Bøger af Nancy Davies

The topics of poems by Nancy Davies leap from beavers to bag-ladies to traveling hippies. Each reveals dramas of ordinary life through a poet's eye, depicting small and large events, scenes, persons and landscapes in fine detail and astonishing metaphor. The forms arise spontaneously, using narrative verse to tell of personal grief and resurrection, but also for the tale of Noah and the Flood; Davies uses descriptive lyrics for nature but also to reveal human suffering and joy; the elegiac mood describing an urban underpass also informs verses about questing. A collection of mature poetry written in mid-career when the author looked back and forward in time, each poem exclaims aha! as Letting the Seasons reveals the universal in each private life.

In this collection of short stories and essays, Nancy Davies, the author The People Decide, steps away from the turmoil of the Oaxaca uprising of 2006 to meticulously evoke intimate human aspects of life in Mexico. As both journalist and poet, she describes the lives of Mexicans riding the stream of cultural change since the onset of the new millennium. Some stories, like "Messages in A Small Town", deal with universals: the unchanging aspects of love, marriage, and betrayal, presented by Davies with the soft humor of lovers using the technology of cell phones to surreptitiously communicate. In the story "The Dogs Were Barking", she explores the sadness and resentment of those left behind, in this case a solitary elderly widow, whose sons left for the United States in pursuit of a better life and were never heard from again. Finally she finds solace with the help of a mysterious boy who appears from the nearby hills and helps the old woman reconnect to her missing children through memories of each one as each appears transfigured, a permanent part of her beloved garden. In "The High Wall" and "The Woman Next Door", Davies approaches the difficulties of immigration from the point of view of the emigrants. A writer comes to Oaxaca to compose her first novel, but a feral cat routinely pees in her garden. The neighbors advise her to poison the cat, but this method is culturally unacceptable to the writer, and she looks for other solutions. In "The Woman Next Door", a middle-aged woman whose elderly husband does not try to integrate or acclimate to their new life, tries to connect with their enigmatic neighbor who is cordial at first, but later appears to be toying with her, an alien in an alien culture she can't quite decipher. Both stories offer intimate explorations of the outsider struggling to assimilate. The Story "Sleeping Beauty", on the other hand, explores the cultural change Mexicans confront in the face of globalization. In a sweet sequence of events, the story introduces us to a sleeping virgin in a coma, a man who travels to his father's village to build a dream bier for the virgin, and a university graduate who becomes his fiancée. In a masterful narrative, Davies leads us, like her characters, from one scene to another until we arrive at a new world-view by accepting the old. These stories and vignettes construct a panoramic view of the human experience via the intimate and mundane. "The universal manifesting in the personal is Davies' forte." -The Oaxaca Reader

In the summer of 1996, two and a half years after the Zapatista armed uprising, Subcomandante Marcos, on behalf of the EZLN welcomed to the Lacandon selva four thousand non-Mexicans, from forty-two different countries, clad not in ski masks but perhaps in the hippie clothing of their parents, retrieved from a quarter century's storage in attic trunks. Along with them came the widow of French President Mitterand, half a dozen world-class writers and intellectuals, and caravans from Pastors For Peace. Invitations were out to Garcia Marquez and Oliver Stone, to attend an upcoming discussion grandly called Encuentro Inter-Continental por la Humanidad y Contra el Neoliberalismo: an intercontinental meeting on behalf of humanity and against the policies of neoliberalism. Marcos knew from the beginning. He waged the first internet war, summoning protection by foreigners, who must not witness government massacres and brutality. Mexico consists of thirty-one states, plus Mexico City. Most Americans scarcely know what occurs south of our border. Some like my friend Frank came upon the scene in Chiapas, Mexico by accident. Those who responded to invitations to assist the Zapatistas in their first years of struggle perhaps knew more, many did not. Some like Emily went for personal escape from impoverished lives. Some of us like Billy went for reasons which in antique times might have been called "a quest". Some like Martin undertook an exalted version of quest. Like Martin, few of us knew what we sought, nor where it might be found. We knew anger, on behalf of those whose lives bordered starvation and extinction; rebellion provided them the only answer. This narrative investigates personal discoveries of Americans who were not repressed, assassinated, imprisoned, penniless, or starving. They were ordinary middle-class people, like you, like me, who went to learn what compels us to attack our governments, compels us to shout Ya Basta, compels us to seek that which we have yet to name. Since 1994 the Zapatistas established their own local good government, their own food supplies, their own education. They survive as an alternative, another way to live and govern. As neoliberalism crumbles around us, the Zapatistas grow stronger. Those of us who witnessed their initial years of struggle were privileged indeed.