Books Books
Category: Ebooks, Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 72
ISBN: 9781781727089
Publication date: July 3, 2023
Price: £9.99
Category: Ebooks, Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 72
ISBN: 9781781727096
Publication date: July 15, 2023
Price: £7.99
Out of stock
“A fascinating, original take on the epic life and career of an Italian hero.” – John Foot, author of Pedalare! Pedalare!
Inspired by the lyrical, mythic mode of Italian sports journalism from the 1930s to the 1950s, Viva Bartali! is a biography-in-verse of the iconic Italian cyclist Gino Bartali (1914—2000), two-time winner of the Tour de France (1938, 1948), known both as ‘Gino the Pious’ because of his fervent Catholic faith, and as Ginettaccio (‘Gino the Terrible’), owing to the short shrift he so often gave the Press.
Conjuring Bartali at crux moments in his personal and professional career, through joy and tragedy, defeat and victory, the collection places us alongside the young rider proving his mettle and adding to his palmarès in the edgy atmosphere of Mussolini’s Fascist Italy, whose political ideology he loathed. From amateur races to the professional one-day classics and on to Tour de France glory, Bartali is seen alongside his fellow riders as both vulnerable body and élite athlete; both cycling’s hard man and fond and bereaved father; both kneeling believer and climbing god.
The collection gives us an insight into the complex relationship that underpinned his great rivalry with the campionissimo (‘champion of champions’) Fausto Coppi – the ‘man of glass’ against Bartali’s ‘man of iron’. It was a rivalry that a divided a nation and defined a sport. We are with Bartali at the 1948 Tour de France when he takes a phone call from the Italian prime minister, who asks him to do his part in diffusing a political crisis that could have tipped over into violence. And we witness his remarkable secret missions in the saddle as a courier throughout Tuscany during World War 2, carrying forged identity documents that helped save the lives of hundreds of Italian Jews. It was a deed he never spoke about – one for which he was named ‘Righteous Among the Nations’ by Yad Vashem in 2013.
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.
“Davies has a finely calibrated visual sense and mixes registers well… There’s a pleasingly obsessional focus on concrete detail throughout, and a desire to recreate and memorialise Bartali’s world and the competitors, family members and marginal figures who peopled it.”
Declan Ryan, The Times Literary Supplement
‘A remarkable man indeed – and remarkable poems, too, which capture the complexity of their chosen subject with intelligence, sensitivity, and style.’
Mab Jones, Buzz Magazine
“A fascinating, original take on the epic life and career of an Italian hero.”
John Foot, author of ‘Pedalare! Pedalare!’
“Stylish and sophisticated, this poetic record of an extraordinary life confirms Damian Walford Davies’ status as one of the finest poets writing in Wales today.”“Stylish and sophisticated, this poetic record of an extraordinary life confirms Damian Walford Davies’ status as one of the finest poets writing in Wales today.”
Jem Poster
“Like Bartali himself this collection is one-off; an exhilarating feat of lyric compression and imagination that pays homage to the great cycling legend. With tremendous formal and imagist dexterity, Walford Davies carries the reader through the hairpin bends of a life lived as a race against the shadows of poverty, grief and political jeopardy. This is poetry of breakneck speeds and switchbacks that, like all tests of mettle, yields moments of grace and beauty when least expected: Viva Bartali!”
Tiffany Atkinson
