A Trick of Sunlight

 Delighted to get my hands on another volume of Dick Davis's poems – A Trick of Sunlight: Poems 2001-2005 – at a reasonable price (and from an English bookseller). The first poem in the collection is this:

"The heart has its abandoned mines . . ."
Old workings masked by scrub and scree.
Sometimes, far, far beneath the surface
An empty chamber will collapse;
But to the passer-by the change
Is almost imperceptible:
A leaf's slight tremor, or a stone
Dislodged into the vacant shaft.

With its tight, concise form and vivid actualisation of metaphor, it reminded me of a poet I'd never before thought of in connection with Dick Davis – Kay Ryan, as in poems like 'Chinese Foot Chart' –

Every part of us
alerts another part.
Press a spot in
the tender arch and
feel the scalp
twitch. We are no
match for ourselves
but our own release.
Each touch
uncatches some
remote lock. Look,
boats of mercy
embark from
our heart at the
oddest knock.

Davis's collection takes its title from this rather beautiful little poem, on a theme (its possibility, its impossibility, its illusory nature, its fleetingness, its reality) that is close to the poet's heart – 

Happiness

The weirdest entry in our lexicon,
The word whose referent we never know –
A river valley from a Book of Hours
Somewhere in southern Europe long ago.

Or once, to someone walking by the Loire,
A trick of sunlight on a summer's day
Revealed the Virgin in rococo clouds:
The peasants in the fields knelt down to pray.