Books Books
Category: Ebooks, Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 72
ISBN: 9781854115799
Publication date: June 4, 2012
Price: £8.99
Out of stock
Category: Ebooks, Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 72
ISBN: 9781854116017
Publication date: June 4, 2012
Price: £7.19
Out of stock
“Overall, Witch is an intriguing and moving poetry collection, which revisits an old story to throw a new and disturbing light on gender and power.” – Planet
“…vividly imaginative, intelligent and engrossing.” – New Welsh Review
“…Walford Davies brilliantly confirms the terrifying cultural power of language. A masterly work perhaps comes to speak most chasteningly through the implacable cultural and linguistic contingencies it sets in play” – Poetry Wales
With the narrative pull of a novel and the vibrancy of a play for voices, Damian Walford Davies’s Witch offers a thrilling portrait of a Suffolk village in the throes of the witchcraft hunts of the mid-seventeenth century. The poems in this collection are dark spells, compact and moving: seven sections, each of seven poems, each of seven couplets, are delivered by those most closely involved in the ‘making’ of a witch. The speakers – from Thomas Love the priest, the villagers who slowly succumb to suspicion and counter-accusation, the ‘discoverer of witches’ Francis Hurst, and the ‘witch’ herself – authentically conjure a war-torn society in which religious paranoia amplifies local grievances to fever pitch. Witch is a damning parable that chimes with the terror and anxieties of our own haunted age.
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.
