Selected Poems

By Donald Davie

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Carcanet Classics
• Release date: Feb 23, 2023
• ISBN: 9781800172913

Donald Davie

Born in Barnsley in 1922, Donald Davie served in the Navy and studied at Cambridge, becoming Professor of English at Essex, and later at Stanford and Vanderbilt. In 1988 he returned to England where he died in 1995. Carcanet's uniform Collected Works of Donald Davie includes Under Briggflatts (1989), Slavic Excursions (1990), Collected Poems (1990), Studies in Ezra Pound (1991), Older Masters (1992), Church, Chapel, and the Unitarian Conspiracy (1995) and Poems and Melodramas (1996). Purity of Diction in English Verse and Articulate Energy (one volume) are also available from Carcanet.

Book preview

Donald Davie

Selected Poems

edited by Sinéad Morrissey

CARCANET CLASSICS

Contents

Title Page

Introduction

Pelican

Tiger at the Movie-Show

Homage to William Cowper

Demi-Exile. Howth

Poem as Abstract

Evening on the Boyne

Pushkin. A Didactic Poem

Woodpigeons at Raheny

Love-Poems: for Mairi MacInnes

Time Passing, Beloved

The Wind at Penistone

Gardens no Emblems

Heigh-ho on a Winter Afternoon

Against Confidences

For an Age of Plastics

The ‘Sculpture’ of Rhyme

Two Dedications

Low Lands

Green River

A Battlefield

Across the Bay

In California

In Chopin’s Garden

A Meeting of Cultures

On Not Deserving

July, 1964

January

Sunburst

The God of Details

Expecting Silence

A Winter Landscape near Ely

A Conditioned Air

Intervals in a Busy Life

Behind the North Wind

Oak Openings

Epistle. To Enrique Caracciolo Trejo

Christmas Syllabics for a Wife

Looking out from Ferrara

Pilate

Midsummer’s Eve

Boyhood Misremembered

The Departed

After the Calamitous Convoy (July 1942)

Portland

Ars Poetica

Morning

Mandelstam in the Crimea

Well-found Poem

The Bent

Catullus on Friendship

Penelope

Mandelstam’s Hope for the Best

Benedictus

Poet Redeemed & Dead

Attar of Roses

‘So make them melt as the dishousèd snail’

Church Militant

Curtains!

‘And Our Eternal Home’

Their Rectitude Their Beauty

The Creature David

The Elect

If I Take the Wings of the Morning

Northern Metres

To a Bad Poet

Wombwell On Strike

Jottings, not so Random

‘Our Father’

About the Authors

Copyright

Introduction

Donald Davie, ‘the definitive poet-critic of his generation’,¹ was born in Barnsley, Yorkshire in 1922, to Baptist parents. Intellectually gifted and supported at home, he won a scholarship to Barnsley Holgate Grammar School, gaining a place at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge to read English in 1940. Almost inevitably, his undergraduate career was cut short by the Second World War: he joined the Royal Navy in 1941 and spent 1942 and 1943 on active service in the Russian Arctic – an experience which was to mark him, emotionally and intellectually, for the rest of his life. In 1944 he returned to England, married Doreen John, with whom he was to have three children, and in 1946 went back with her to Cambridge to complete his BA, MA and PhD. From ‘four draughty and mouse-infested rooms over the village store in Trumpington’, where the couple first lived together, Davie’s rise was swift. From this point, his career is marked by successive prestigious academic appointments in Ireland, England, and the United States: Fellow, Trinity College Dublin; Lecturer, Cambridge University; Professor of Literature, and later Vice-Chancellor, Essex University; Olive H Palmer Professor in the Humanities, Stanford University; Andrew W Mellon Professor of Humanities, Vanderbilt University. He retired simultaneously from America and from a formal position in the Academy in 1988, relocating with Doreen to Devon, the county where they first met, and died of cancer in 1995 aged seventy-three.

In the way men of his generation could be (and women usually could not), Davie was extraordinarily prolific. Between Brides of Reason, which appeared in 1955, and Poems and Melodramas, published posthumously in 1996, he produced twelve discreet collections, two Selected Poems, two Collected Poems, as well as numerous other poems and translations in journals and periodicals on both sides of the Atlantic. The definitive Donald Davie: Collected Poems, edited by Neil Powell in 2002, runs to 634 pages and spans six decades. In addition to poetry, Davie was an equally inspired essayist and critic. Two foundational works of criticism, Purity of Diction in English Verse and Articulate Energy, published in 1952 and 1955 respectively (and republished as a single volume by Carcanet in 2006), appeared at the inception of his poetic career in the mid-1950s, and established his reputation as a writer whose dual practice as poet and critic was not only interdependent, but mutually enriching and sustaining. He went on to write seminal studies of such diverse poets as Thomas Hardy, Ezra Pound and Czeslaw Miloz, as well as an eclectic range of more general monographs, including A Gathered Church: The Literature of the English Dissenting Interest, 1700-1930 (1978), Under Briggflatts: A History of Poetry in Great Britain, 1960-1988 (1989) and Slavic Excursions: Essays on Russian and Polish Literature (1990). Davie was, by any standard, what has become an unusual thing: a giant of Letters, erudite, articulate (that word again), possessed of unstinting energy and an acute – and notably continuous - historical sensibility.

In his introduction to the 2002 Collected Poems, Neil Powell addresses the monumental scale of Davie’s poetic output, as well as its remarkable variety – the (at times drastic) shifts in form, style and tone encountered along the way. Powell compares Davie to fellow Movement poet, Philip Larkin (for the Movement of the 1950s is where Davie began, if not – and definitively not – where he ended, or even stayed for very long). In contrast to Larkin’s mature poetic output of just ‘three slim volumes’, Powell suggests readers have found ‘the scope and, at times, the complexity, of Davie’s poetry daunting.’

Reviews for Selected Poems

[edwinbcn · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Usually publishers have a clear distinct understanding in the use of "selected poetry" and "collected poetry", the former suggesting a selection and the latter suggesting completeness albeit "up till then". It is also true that occasionally the title of a book on the cover is different from the title on the title page, often for marketing purposes. I wonder why the title of this volume is "Collected poems" on the title page but "Selected poems" on the cover. (Patrick Kavanagh (2005). Selected poems in Penguin Classics. The editor Antoinnette Quinn has quite a lot to say about about this in the bibliographical note (pp. xli-xlii), insisting that the present volume is named "Selected poems", making the title on the title page all the more puzzling, as in academic practice the title on the title page should take precedence over the title on the cover.Patrick Kavanagh (1904-1967) was an Irish poet. The introduction mentions that Kavanagh's poetry was not very well received by critics. He saw himself as an outsider, hesitant to call himself a poet.The poems show an independent mind that doesn't regard or follow the trends of the time. The reading is not easy. as poems seem of a certain roughness or stubbornness or even clumsiness over melodious flow. The poetry is marked my religion and rural, elements not often associated with modern poetry. Still, the poet seems to try to reconcile the modern form with traditional rhythm and form of ballads.I did not enjoy reading this collection, few poems really interested me.