Trespassing on the Mount of Olives

“Readers like me who have less command of Holy Writ than the author may be most taken with Davis’s skill and ardor in his (fitting) humanization . . . of the collection’s secondary characters. . . . Davis asks: ‘What does the man cradling / the water jar know of the Teacher?’ The answer in part is ‘Likely . . . nothing / more than where to stand and how / to hold the jar and to be watching / for two Galileans who will enter the city.’ The man’s a mortal like any of us, going about quotidian life, only to be stunned by the presence of a miraculous transcendence. We are stunned in turn by the deftness, magnanimity, and persuasiveness that Davis brings to this extraordinary sequence.”


—Sydney Lea, author of Six Sundays Toward a Seventh





“Sometimes clever, always thoughtful, and, on occasion, glorious, Davis’s poems shine with a unique sensitivity to the Gospels. They are filled, quite simply, with belief. Reading them softened me to the possible presence of Jesus in my wayward life.”


—Paul J. Willis, author of Somewhere to Follow





“In Trespassing on the Mount of Olives, Davis explains, ‘They are the story’s unnamed / who move me . . . since without / them . . . there is no story.’ Through persona poems and first-person narratives, the contemporary and biblical intersect with insight and humor. . . . What follows are spiritual and social examinations: ‘How to clear out a self from a self,’ how to protect the environment, how to face doubt and mortality, and, ultimately, how to ‘do whatever he tells you,’ even if that means, according to Davis, writing poems. Thank God for the latter.”


—Marjorie Maddox, author of True, False, None of the Above