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Borrowed Ware

Medieval Persian Epigrams

Edited by Dick Davis

Translated by Dick Davis

Series: Poetica
Imprint: Anvil Press Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
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  • In Borrowed Ware, Dick Davis brings together a wide range of shorter poems by poets from the ‘classic’ period of Persian literature. It makes a fascinating introduction to a literature that is little known in the West, and incidentally provides insights into a vanished and extraordinary way of life. The book contains a lucid and entertaining introduction, and informative headnotes on each of the 68 poets whose work is included. After graduating from King’s College Cambridge, Dick Davis worked as a teacher in various places around the world including Iran, where he lived and worked for eight years. He was Northern Arts Literary Fellow at Durham and Newcastle (1985–7), and he now teaches Persian at Ohio State University. Borrowed Ware is published simultaneously with his new collection of original poetry, Touchwood.

    Dick Davis
    Dick Davis was born in Portsmouth, England, in 1945, and educated at the universities of Cambridge (B.A. and M.A. in English Literature) and Manchester (Ph.D. in Medieval Persian Literature). He lived in Iran for eight years from 1970 to 1978, and also for some time in both Italy and Greece. He ... read more
    Awards won by Dick Davis Winner, 1981 Royal Society of Literature Award (Seeing the World)
    Praise for Dick Davis 'Original poetry and translated Persian verse weave together into a single life, translation as border and as invitation.'
    A.E. Stallings, The TLS
    '...throughout Love in Another Language, a strange perfusion of elements is at work, at once familiar and exotic; there are bizarre depths, weird echoes, beneath the seemingly traditional and seemingly quite "English surfaces of the poems... Dick Davis's collected poems of over forty-three years constitute what the great Persian poet Nizami called a "makhzan-i-asrar", a treasure-house of mysteries and perfected marvels.'

    Eric Ormsby, the TLS

    'It is marvelous to find a poet whose poetry lives through its metre. His handling of it is masterful, and you are never aware of the effort. And the language is exact but relentless, like the perceptions . . . Davis is one of the best poets around.'
    Thom Gunn
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