Glyn Pursglove, whom I admire not least because of his generous appraisal of my latest book, has this to say about Dck Davis' latest and Clive Watkins' first collection. These remarks appeared in Acumen, a highly regarded English poetry journal. Congratulations to the home team.
Dick Davis, though born in Britain, has lived and worked in the USA for quite a few years. Belonging (Anvil Press Poetry, Neptune House, 70 Royal Hill, London, SEI0 8RF. 61pp; £7.95) is his sixth collection. There are no elaborately constructed sonnets here (they would probably seem rather ostentatious given Davis's generally understated manner), though there are some very fine individual sonnets, as in “A Petrarchan Sonnet” (which is Petrarchan in more than just its form, taking as its occasion the familial connection between Petrarch’s Laura and the Marquis de Sade). Davis is a particular master of the single quatrain, of the resonantly lapidary, as in “A world dies ...”:
A world dies when a person dies; who sees
And savours life as he did who is dead?
No one now lives the myriad privacies
That made the life that ends, now, on this bed.
But he can also carry off the impetuous energy of the sixteen lines that make up “A Monorhyme for the Shower”. Through Davis's very well made lines there echoes a profound sense of both human joy and pain. He offers here a kind of retrospective review of his first book (In the Distance, published by Anvil in 1975), under the title “Déjà Lu”:
I read my first book through again,
The poems of my messy twenties:
The stench of misery rose up,
Every last stanza stank of it.
And at that time I thought I’d been
So circumspect, so impersonal,
Threading my way through myths and metres…
I’d never do that now of course.
Donne (in “The Triple Fool”) wrote of how “Grief brought to numbers cannot be so fierce / For he tames it that fetters it in verse”- and it is in the tension between the (briefly) reconciled pressures of form and emotion that the power of Davis's best work resides. An impressive, readable, moving and entertaining collection.
Like Davis, Clive Watkins was born in 1945, but is only now publishing his first collection: Jigsaw (The Waywiser Press, 9 Woodstock Road, London N4 3ET. 95pp; £8.9.5). The book does indeed display a striking maturity of technique and sensibility. He, too, can use traditional forms to great effect, but he is also very skilled in the way he employs freer forms. In both his short and long lines there is often a simplicity, even a starkness, of expression that has a distinctive power. Many of the poems articulate precisely, but unfussily, annotated observations; there are dream poems, and elegies for ordinary places and lives (as in the excellent “Hilda and Eddie's Place”); there are accomplished translations from, amongst others, Heine, Rilke and Victor Hugo. He, too, can produce striking epigrams, as in “Una, Senecta, Viximus Multos Dies” (from the Latin of Walter Savage Landor):
Old Age, we’ve lived together now for years,
For years like friends have managed to get on.
If you should find a quieter place than this,
Whisper it in my ear – and then be gone.
Watkins deserves to find many readers for this belated, richly assured, first collection.
Glyn Pursglove, Acumen, September, 2003
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