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Joy Davidman. A Naked Tree: Love Sonnets to C. S. Lewis and Other Poems. Edited by Don W. King. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2015. xvi + 320 pp. $30.00, ISBN 9780802872883.
Joy Davidman is best known today as the wife of C. S. Lewis, her untimely death poignantly portrayed in the play and subsequent film Shadowlands. Many also know of her through the touching reflections on death and the problem of pain that Lewis penned in A Grief Observed, drawn from a journal that Lewis kept during Davidman's struggle with cancer. But Davidman was also an important writer in her own right. In 1936, when she was not yet 21 years old, Davidman first had poems published in the prestigious journal Poetry. This success led her to produce a complete volume of poetry-Letters to a Comrade, which won the Yale Younger Poets' competition and was published that year (1938). In addition to her poetry, Davidman wrote fiction (two published novels) as well as numerous film, theater, and book reviews, serving as poetry editor for New Masses, the weekly magazine of the Communist Party of the United States of America. She edited and published War Poems of the United Nations (1943), and in 1954 she published Smoke on the Mountain: An Interpretation of the Ten Commandments, a volume for which C. S. Lewis wrote the preface.
A Naked Tree: Love Sonnets to C. S. Lewis and Other Poems represents part of a series of books written and edited by Don W. King (former editor of CSR) that focus on "C. S. Lewis and the two women writers who most influenced his life and poetry: Ruth Pitter and Joy Davidman."4 Three of these books relate specifically to Davidman. The first, Out of My Bone (Eerdmans, 2009), is a collection of Davidman's letters, many previously unpublished, as well as her autobiographical essay "The Longest Way Round." The second is A Naked Tree, and the third, Yet One More Spring (Eerdmans, 2015), will be the first comprehensive critical study of Davidman's writing-her poetry, nonfiction, and fiction.
A Naked Tree: Love Sonnets to C. S. Lewis and Other Poems brings to light dozens of previously unknown poems by Davidman, along with the just over seventy poems...