Poetry
Category: Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 64
ISBN: 9781854114938
Publication date: March 15, 2009
Price: £7.99
Out of stock
The poems in Damian Walford Davies’ first full collection are fascinated by serrations of light, parodies of shadow, and all shades in between.
The bare flesh of a 1951 boxing match, luminous shirts in a country lane, surreal urban attire and the scales of a dying fish illuminate the volume with suits of light. This collection doesn’t shy away from the disturbing and violent: plague pits on the Piccadilly line, a landscape illuminated by atomic afterblast, an aria sung to the accompaniment of artillery fire. And yet these poems also celebrate precious interrelations: inscriptions of love on an effigy, charged mementos, the delicate breaking of ice. Irony and play give edge to the vision.
The volume contains a number of sequences, including ‘Kilvert’, which responds in a pared-down voice to some unnerving entries in the famous Victorian diary; the experimental ‘Aerial’, the result of a Cessna flight above ancient ground; and ‘Ideal City’, a series of letters to a visionary architect.
Damian Walford Davies
Damian Walford Davies was born in 1971 in Aberystwyth. He is Deputy Vice-Chancellor at Cardiff University and was formerly Head of the Department of English and Creative Writing at Aberystwyth University. A poet, librettist and academic specialising in the intersections between literary and political culture in the Romantic period, he is the author of several Seren collections. He writes creatively and critically in both English and Welsh. His academic interests and creative methods intermix: narrative and an interest in counterfactuals are key to the former as research is to the latter. His poetry is prompted and informed by deep histories of place, cartography and psychogeography. His work to date is a concerted exploration of historical terror and trauma, marginalised voices, gaps in the record and the availability of the past through the use of the single-voice perspective of the dramatic monologue, through which troubled social and psychological worlds are conjured. He also has a keen interest in the relation between poetry and visual art. A broadcaster and presenter, he regards performance as a core element of his poetry.
His collection Viva Bartali!, a biography-in-verse of the great Italian cyclist Gino Bartali was published by Seren in 2023.
