This selection from the first thirty years of Donald Davie’s poetry reveals an impassioned spirit advancing from Augustan reserve towards the treacherous, rewarding risks of modernism. As a critic, Helen Vendler writes, 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, she adds, is a notable locus on the map.
His poetry is an abiding source and a resource for readers and other writers.