Damian Walford Davies has taught in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Cardiff University since 2013. He is now pro-vice chancellor for the university’s college of arts, humanities, and social sciences. Alongside his three poetry collections with Seren Books (Suit of Lights, 2009; Witch, 2012; and Judas, 2015), he publishes extensively on topics such as the relationship between maps and the imagination, and the work of poet RS.Thomas. 

At the end of Docklands he describes how he came to write its poems: “Docklands emerges from a long fascination with buildings, ground, maps and the dead”, it was “a way of helping me to understand and bed down in a new city”.  Personally I relish this small ‘explaining myself’ by the poet, especially after they have held me in thrall over 66 pages.

Docklands comprises 50 poems of eight couplets apiece. It offers a ghost story told by a Cardiff architect who is imagined living and working in the city in the early 1890s. The architect secured a commission:

     … to level Angeline,

     Louisa, Adelaide - ragtag terraces

     of lean, abutting lives

     from Wharf Street to the dun canal -

     and raise a perfect square with limes

     and fountains playing. It was me

     all over …

Undertaking this work he begins to sight the ghost of a girl murdered in one of the houses he has watched reduced to “red rubble”, “…The dustcloud/took all day to clear; its tang - /now sweet, now acrid –”.  In his private life, he estranges himself from his wife, she grieving after a stillbirth. Instead he seeks the women selling sex “in shabby rooms in Stuart Street”, who’ll “tackle anything” for oranges.

A collection that tells a single, coherent story is unusual. Yet poetry is well suited to this task, particularly in the case of a ghost story. A form of writing that releases its meaning only slowly and requires careful focus is a wonderful medium for creating suspense, gradually building character and atmosphere, poem by poem. What a thriller or ghost story requires of us is the recognition of allusions and clues, the exploration of possible interpretations; in other words the practices of an appreciative reader of poetry.  

These points also apply to ghost stories told through film and Docklands similarly uses the filmic technique of close-ups to reveal more and more of the architect and his wife’s characters — his ruthless arrogance, her terrible despair.  Event after terrible event is brought to life through telling details. When an apprentice is wallpapering one of the architect’s new properties he not only remarks that a girl was murdered “by ’ere” but conveys its grisliness, saying he hopes “tha’ fucker Foley” “took ’is time to croak”. Meanwhile the architect notes:

     … He’d missed

     a bubble.  I fought an urge

     to prick it with my pen.

When the architect witnesses a death (there are many) while drinking oolong on a café terrace  (“… I saw the infant boy/cracked sideways by the flouncing mare”), the café owner is depicted:

     arching over with the sugar tongs - so close

     I read the bonewhite buttons

     on his waistcoat: Cardin, France.”

When his grieving wife is hanging out scarlet ribbons laden with lard for the birds, he describes the ribbons “ranged/like gashes on her wrists”.

Such is the suspense built up here that I would do the collection a disservice if I revealed its dénouement. Certainly the architect and his wife undergo profound personal transitions, offering a nuanced sense of their characters and circumstances.  But maybe I wanted a slightly darker ending - I have already ordered Damian Walford Davies’ earlier collection, Witch. For all that, though, I relished the complexity of these poems’ language and their references.  Sometimes their syntax skillfully takes you to the brink of incomprehension -   then catches you up on a line or stanza break to lead you more deeply into a world that is remote, yet here made satisfyingly plausible and intriguing.

In Docklands: A Ghost Story, Damian Walford Davies follows up his two previous collections from Seren – Witch and Judas – with another book-length narrative in verse, this time a ghost story flitting between the luxury and poverty of Victorian Cardiff. Witch, set in the seventeenth century, imagined a Suffolk village torn apart by the hysteria of witch trials; Judas let the Biblical traitor adrift among the squaddies and barflies of present-day Jerusalem, an outcast twice-lost.  Docklands appears based upon similarly painstaking research, although the story is fiction.  Its protagonist is a prominent but unnamed architect, commissioned to design an elegant square on a patch of dockland slums.  In an effort to distance himself from his wife, who is gripped by grief following the death of their infant child, the architect consoles himself in the seedy pleasures of the docks, until he notices a girl appear:

through the whiskey’s umber,
fractured by the lead-glass

tumbler’s cuts: ten, or younger…

(‘Solus’)

Grey, bruised, and silent at first, the girl becomes an obsession, drawing ever-nearer to the architect as she follows him through the streets.

