BOOK REVIEW

Noah Davis’s The Last Beast We Revel In

By Daniel Lassell     June 20, 2025

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The Last Beast We Revel In
Noah Davis
Fort Lee: CavanKerry Press (2025)
96 pp. $18 (paperback)

When reading the first few opening poems from The Last Beast We Revel In, the second poetry collection from Noah Davis, I was first reminded of W.S. Merwin’s Garden Time, a meditation on mortality and the natural world, words coursing through pages as roots build quietly beneath a tree. So too does this new collection from Noah Davis. It should come as no surprise, then, to find out that the author’s father is the renowned nature poet, Todd Davis. They both write about nature, about the Pennsylvania landscape, and about love. Take these opening lines from the collection’s third poem “Places Familiar”:

[…] Because everyone here smiles

with their mouths closed, the people I love
walk home counting in their heads

what neighbors they couldn’t find
in the dark.

Here, Davis references a region’s personality, one that is hardened and hardworking. Like his first collection, Of This River, this second book from Davis is also concerned with the Appalachian landscape along the Allegheny Front, its people and its natural wonder.

The book, to me, has two primary modes: one is meditative, sparse, and reserved; and the other is unbidden, bombastic, visceral, and at times marked with a violent intensity. While these two modes seem—at surface level—odd bedfellows, they are perfectly encapsulating of the natural world, which is at once tranquil and roiling. The sparse, meditative mode of the collection recalls the poetry of Charles Simic, Wendell Berry, W.S. Merwin, and the early work of the author’s father, Todd Davis. On the other side of the coin, the intensity mode recalls the epic poetry collections of Rebecca Gayle Howell’s Render / An Apocalypse, Alicia Suskin Ostriker’s The Volcano Sequence, or Yusef Komunyakaa’s Warhorses.

The resulting cocktail makes this collection robustly exquisite and delightfully visceral, and yet at times, also quietly surrealistic, like a breather after a storm. There is also varying tension at work: sometimes word choice, verb choice, and syntax take the background as image and the tension within that constructed image take precedence. For example, take these surprising lines from “On the last day of rifle season”:

deer come off the ridge,
                              like sisters

                    who haven’t stood in the same room
                    in fifteen years

Deeply imagistic, the collection reminds me of the very best of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, in that the quaint becomes centerpiece, and the natural world—too often forgotten in today’s corporate-focused society—takes the spotlight in what seems an intensive turning toward love. The book at its core seems to be a love poem to the speaker’s beloved, as referenced in these lines from “Hound Heart”:

Beloved, the hound
in my chest scrambles
into the absence of you.

This stanza, to me, is a beautiful, uniquely poignant depiction of sex, of the animal self. Davis turns a topic that might otherwise in the hands of an amateur writer become crude or cliché into an act that simultaneously connects with and bows down to the natural world, while also recognizing the speaker’s beloved as part and parcel to that constellation.

There is also a sound-driven quality in the collection, with poems such as “Poem Found on Three Springs Run,” where each line is packed with lush rhythm and sound:

[…] and the moon below,
between the light that sticks
to fingers and the back
of my beloved’s neck
[…] like water through
this hollow, follow
the crease to the unbraided
language she speaks

Here, the B alliteration in “below,” “between,” and “back” and the S alliteration in “she speaks” all serve to drive both image and sound, while simultaneously the rhyme in “hollow” and “follow” smack the reader with sonic imperative.

Many love poems weave throughout the collection, some even thematic with titles like “Bee Heart,” “Hound Heart,” or “Heron Heart”. These poems string together with an observance of the natural world. One of my favorites is “Mountain Salve”:

My beloved crushes nettles
into red sauce when her muscles
ache, chews fennel
when her stomach roils,
and when I slice my thumb
like the ripest plum
she wraps its two halves
in burdock leaves

Here, the attention to each plant’s name is as important as the actions therein, a marker of a poet who has fully consumed the landscape that surrounds. The natural landscape in “Mountain Salve” heals the speaker and the speaker’s beloved, as they in turn heal each other.

