Carcanet Press Logo
Quote of the Day
an admirable concern to keep lines open to writing in Ireland, Scotland, Wales and America.
Seamus Heaney

Collected Poems

Donald Davie

Edited by Neil Powell

Cover Picture of Collected Poems
10% off Paperback
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (480 pages)
(Pub. May 2002)
9781857544060
£30.00 £27.00
Hardback (480 pages)
(Pub. May 2002)
9781857545791
Out of Stock
  • Description
  • Author
  • Awards
  • Reviews
  • Donald Davie was, par excellence, the engaged poet of our time. His poems do not pre-empt us in the way that protest or political poetry does, though he protests and is political. He was a poet of English perspectives refracted through historical mediation, essay-poem, love lyric, satire, translation (notably of the Psalter), epistle, eclogue and other forms. His passion is for our common language, its registers and tonalities, what it can do responsibly and where it can go only at its peril.

    This expanded edition of the Collected Poems includes the posthumous Poems and Melodramas. It restores to print the author's own selection from his Pasternak translations and the whole of The Forests of Lithuania, and it gathers together for the first time over two dozen poems which have not previously appeared in any of his collections. It also incorporates the corrections and revisions Davie made to his own copy of the 1990 Collected Poems. The Notes which he provided for his first Collected in 1972 at last reappear, supplemented by further notes and a new editorial introduction.
    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 Collected Poems (1990), Under Briggflatts ... read more
    Neil Powell
    NEIL POWELL was born in London in 1948.  He was educated at Sevenoaks School, where he founded and edited the award-winning magazine Verve and wrote on jazz as a ‘young critic’ for The Daily Telegraph ; and at the University of Warwick, where he read English and American Literature (BA, 1966–9) ... read more
    Awards won by Neil Powell Winner, 2017 East Anglian Writers Book by the Cover Award (Was and Is) Winner, 2017  East Anglian Book Awards (for Poetry)
    (Was and Is)
    Praise for Donald Davie 'From the publication of his debut collection of poems in 1955 until his passing in 1995, Donald Davie enjoyed a doubly excellent reputation as a critic and a poet... Sinéad Morrissey's Selected Poems gives an admirably rounded picture of his work and guides the reader through the editor's well-judged inclusions with a succinct introduction.'
    N.S. Thompson, The TLS
    'This is very unusual, essential and distinctive poetry of a kind we so often don't see. Davie had a well developed sense of his own outlook and it does come through in quite complex and multifaceted ways.'
    Clark Allison, Stride Magazine
    'This is a sampler of one of the major poets of the last generation that has been assembled by leaning into the proclivities of one of the major poets of our own... if you have read none of Davie's poetry before, you have a small, perfectly formed, ever-expanding universe to explore.'
    Rory Waterman, The Friday Poem

    'This is an accessible exploration of Davie's work. And it makes me want to read more, so this taster selection clearly works. It is an important reminder of the great writer he was, and how relevant he still is, nearly thirty years after his death. Morrissey's introduction is clear-eyed and intelligent, a perfect primer'
    James Nash, Everybody's Reviewing
    'He has drawn a map of modernism, starting with Hardy and Pound, that remains one of the definitive outlines of twentieth-century experiment in form and language. The mapmaker, in this case,is a notable locus on the map.'
    Helen Vendler
    `These poems thrive on the restless energy that drives their author on from form to form and place to place. Few poets are more likely than Davie to persuade new readers that poetry can still be a matter of concern and pleasure.'
    Martin Dodsworth, The Guardian
    'In his criticism, he has drawn a map of modernism, starting with Hardy and Pound, that remains one of the definitive outlines of twentieth-century experiment in form and language.'
    Helen Vendler
    Praise for Neil Powell 'Throughout there are poems to and for friends and yet, paradoxically, Powell has the air of an outsider, solitary and watchful.' 

     D A Prince, the North

     ''Neil Powell's Was and Is: Collected Poems gathers together a lifetime of walking, seeing, reading and rhyming the landscapes of eastern England, and in particular the coast of Suffolk. The author's world of friends and books has a wide historical horizon, haunted by literary ghosts from George Crabbe to W.G. Sebald. This is a rich book full of the light of the changing seasons, the rhythms of weather and sea, and the little details of human life that add colour to every corner of these skilful, evocative, and painterly poems.''
    Dr Jeremy Noel-Tod (UEA), Poetry judge of the 2017 East Anglian Book Awards

    'Like ordinary people, poets long to be loved. But all that is necessary is that they should be understood.'
    Roy Fuller
         'His poetry has a rewarding range and depth, though memory and our ambivalent handling of memory is what he is best at. He is an elegiac poet, and in some ways a more valuable poet of loneliness than Larkin. Any younger reader who hasn't yet cottoned on to Powell should find this carefully considered 'Collected' rewarding: his is a quiet insistent voice at the heart of the tradition.'
    John Fuller

    'Neil Powell's poems are lucid, elegant, formal and humane .'
    Peter Scupham
    'An exceptional poet of place, and of the East Anglian coast in particular: Neil Powell's Selected Poems thoroughly defines the peculiar atmospheres of that bleak landscape and seascape...'
    New Statesman
Share this...
The Carcanet Blog Near-Life Experience: Rowland Bagnall read more The Silence: Gillian Clarke read more Baby Schema: Isabel Galleymore read more The Iron Bridge: Rebecca Hurst read more Sleepers Awake: Oli Hazzard read more The Miraculous Season: V.R. 'Bunny' Lang, edited by Rosa Campbell read more
Find your local bookshop logo
Arts Council Logo
We thank the Arts Council England for their support and assistance in this interactive Project.
This website ©2000-2024 Carcanet Press Ltd