As with Witch and Judas, there is a supernatural or spiritual element to the story, but this otherworldly intrusion is not quite as convincing as the material detail of time and place.  Walford Davies pins open the precarious world of the docks, where the architect wanders the terraces he must demolish and encounters a world scarcely firmer than the sea it abuts:

… crazy

Angeline and Adelaide, held up only
by the rigging of the washing lines.

 

(‘Commission’)

Conversation is interrupted by ‘the sounding of a two-tone channel buoy’ (‘Recipe’); after the demolition of the slum terraces, the reader’s eyes almost feel the irritation of the resulting dustcloud:

… its tang –

now sweet, now acrid –
conjured last night’s staged

saltpetre smoke that veiled
the cheap illusionist’s hey prestos…

(‘Wives’)

The poems, each of which consists of eight couplets, all follow a similar quick, staccato rhythm, hanging on careful rungs of rhyme and half-rhyme. Walford Davies has a sharp turn of phrase, paring each observation down to its essence, an almost surgical technique which gives the poetry both its precision and also its slight callousness of tone. Scenes of horror and hope are described in equally clipped fashion, from the amputation of a leg in a dockside pub:

… From nowhere,

someone set to work:
knifestrokes, sawstrokes, reef knot

to the artery…

(‘Saw’)

to a moment of reconciliation between the architect and his wife:

… As if along
a corridor of long-barred doors,

she tacked towards me,
the lamp behind her

moving in and out of curt
eclipse.

(‘Cross-section’)

The book is a monologue in the architect’s voice, which is one reason for the unwavering tone and pace. The rigid structure of the poems is another. The narrator remains a man of confidence and certainty: even as he accepts the presence of the ghost, he never loses control of the pattern of his speech or thought.

The twenty-first century reader might infer a psychological aspect to the haunting: having something to do with the loss of the architect’s own child, and with his resentment of his wife’s grief. Perhaps he has transferred to the girl the compassion he is unable to grant his wife, or himself. To the architect, however, the ghost is real: he asks around to discover her identity, that of a child murdered a few years before. But despite this stimulation of his sympathy, and despite the movement towards reconciliation between husband and wife somehow engendered by the ghost girl, there is not truly a sense in the poems that the architect has changed the way he sees or understands the world. We witness a change in his actions towards the end of the book – he buys a gift for his wife, and replaces the bawdy mermaid which first topped the fountain in his square with a monument to the murdered girl – but little shift in his voice or his composure.  This is still a man who knows exactly what to do.

Docklands is, then, a buttoned-up kind of ghost story. However, even if the protagonist’s perspective remains constant, the impact of the book lies in its ability to affect the reader’s view. One of the most vivid images is a scene on St Mary’s Street which holds no particular dramatic function but is perfect in its crystallisation of a moment:

… Woken by the sun,

O’Driscoll shifted in his oilskin
at the cab-stand; his bowler

held the morning’s downpour
in its rim.  I rapped the pane;

he raised his face; the bright ring
sluiced off in a flashing plait.

(‘Figure’)

Cardiff today is filled with images of its history, on the walls of every pub and café, but descriptions such as these bring the past to life in a way which photographs fail to do.  In these poems we taste, smell and hear the city, and we see the shadows behind the grandiose civic architecture of the British Empire. In the tiny details of smoke on a conjurer’s stage, or rainwater falling from a hat, we are immersed in moments quickly forgotten by those who experienced them, but which cumulatively make up the substance of their lives. Docklands is a meticulous study of place, time and atmosphere, which opens the reader’s eyes to a city behind the city, and to lives behind our own.