Georgia Jones-Davis on Poets Cafe

The following interview of Georgia Jones-Davis by Lois P. Jones originally aired on KPFK Los Angeles (reproduced with permission).

Biographical Information—Georgia Jones-Davis

Georgia Jones-Davis’s first collection of poems, Blue Poodle (Finishing Line Press), was published in 2011. She grew up in Northern New Mexico and Southern California.

It was as a student studying English at UCLA that Georgia first wrote and published poetry. She set poetry aside when she went into the news business for more than twenty years. Georgia worked as a literary reporter, sub-editor, book review editor and book reviewer. She was one of the founding editors of the Herald Examiner Book Review and an Assistant Book Editor at the Los Angeles Times Book Review for 14 years. Her critical essays have appeared in many publications including The Washington Post, New York Newsday, The Chicago Tribune and Salon.

After leaving the newspaper world, “Poetry,” Georgia says, “came back to me like a long, lost, muddy dog.” Her work has appeared in various publications including West Wind, The Bicycle Review, California Quarterly, Sam Hamill’s website, Poets Against War, Brevities, Nebo and South Bank Poetry, London. New poetry appears this fall in Ascent Aspirations, a Canadian Journal, and Eclipse.

Her interview profiles of poets, including Mary Ruefle (pronounced Roofle) and Stanley Plumly, will be appearing in Poets Quarterly starting this winter. Georgia was honored as one of the Newer Poets 2010 by the Los Angeles Poetry Festival/Beyond Baroque and the Los Angeles County ALOUD Series. She is a former board member of Valley Contemporary Poets, a Los Angeles non-profit, and founder of the Poetry Group at the Grancell Village Jewish Home for the Aging. Georgia Jones-Davis is a member of PEN, California State Poetry Society and the Academy of American Poets.

She is the mother of one daughter, Emily, and lives in Tarzana, California, with her husband and two dogs, Rooby and Lili.

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The Visitors

Three horses—
two roans and a ghostly gray—
muscle across our lawn
at the first light of morning,
stop in the suburban street,
as their breath clouds widen
in cold that knifes.

Fathers in buzz cuts shout across driveways.
We kids wake to urgent voices, commotion,
run outside
followed by sleepy Medusa mothers in pink rollers.

People stand frozen,
electrified
by this vision—
something out of the dead times
when pathways in the tall grasses
were no wider than flanks,
three horses
in the cul-de-sac.

Bart and Scott’s hunter dad
orders a posse of neighbors.
With yells and prods—
golf clubs, butts of rifles—
they herd the horses
into a car port,
block with a red-and-white Rambler.

Bart and Scott once drew me
into their garage
to show off what it was
their dad brought home
from the woods.
In the dark I edged up against an object
bristly, delicate, suspended,
the floor sticky.
When they flicked on the light
I was face to face

with a bruise-eyed buck,
shot and hung
by its hocks,
the head and small antlers swinging downward,
drops of its blood
on the oily concrete.

Fear for the visitors
surges through me

until a Tesuque man
in a white pick-up appears,
its headlights blinding
as a spirit’s eyes.
He carries blankets, rope and reins,
and in monotone chants
the strange names
of what it is he seeks.