Hayes Davis

Let Our Eyes Linger Hayes Davis

Let Our Eyes Linger delves deeply into the author's life as son, grandson, father, husband, artist, and schoolteacher while illuminating currents of racial identity and the plight of other black men. These include Jim, the runaway slave from Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, who speaks here in his own in poems that deepen one of the most complicated and controversial characters in American Literature. Reginald Dwayne Betts calls Let Our Eyes Linger "a testament to how the stories we tell ourselves to get through the day can become the poetry that speaks to more than our own existence." Joshua Wiener praises poems "that dramatize the contingencies of family; of its direct influence on the kinds of language we speak...that draw honestly the flight of eros from the domestic scene, as well as the endurance of love & devotion." Toi Derricote writes that "Davis' poems invite comparisons with Robert Hayden and Gwendolyn Brooks' poems of 20th century family life."