Selected Poems

To mark the centenary of Donald Davie’s birth, Carcanet publishes a new Selected Poems drawn from the full trajectory of his poetry and showing his skills as lyric, satirical, elegiac, epistolary and philosophical poet. He was, par excellence, the engaged poet of our time, not in the pre-emptive manner of protest poets, though he is political and does protest. But he is a poet of English perspectives, refracted through historical and theological mediation.

And he loved the writing of Ezra Pound in all its suggestive contradiction. Pound challenged him to try longer forms, to break away from the discrete lyric and to use poetry for the most compelling and complex themes. His passion was for our common language, its registers and tonalities, what it can do responsibly and where it can go only at its peril.

Sinead Morrissey introduces this new selection, prepared by his long-term editor and friend Michael Schmidt. Davie developed some of the most dependable ways into the heart of Modernism - American, Irish, British, Continental. Davie’s poems are themselves an index of his directions and an invaluable resource for the contemporary reader and poet.