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The poems in this selection range from recent poetry written in Ian Davidson’s new home in Ireland (in ‘Coming and Going’) to work gathered from his collections with Shearsman and Spectacular Diseases, written when he lived in north Wales. This volume also makes available long out-of-print sequences with West House, Oystercatcher and Wild Honey, work that was published to some critical acclaim and was described at the time of its publication as ‘some of the most exciting and innovative poetry currently being written in Wales’. Combining human and non-human concerns, the social and the environmental, the poems chart a growing interest in the ways the landscape and the moving body interact. They focus on events such as an archaeological dig off the west coast of Ynys Mon, on a walk around the Llyn peninsula and exploring the coast at Aberystwyth, but never lose sight of the gritty politics of language in those communities or the ways the frictions of mobility are part of the writing process.
In a recent (2021) review in Poetry Fortnight Peter Riley spoke of the ways Ian Davidson has worked with concerns about correspondence and hidden threat for a long time, mainly driven by socio-political concern and cultivating an awkwardness of address, sometimes like a sustained and suppressed anger which distorts the language, defining poetical as a refusal of detailed explicit connection. Sean Colleti, again reviewing in 2021 in Second City, speaks of the ways ‘Great poetry gets you outside of yourself as much as it brings you back in … Davidson’s pamphlet does just that.’
Earlier reviews at the time of first publication of the work in this New and Selected Poems describes the work as ‘some of the best political poetry this reader has encountered for a long time’ (Chicago Review), as a ‘spectacular mosaic’ and an ‘exhilarating journey’ (Planet) and as ‘nature poetry completely wired, plugged in and mediated’ (The Gig). Ian Davidson has been described as ‘the most interesting Welsh modernist writer’ (P N Review), as a ‘poet of conviction with rare touches of humour’. (Planet).
