Poetry
Category: Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 64
ISBN: 9781781721117
Publication date: March 28, 2013
Price: £9.99
Out of stock
Celebrate the R. S Thomas centenary with this excellent volume that draws together 52 poems (2 previously unpublished) by Thomas to his wife, the distinguished artist Mildred E Eldridge – known as Elsi – from early meditations on their relationship to the elegies following her death.
This revelatory collection dramatises the changing dynamics of a complex and vitally creative relationship. Poems on marriage, cohabitation, birthdays, anniversaries, family and bereavement offer a candid portrait of emotional intimacy, desire, the painful process of ageing, and of loss. Elsi is a complex presence here: to the ‘to’ in the title signifies not only ‘addressed to’ but also ‘about’, ‘with an eye on’, ‘to be overheard by’, and even in one case ‘from’.
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.
