"He is a thoughtful, meditative, serious poet and well worth reading." - Sheenagh Pugh

Lightning Beneath the Sea is the first collection of poems in English by Grahame Davies, featuring the work that he has honed over the years as he has read them at literary festivals, conferences and events world-wide.  He is already well-known for his prize-winning Welsh-language poetry and fiction, and for his scholarly non-fiction.  He brings a native warmth, an intimate, conversational tone, and a raised civic awareness to these poems.

He favours rhyme and meter in a number of memorable instances like ‘Capital Bookshop’ and ‘Valley Villanelle’; he can use a longer, narrative, free verse line as in ‘Dangerous’; and there are several ‘found’ poems as in the witty ‘The Complete Index of Welsh Emotions’. He observes other nations  with the same keen, ironic eye that he casts on his own country and is as concerned with character and the vagaries of relationships as he is with wider cultural concerns.

“Check here for the meeting of form with freedom, for tradition and for avant garde and for examples of the kind of splendid literary shenanigans that only real poets can succeed at in a verse which melds two cultures into an exciting whole.” – Peter Finch

“Because Grahame Davies forever makes the perfect imperfect sense, the smallest things exploding into God or Language or the Sea Itself. That’s the surprise of the poem, the ease of a great writer: that you don’t notice the lightning as it emerges from the depths, but what it illuminates. No need to answer. Read the poems. Grahame Davies is a known treasure in Welsh, and now we English-speakers get to share the wealth.” – Bob Holman
 

Listen to Grahame Davies read his poem, ‘Capital Bookshop, Cardiff’: