Belonging: Poems - Hardcover

Davis, Dick

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804010420 ISBN 13: 9780804010429

Publisher: Swallow Press, 2002

Synopsis

There are worlds within our own in which even the smallest victories are hard won, the tender moment is almost unbearable, and the understated rings like a bell. Belonging, a new collection by British poet Dick Davis, is an extended visit to these worlds. Deepened by his dry wit and the formal rigor of his verse, the poems of Belonging negotiate their way among personal and political divides―generations in a family, man and woman, and the tentative present and our inherited pasts. But behind much of the writing there is also a desire for a kind of idealized belonging―to a clerisy of civilized and humane decency which can be found intermittently in all cultures and is the monopoly of none. Davis’s own cosmopolitan background provides the context for many of the poems, yet he is concerned always to find the humanly universal within the local and anecdotal―a hope realized in these careful and incandescent poems.

About this title

About the Author

Dick Davis was born in Portsmouth, England. He is a professor of Persian at Ohio State University. He has published translations of prose from Italian and poetry and prose from Persian, and six books of his own poetry. His most recent collection, Belonging, was chosen by The Economist as a “Book of the Year” for 2002.

Reviews

America needed a new formalist movement to get poets to write in regular meters and rhyme again, but in Britain formal verse never fell out of fashion. Consequently, what takes obvious effort for American poets flows almost nonchalantly from British pens. Davis, British though for most of his life residing elsewhere, especially in Iran, chimes and scans perfectly but never preens himself about it, even for poems in three-line stanzas, each with a single end-rhyme, or for the lovingly murmuring "Monorhyme for the Shower," a tribute to his wife's persistent attractions (every line rhymes with air). Yet his technique isn't the only thing he could boast of. His poems are full of fine emotion, intelligence, wit, and multinational culture. He lithely celebrates the legendary rake Casanova; poignantly conjures "Kipling's Kim, Thirty Years On"; economically reports a father's aching futility in comforting his child ("A Bit of Paternity"); deftly valorizes the power of art ("Just So"); and often muses on the shortness of life and the limitations of being human, so cogently that a single quatrain can take one's breath away. Perhaps these are old-fashioned poems, but they feel so contemporary, so present, that they persuade one that contemporary and old fashioned are sometimes the same thing. Ray Olson
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Edition details

• Publisher: Swallow Press
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0804010420
• ISBN 13: 9780804010429
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 54