"Ever since I was a child, / I wanted to spend my life in praise," writes poet and nurse Cortney Davis in her New & Selected Poems. Here she looks hard at the body-at life, death, rape, abuse, disease, fear. Then she says, "I bless you with my fingertips"-not only to her patients, but to her readers, to us. "At death, / you become wholly mine," she says. And she tells us amazing stories, metaphors for passion, family, for love, for suffering: "This is the body I love-the one that laughs down death's trumpet." I love these poems and the poet-nurse who writes them. She is compassionate, curious, detached, fascinated, candid, in love with the human body- its drips and weight-and the life it carries. Praise Cortney Davis and her marvelous poems. Read them now.

- Hilda Raz, author of List & Story

Over the years, Cortney Davis' vocation as a nurse has placed her with human beings who find themselves over the threshold of injury or illness, or on the threshold of dying, at times crossing over. Her vocation as a poet has allowed her to take these liminal moments, or hours, with patients and turn them into poems written with fearlessness, clarity, and compassion. Both the work of healing and the work of poetry require a capacity for attention that is both generous and strict. Davis' poems, which have these qualities, place us intimately in the midst of life. In one poem, herself now the patient, she writes:

. . . how it was sometimes the feminine

my body sought

and other times the masculine

how necessary both

the tender gentle sympathy

and other times

the strength and deference

that lifted and held and did not let me fall

You will find just these qualities of tenderness and strength in the poems selected for I Hear Their Voices Singing.

- Margaret Gibson, Connecticut Poet Laureate