Carcanet Press - Touchwood

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Touchwood is Dick Davis’s first collection since Devices and Desires, his New and Selected Poems (1989), which Wendy Cope selected as her book of the year in the Sunday Times, calling it ‘the year’s most underrated poetry book’. The clarity and elegance of his lyrics, intimate and personal in tone, combined with his precise yet natural language, is undiminished. But there is a more relaxed feel to the book with the presence of epigrams and satirical poems like ‘A Translator’s Nightmare’ in which the poet-translator is confronted in the underworld by the poets he translated or failed to translate. The book concludes with a brilliant, funny and moving retelling of the story of Esther and Mordecai.

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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Touchwood Dick Davis Imprint: Anvil Press Poetry Publisher: Carcanet Press Available as: Paperback (80 pages) (Pub. Nov 1997) 9780856462696 Out of Stock Description Author Awards Reviews Touchwood is Dick Davis’s first collection since Devices and Desires, his New and Selected Poems (1989), which Wendy Cope selected as her book of the year in the Sunday Times, calling it ‘the year’s most underrated poetry book’. The clarity and elegance of his lyrics, intimate and personal in tone, combined with his precise yet natural language, is undiminished. But there is a more relaxed feel to the book with the presence of epigrams and satirical poems like ‘A Translator’s Nightmare’ in which the poet-translator is confronted in the underworld by the poets he translated or failed to translate. The book concludes with a brilliant, funny and moving retelling of the story of Esther and Mordecai. 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	Share this... Quick Links Carcanet Poetry Carcanet Classics Carcanet Fiction Carcanet Film Lives and Letters PN Review Video Carcanet Celebrates 50 Years! The Carcanet Blog Coco Island: Christine Roseeta Walker read more that which appears: Thomas A Clark read more Come Here to This Gate: Rory Waterman read more Near-Life Experience: Rowland Bagnall read more The Silence: Gillian Clarke read more Baby Schema: Isabel Galleymore read more
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