All fours

By Nia Davies

Bodies. Rhythms. Motion. Sounds. All fours is a debut collection of poetry from Nia Davies, a book of rituals in language that stalk the space between what is uttered and what is meant. These poems are haunted by the strange traces of the longest words in the world and folk-mythic figures such as Sinbad, Eurydice, Mossy Coat, Pan and Baba Yaga. They pose riddles with multiple or mysterious answers. A swerving sweary jump into a terrain that is both comically musical and perplexedly political, All fours speaks of the (mis)adventures of sex and human communication, a life full-to-bursting with burning questions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Release date: Jul 3, 2017
• ISBN: 9781780373652

Nia Davies

Miriam Nash was born in 1985 in Inverness and grew up in Scotland, England and Wales. She was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to study poetry at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, and graduated with an MFA in 2014. She has performed her work internationally, and brought poetry into schools, museums, mental health organisations and prisons in the UK, USA and Singapore. She was the first Writer in Residence at Greenway, Agatha Christie’s summer home, as part of Writing Places with the National Trust, Literature Works and The Poetry Archive. Her poetry has appeared in numerous magazines, and her pamphlet, Small Change (flipped eye), was published in 2013. She received an Eric Gregory from the Society of Authors in 2015, and was runner-up for the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award in 2016. Her first book-length collection, All the Prayers in the House, was published by Bloodaxe in 2017.

Book preview

You will never guess my name

for Elizabeth Hamilton Watts

About me

Because I was sleeping all over here,

and here. The magnesium intake nightly,

the slosh of the road in the distance.

Heaven had already soiled me.

Who’s that scaling the terraced garden?

I opened one eye in the dark,

then someone braver opened both.

I made to swing out of a lime tree,

said deepen, foster. Thought of when I was young,

I would think selkies, think skerry calf.

I would listen through lids,

less scathing, less scrape and tangle.

An alarm sounded and everyone ignored it.

Mossy Coat

I wanted to live out of party bags and dream daily in bread-making references. I wanted to write about haunted sties and brown trousers, the look of champagne on your face, the look of rate-nice/right-nice.

I would write about sealing practices, I said. I wanted Ermintrude, or any woman by that name, to come to my party.

I thought how I’d like pieces of his muscles to keep for the night, I wouldn’t waste them.

And of course I thought about Mossy Coat. She singles out the bad men, the ghosts from the guests, hears Baba Yaga’s distant rumble.

I wanted the bad man to come back and fetch me. I wanted a loom as a bed. I said my time with me should be limited. I wanted masochistic dressing-up mode.

I wanted furlongs of him. And pussy was a word I could think about – ‘Pussy’ ‘Cunt’ / ‘Mossy’ ‘Coat’. Or maybe a rap on the word ‘sundress’.

I couldn’t think about ‘I’ anymore, it was bad for me, so I thought about him all dressed up like a pig-herder or a mountain lion.

And about wedges and my moccasin-together-look with a heel, Look Pocahontas, Look! But I wasn’t sporting either. Instead I still hadn’t put my trousers