Jabuticaba: Poems of Emigration

Much attention has been paid to the experience of immigrants, but what about emigrants? What might motivate someone to leave a comfortable and familiar homeland to face the challenges of a new language, a new culture, and a new community. This was the choice of poet and teacher, Roger Davis, so touchingly described in this collection of his poetry. Motivated by his sense of the oneness of humanity, and curious to experience its diversity, he left his home in the mountains of Virginia, emigrating to Brasília, Brazil, where he taught for nine years at Escola das Nações, the School of the Nations. These poems, written in a variety of traditional forms but in an accessible, even conversational style, reflect the emotional outpouring released by his emigration-- the anguish of leaving family and friends behind; the excitement of new horizons; the challenges of a new language and culture; the joys and frustrations of teaching in a school with children of many nationalities; and the feeling of homesickness, followed by a sense of belonging, followed by a new homesickness upon emigrating from his new home back to the U.S. With an introduction by James Sacco, one of the cofounders of Escola das Nações, this collection of over 50 poems, including some written or translated by Davis in his new language, Portuguese, will give the reader a taste of the emigrant experience and an understanding of our common humanity across cultural differences, as in these lines from the poem "On Culture Shock":

Our differences are many, but never as great

As the things we all share in common.

When you meet a new culture, the biggest shock yet

Is discovering what it means to be human!