Foliage (version 2)

A poet who lost his foot jumping a freight train, who spent winters in Michigan jails by choice, who wandered from Wales to the Klondike and back this man knew hardship the way most people know their own kitchen. Yet from that rough life came verses of startling gentleness, poems that notice the particular way light moves through leaves and the secret patience of growing things. Foliage collects Davies' observations of the natural world with an outsider's fierce attention, the kind of gaze that only arrives after you've slept under open skies and learned the value of a single unspoiled morning. These are poems written by a man who chose poverty to satisfy his restlessness, and found in leaves and branches something that mimicked the freedom he'd been seeking all along.