Poetry
Category: Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 64
ISBN: 9781781722220
Publication date: February 16, 2015
Price: £9.99
A shattered Judas Iscariot – that byword for betrayal – tells his own story in Damian Walford Davies’ compelling and finely wrought new collection from Seren.
We follow Judas over the course of five days as he moves through first-century Jerusalem trying to make sense of the bewildering events surrounding the life and execution of Jesus. But this is a man for whom the future is as real as his anguished and traumatized present, and for whom the Arab-Israeli conflict is as urgent as the tension between the Romans and Jews. Emphasising our compulsion to create, and challenge, gospel truths, Judas gives voice to man caught up in the promise and violence of history.
In short-lined, intensely suggestive dramatic monologues, Damian Walford Davies vividly summons moments of fear and swagger, doubt and passion, despair and nonchalance as an outlaw Judas finds himself haunted by his chequered and extraordinary past. Familiar stories are rendered strange and uncanny as the reader is caught in multiple ironies. As striking as the unnerving images on the news loops of our TV and computer screens, these poems locate us on the hazardous streets of a divided city with a companion-guide who shares with us his own troubling and troubled version of history.
Drawing on conflicting representations of Judas spanning twenty centuries, this chain of poems sets out to challenge orthodoxies and easy pieties. Judas offers an imaginative map of ancient enmities – and dares to hint at resolutions – in the form of a dramatic autobiography of the man whose most famous act (they say) was a kiss in the dark.
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.