Or take “Trout Heart,” another love poem in the collection, where the speaker opens the poem with an insightful fishing scene:

When the trout is hooked deep
in his throat and held above the river,

water on his jaw is first more water
than blood, then more blood

than water, until only water is left.

Here, the image of water and blood, as with its double meaning of family and not, become in conversation with each other in the larger realm of love. Davis follows this poem with a prose poem with similar obsession, “Portrait of the Beloved with Rain,” which has an amazing ending: “My beloved does with me what rain does with streams.”

Hunting and fishing are core to the subject and inclination in The Last Beast We Revel In. Nearly every poem touches on these topics in some way, which to readers who have grown up in a rural landscape, it might seem as familiar as a morning’s coffee cup, but for those who haven’t, it might be perplexing at first. But considering that the title of the collection has much to do about bestiary revelry, it connects quite well. Take, for example, these opening lines from “In April with my beloved”:

I find the skeletons of deer that died
by the stream and sit watching purple moths
crawl down the long slides of their spines.

Here, the obsession with hunting is on display. Another poem that engages with this is the ending of “Mercy Song,” with these lines: “until all this mercy // runs out.” Here, the killing is a mercy, while also the end of killing could be a mercy.

Then there are the consequences of spending so much time outdoors, acknowledged in the standout poem “Tick Triptych,” which explores a differing relationship with ticks in each sequence, first with the speaker’s father, then with his beloved, then with himself. Here’s an excerpt from the final sequence in “Tick Triptych”:

In drinking,
the tick is now
more me
than it

The Last Beast We Revel In, as a collection, is divided into three unnamed sections, which to me build toward the ending poem, “The Last Beast We Revel In.” This final poem of the collection, the titular poem, is a crescendo. It spans several pages long, weaving and dodging with intensity. It is a poem about dogs hunting a bear while the speaker meditates on what masculinity hands down in teaching children to hunt. Here are a few lines of “The Last Beast We Revel In” as an example:

How dogs want to kill bears.
We talk to these women

we’ve buried ourselves in.
Swallowed cups of them.

Said sentences like,
I need you in my mouth

like milk. And we’ve
been laughed at and slapped

and kissed because of those sentences.
But now we’re waiting for the night

to break, for that dog with the best nose
in someone else’s truck to smell where the bear

stepped. We wait for this dog to cross the trail

Here is a portion of the poem, pages later, that showcases its rushing, visceral imagery:

The hounds run up the stream to the next ridge.
We drive off Laurel Mountain, and back up Buck Mountain,

radio antennas bent like skeletons of goldenrod
after the storm, hoping to beat the bear

to the top. Pistols at our sides and rifles, silent and clean,
propped between legs.

The poem “The Last Beast We Revel In” makes sense as the titular poem for the collection; it is simultaneously bombastic, momentum-driven, and image heavy, an ending that takes the collection out with a bang.

As I consider my overall interpretation of The Last Beast We Revel In, I can’t help but return to the book’s epigraph, which is from the wonderfully talented poet Gabrielle Calvocoressi: “From whose flanks comes this world’s dark lowing?” This quote appears in the poem “Exogenous” from Calvocoressi’s first book, The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart, which unwaveringly depicts the world as it is, rather than how humans wish it to be.

Similar to Calvocoressi’s book, Davis’s second poetry collection, The Last Beast We Revel In, spurns an idyllic lens. It is a rare collection, indeed, to depict the world—specifically, the natural world—with such bold clarity of interpretation and yet, despite its occasional violence, an embraced wonder. It permeates the whole and leaves me, as a reader, gratified.

​The Last Beast We Revel In by Noah Davis

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DANIEL LASSELL is the author of Frame Inside a Frame (Texas Review Press, 2025) and Spit (Wheelbarrow Books, 2021), winner of the 2020 Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize. He grew up in Kentucky and now lives in Bloomington, Indiana.