Intro to Dick Davis
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 (PhD. in Medieval Persian Literature). He has taught at the universities of Tehran (Iran), Durham (U.K.), Newcastle (U.K.), and
California (Santa Barbara) and is currently Professor of Persian at Ohio State University. He lived for 8 years in Iran, as well as for periods in Greece and Italy. He worked for some years as a freelance writer and during this period published c. 150 articles and reviews in the British national press. As author, translator or editor, he has produced 18 books; as well as academic works he has published translations from Italian (prose) and Persian (prose and verse) and six books of poetry, including his forthcoming Belongings (Swallow Press, US., Anvil Press, UK). He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature at the tender age of 35, and his other awards and distinctions are too numerous to mention.
In 1994 Dick Wilbur introduced me to the work of Tim Steele, who sent me Dick Davis’ selected poems, Devices and Desires. I wrote to Tim and said “It strikes me as very unfair to Tims that the Muse is so nice to Dicks.” Davis is a shy, retiring poet who is little known in this country, but he’s certainly the finest British poet of his generation whom I have been fortunate enough to encounter. And he’s the most important translator of Persian poetry we have. Dick excels at the sonnet (see the thread I'll initiate at Mastery). He (and we) will examine a number of sonnets by Eratosphere members during his tenure as our guest Lariat. We'll start posting next week.
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