This new selection of Donald Davie's poems spans six decades. It traces his protean trajectory from austere beginnings to riskier dislocations of shape and syntax, through to his extended late-meditations on form, content, and spirit. To apply his own critical definition of syntax, his is a poetic of articulate energy, the restless redistribution of force – an abiding resource and inspiration.



Born in Barnsley in 1922, Donald Davie served in the Navy and studied at Cambridge, becoming Professor of English at Essex, and later at Stanford and Vanderbilt. In 1988 he returned to England where he died in 1995. Carcanet's uniform Collected Works of Donald Davie includes Under Briggflatts (1989), Slavic Excursions (1990), Collected Poems (1990), Studies in Ezra Pound (1991), Older Masters (1992), Church, Chapel, and the Unitarian Conspiracy (1995) and Poems and Melodramas (1996). Purity of Diction in English Verse and Articulate Energy (one volume) are also available from Carcanet.