Search results for ""Author Donald Davie""

Shortly before his death in 1995, Donald Davie sent his publisher the poem, "Our Father". This ten-part meditation broke a seven-year poetic silence. This book contains a body of poems which extend the concerns of his late years, concerns with the "sacred", with England and with our age.

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Donald Davie's first two prose books (1952, 1955), available now in one volume with a new foreword, set the agenda for 'The Movement' and shaped the critical approach of two generations of readers and teachers of poetry. They have also proven of value to poets finding their way. Intended as 'two stages in one investigation', they provide a brilliantly detailed analysis of the workings of English poetry and remain, with books such as I.A. Richards's "Practical Criticism" and William Empson's "Seven Types of Ambiguity", primary critical texts, reviving attention to poetry at a technical level and, in the process, stirring awake for many readers major (and minor) writers of the late eighteenth century who require special qualities of attention. Davie remains a particularist, proving in insight after insight the deep rewards of close attention. For him poetry is a responsible art; it is not an end in itself but must always 'reek of the human'.

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Donald Davie is a poet of the English perspective refracted through historical meditation, essay-poem, love lyric, satire, translation (notably the Psalter), epistle, eclogue and other forms. His passion is for our common language, its registers and tonalities.

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This selection from the first thirty years of Donald Davie's poetry reveals an impassioned spirit advancing from Augustan reserve towards the treacherous, rewarding risks of modernism. As a critic, Helen Vendler writes, "he has drawn a map of modernism, starting with Hardy and Pound, that remains one of the definitive outlines of twentieth-century experiment in form and language. The mapmaker, in this case," she adds, "is a notable locus on the map." His poetry is an abiding source and a resource for readers and other writers."

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This new selection of Donald Davie's poems spans six decades. It traces his protean trajectory from austere beginnings to riskier dislocations of shape and syntax, through to his extended late-meditations on form, content, and spirit. To apply his own critical definition of syntax, his is a poetic of articulate energy, the restless redistribution of force – an abiding resource and inspiration.

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