Books Books
Category: Ebooks, Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 72
ISBN: 9781854115751
Publication date: June 4, 2012
Price: £8.99
Category: Ebooks, Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 72
ISBN: 9781854115973
Publication date: June 4, 2012
Price: £7.19
Out of stock
“He is a thoughtful, meditative, serious poet and well worth reading.” – Sheenagh Pugh
Lightning Beneath the Sea is the first collection of poems in English by Grahame Davies, featuring the work that he has honed over the years as he has read them at literary festivals, conferences and events world-wide. He is already well-known for his prize-winning Welsh-language poetry and fiction, and for his scholarly non-fiction. He brings a native warmth, an intimate, conversational tone, and a raised civic awareness to these poems.
He favours rhyme and meter in a number of memorable instances like ‘Capital Bookshop’ and ‘Valley Villanelle’; he can use a longer, narrative, free verse line as in ‘Dangerous’; and there are several ‘found’ poems as in the witty ‘The Complete Index of Welsh Emotions’. He observes other nations with the same keen, ironic eye that he casts on his own country and is as concerned with character and the vagaries of relationships as he is with wider cultural concerns.
Grahame Davies
Poet and psychogeographer, Grahame Davies is the writer of 19 books in Welsh and English, and has won a number of awards, including the Wales Book of the Year. He is much in demand as a librettist for some of the world’s most prominent classical, folk and popular composers and has been nominated for a Novello Award.
A native of Coedpoeth, Wrexham, he holds a degree in English from Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, and a PhD from Cardiff University, honorary D.Litt degrees from Anglia Ruskin University and the University of Aberdeen, an honorary fellowship from the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, and the title of Honorary Professor from the University of Wales Trinity Saint David. In 2023, The King appointed him a Commander of the Royal Victorian Order for his work in organising the music for the Coronation. In 2025, he received the Freedom of the City of London.
The writer of numerous Seren volumes in a variety of genres his most recent book of poetry is A Darker Way (Seren Books, 2025).
“Because Grahame Davies forever makes the perfect imperfect sense, the smallest things exploding into God or Language or the Sea Itself. That’s the surprise of the poem, the ease of a great writer: that you don’t notice the lightning as it emerges from the depths, but what it illuminates. No need to answer. Read the poems. Grahame Davies is a known treasure in Welsh, and now we English-speakers get to share the wealth.”
Bob Holman
“Check here for the meeting of form with freedom, for tradition and for avant garde and for examples of the kind of splendid literary shenanigans that only real poets can succeed at in a verse which melds two cultures into an exciting whole.”
Peter Finch
