A Trick of Sunlight: Poems

By Dick Davis

In his new collection of poems, Dick Davis, the acclaimed author of Belonging, addresses themes that he has long worked with—travel, the experience of being a stranger, the clash of cultures, the vagaries of love, the pleasures and epiphanies of meaning that art allows us. But A Trick of Sunlight introduces a new theme that revolves around the idea of happiness—is it possible, must it be illusory, is its fleetingness an essential part of its nature so that disillusion is inevitable?

Many of the poems are shaded by the poet’s awareness of growing older, and by the ways that this both shuts down many of life’s possibilities and frees us from their demands. The levity of some verses here is something of a departure for Davis, but his insights can be mordant too, revealing darknesses as often as they invoke frivolity.

As Davis’s readers have come to expect, the poems in A Trick of Sunlight. aim at the aesthetic satisfactions that accompany accurate observations expressed with wit, intelligence, and grace. But they achieve as well an immediacy and rawness of vision that seem to belie his careful craft.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Release date: May 30, 2006
• ISBN: 9780804040259

Dick Davis

Dick Davis was born in Portsmouth, England. He is a professor of Persian at Ohio State University. He has published translations of prose from Italian and poetry and prose from Persian, and six books of his own poetry. His most recent collection, Belonging, was chosen by The Economist as a “Book of the Year” for 2002.

Book preview

The heart has its abandoned mines . . .

Old workings masked by scrub and scree.

Sometimes, far, far beneath the surface

An empty chamber will collapse;

But to the passerby the change

Is almost imperceptible:

A leaf’s slight tremor, or a stone

Dislodged into the vacant shaft.

Chèvrefeuille

In a neglected glade

The hazel sapling’s shade

Quickens with early spring:

New tendrils clutch and cling—

A honeysuckle twines

Its tentative thin vines

Reaching now in, now out,

Above, below, about,

Till intricate, strong strands

Clasp like a myriad hands.

Love’s leaves and limbs conspire

As if unsaid desire

Could intimately tether

Their substances together

And none could separate

Their growths’ complicit state.

Bright in the summer sun

Two tangled lives are one.

Getting Away

Once, when I was a child of seven or eight,

I turned a corner on a wooded path

And saw a fox a few feet from my face.

We stood stock-still and took each other