In Robin Davidson’s poems we hear the inner voice of someone who’s vulnerable and yet strong, introverted yet keenly observant-these are blessed tensions.
— Adam Zagajewski
 

Mrs. Schmetterling

by Robin Davidson

Robin Davidson's Mrs. Schmetterling is a book of poems like no other. Paired with and inspired by the stunning artwork of Sarah Fisher, this book brings us into the deeply personal yet universally relatable inner world of a woman questioning herself and her life with intelligence and fearlessness. Mrs. Schmetterling thoughtfully and flawlessly hooks onto our inner world with her own, and won't let go. The second Poet Laureate of Houston, Robin Davidson is the writer you've been looking for.

“Lipska’s fascinating, enigmatic character has taken flight under Davidson’s pen. From a complex seed, Ms. Schubert has grown into a blooming tree, a witness of our times that floats across the globe and over historical divides like Virginia Woolfe’s Orlando. She is a-corporeal and intangible, and yet she is real and grounded. Having made closure with the past in the way one puts Christmas decorations away, having become one with her deceased mother, she is on a quest to affirming her new identity in the last six poems of Mrs. Schmetterling. Her metamorphosis from music (Ms. Schubert) to visual arts (Mrs. Butterfly) is completed by her new determination to survive the Covid pandemic. She has waited a long time for this visionary purpose.“
-Alice-Catherine Carls, World Literature Today

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Robin Davidson

Robin Davidson(Photo Credit Pin Lim).jpg

Houston's second Poet Laureate (2015-2017), Robin Davidson is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Kneeling in the Dojo and City that Ripens on the Tree of the World, and the full collection, Luminous Other, recipient of the Ashland Poetry Press 2012 Richard Snyder Memorial Publication Prize. The recipient of Fulbright and NEA awards, she is co-translator with Ewa Elzbieta Nowakowska of two volumes of Ewa Lipska's poems from the Polish, The New Century and Dear Ms. Schubert (Princeton University Press, 2021). She was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2019, and teaches literature and creative writing as professor emeritus of English for the University of Houston-Downtown.

Robin Davidson brings an unusual sense of history, especially as it impacts women, into her own very American poetry. Her work is deeply engendered, and she writes of ordinary women—rooted in earth, reaching for light—caught between personal, social, and historical forces. She is a learned poet—her work rings with the work of photographers, painters, and other poets—who understands the work of poetry to bring light out of darkness and music out of silence. She is a poet of harsh luminosity, spiritual alertness, who has been growing into the fully realized artist she was always meant to become.
— Edward Hirsch