Belonging: Poems

By Dick Davis

There are worlds within our own in which even the smallest victories are hard won, the tender moment is almost unbearable, and the understated rings like a bell. Belonging, a new collection by British poet Dick Davis, is an extended visit to these worlds.

Deepened by his dry wit and the formal rigor of his verse, the poems of Belonging negotiate their way among personal and political divides—generations in a family, man and woman, and the tentative present and our inherited pasts.

But behind much of the writing there is also a desire for a kind of idealized belonging—to a clerisy of civilized and humane decency which can be found intermittently in all cultures and is the monopoly of none. Davis’s own cosmopolitan background provides the context for many of the poems, yet he is concerned always to find the humanly universal within the local and anecdotal—a hope realized in these careful and incandescent poems.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Release date: Jun 1, 2002
• ISBN: 9780804040051

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

A Monorhyme for the Shower

Lifting her arms to soap her hair

Her pretty breasts respond—and there

The movement of that buoyant pair

Is like a spell to make me swear

Twenty-odd years have turned to air;

Now she’s the girl I didn’t dare

Approach, ask out, much less declare

My love to, mired in young despair.

Childbearing, rows, domestic care—

All the prosaic wear and tear

That constitute the life we share—

Slip from her beautiful and bare

Bright body as, made half aware

Of my quick surreptitious stare,

She wrings the water from her hair

And turning smiles to see me there.

Haydn and Hokusai

Masters of wit and line

Who welcome what is ugly,

Lumpish, disproportionate,

And give it grace, distinction—

Whose humor is a pool

For all of us to splash in

(And we emerge like angels

Double-dipped in Pactolus

To shimmer in bright air

That is and is not earthly . .