A Review of The Nail in the Tree by Carol Ann Davis

Carol Ann Davis and her family had recently moved to Newtown, Connecticut when twenty first-graders and six educators were gunned down on December 4, 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School. During the massacre, her youngest son was home with his father, and the older was in his fourth-grade classroom, but “through an accident of zoning,” neither was a student at Sandy Hook. 

The Nail in the Tree begins with an explanation of the title: Davis tells the story of her older son, Willem, now in high school and an activist, explaining how he does his best to make sense of the shooting:

Willem explained that the way he felt about the tragedy was similar to a tree with a nail driven into its skin. As the tree grows, the nail becomes a part of it, a gnarled knot in a trunk that nonetheless grows tall and strong. You would not take out the nail, would you, Mom? he asked me. At some point you have to love the nail.

Davis’s collection, part of Tupelo Press’s Life in Art series, is a thorough examination of that nail and that tree. Chapters are labeled by both title and time — "the day of the shooting,” “in the year that comes after,” “two years before,” “three years after”— revolving around this one incident and attempting to make sense not so much of the violence itself, but of its repercussions vibrating through her family's life. What does it say that the “not-suffering, happy-ending story” means being the child not shot, the family not destroyed?

Davis’s cyclical way of writing and processing works well as she deals with these vibrations, tying them to other lived experiences, her writing, and other art media. As Davis says, “Art is experience’s contingency,” and much of the book is spent interacting with numerous artists and their work — Rumi, Hélène Cixous, Georgia O’Keefe, and Tomas Tranströmer, to name a few — attempting to deconstruct how they have used their art to understand the world. She writes of Eva Hesse, “It’s clear she expects only to get closer to what she envisioned, never to arrive at it,” and that’s what these essays feel like: a constant circling nearer to what Davis is looking at, but never quite arriving. This is not so much a criticism of Davis's book as a way of understanding it: this book is not about the arrival but about the circling — the attempts to make meaning rather than the meaning itself. 

For instance in “On Brotherhood and Crucifixion: two years before,” Davis recalls incidents from her childhood, writing how difficult it must have been to be an older brother to her and her siblings, “to shield us from the unaccountable as it assuaged us in various forms throughout our childhoods.” Later she realizes, “nothing I can do takes back that I was not only witness but cause of his suffering. . . . This brings me close — close — to what the feeling of being a brother must be.” Circling, not arriving. 

Davis writes a lot about the unknowable things we cannot express, looking at essential paradoxes: how a thing can be both wild and tame, inside and outside of ourselves, taken and not taken, pursuing and leading, and general chaos structured as order. At times her writing captures that inexpressible expression, but at others it feels like an evasion, the words purposefully hiding their meaning, although maybe this too is another paradox she’s exploring, another yin and yang. 

For example, In “Loose Thread: four years after” Davis writes of her children in conflict with some of their friends:

The way they argue over a narrative they all frame differently has me thinking about the ethics of the image, how a narrative sometimes detaches the image from its surroundings; in the case of argument, images can be produced to substitute for reason, to provide a tidy narrative, or to illustrate a wrong deeply felt, among many possibilities. The image’s symbolism detaches it from the realities of the experience and from its original ethical framework.

Phrases like “ethics of the image” and “the image’s symbolism” and “original ethical framework” feel more like strings of words than intelligible concepts, like a hiding place for Davis, as she explores the issues while trying to make sense, unable to circle too close. Her work shines brightest when she does deal with the concrete: the nail in the tree, the act of putting a child on a bus, minding a radio tower at the beach as a young woman handling calls about drownings. Two pages after the above quote, she admits to her fear in more tangible terms:

These days I live in fear of the catalog in poems, once a friend for its precision and the accretion of depth, even for its potential surprise: I am fond of apples, tomatoes, and elocution exercises. But now, familiar with a catalog that lists names of children lost one after the other, I’m leery of the harm cataloging can do, grammar seeming to make inevitable their senseless murders, reducing their deaths into nothing more than a list.

Here Davis circles so closely and so specifically. We know her emotion — fear — and we see real things — lists, apples — and what she likes about these lists — precision and depth. This is followed by the gut punch of the list of the kids and “the harm cataloging can do.” 

In the end, Davis doesn’t necessarily answer her questions about art and life, chaos and order, but she’s smart to realize, “What I want of my art is not at all what will come out of it,” which is where the reader comes in. At the end of the book I asked myself, What did come of it? What has this art taught me?, which demonstrates that Tupelo’s Art in Life series, and Davis’s work in particular, extends well beyond words on a page.