The Greatest Literary Project of All Time

Ryan Davidson is, in the most positive sense of the word, alienated. A native of Scotland but a longtime resident of America and a world traveler, in his poetry he is always an expatriate—an engaged, bothered outsider mastering a new dialect even as he longs for a home he can never quite locate. “I think I left home,” he writes, “to go home to start a new home / or something equally improbable.” If he is at rest anywhere, it is in his stance of urgent ambivalence—his commitment to explore, in acute detail, the uncertain summons of place, nation, knowing, desire, and romance. In his brave attempts to connect over the borders and barriers that separate us, he proves himself a truly international writer, a poet of promise and grace.

-David Groff- Winner of 2002 National Poetry Prize for Theory of Devolution

Under What Stars is Ampersand Books’ first foray into poetry. In times like these it is necessary to turn back—to look at where we were, where we are, and to where we are going; this is true in poetry, in literature and in general. As often as these poems hearken back to men long dead and women long disappeared, they look forward to a new understanding. These poems strive for the only sort of communication possible, of real communication possible—that of observation.

In an effort to connect with the people and women of a life uprooted, Under What Stars has a feeling of homelessness, but a hopeful one. These poems move around the globe. Vermont, New York, Japan, Austria, Italy, Serbia, Russia, England, Scotland, France, The Netherlands—the world, in the fullest sense of that word, is wandered in these poems. Tangential and elegant as Hoagland, with the ramble of Gilbert and the Beats this poetry eludes being derivative by being reverential.