One Way to Reconstruct the Scene (Yale Series of Younger Poets)

the long version

Richard Hugo has selected William Virgil Davis's *One Way to Reconstruct the Scene* as the 1979 winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. In his foreword to the volume Hugo says: "William Virgil Davis is a poet who, when he writes, contends with a loving self who wants to render the world as found. His battle is the classic one, the memory versus the imagination. . . . 'Memory is the first property of loss,' Davis tells us, and that may be true. At least it is worth considering. Certainly a scene, no matter how initially unattractive, reconstructed lovingly in active language posing as passive recall is a true property of gain. Davis believes in and works to create a world we can humanely attend the second time around, and his poems often provide that second chance."