lift the body / out of the arms of the sea." Of course the complexities of representing things compromise this claim. Does a notion of joy, even negatively presented, belong at all in a line about the dolphin's primal, instinctive act? And notice how quickly metaphors break the surface, so to speak, with those "arms of the sea." Another poem ends with a stark interpretive crossroads, a choice between "the voice of God, / or the simple sound of wind / among turning leaves."

Occasionally readers may raise an eyebrow or mutter a brief "eh?" When Davis writes that "fatty tumor's bump—/ is simply another way for the light to get out," I find that the upbeat solution does not quite ring true. The whimsy inadequately matches the serious circumstance. A few lines suffer from wordiness or blandness ("Blood fresh from the body / is so brilliant.") or portentousness: "Must we always take a life / to feed a life?" Yet that particular poem ends strongly. The last lines remain prose-inflected but with a dramatic sense, not of the action itself but of the speaker's true regard for it: "I wonder if this / is thanksgiving I feel, Lord, or regret for having to harvest one more thing?" Truly, these are mild criticisms, and ones perhaps unavoidable in such an ample collection. (Davis' book is fifty pages longer than Graber's.) For The Least of These at its best, check out especially "Veil," "Accident," "Theodicy," and "The Sleep of Pears," with their confident succession of images and quiet but sturdy voices.

Brett Foster is associate professor of English at Wheaton College. His first collection of poems, The Garbage Eater, has just been published by Northwestern University Press.

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