John Davies'' new book, North by South, offers a choice selection from his substantial body of work. From the slate quarries of north Wales to the steelworks town of his youth in south Wales to the dirt roads of the American West, the poet''s travels through rough landscapes and his meetings with the characters who inhabit them inspire witty, occasionally satirical and often piercing meditations.
John Davies was brought up in Port Talbot, south Wales, and in Prestatyn where he taught English. He has also taught in Michigan and Washington. In 1986 The Visitor''s Book, his third collection, was joint winner of the Poetry Society''s major award, the Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize. John Davies is also a talented wood carver.
North by South is that landmark volume, a selected poems. It draws on Davies'' previous five collections, including The Visitor''s Book, for which he shared the Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize with Vikram Seth. Technically adroit and writing in a wide variety of styles and forms, Davies is one of the few contemporary poets able to produce telling satire, although his pungently humorous poems sit alongside the tellingly delicate and observational and confirm the breadth of his poetic vision. Born in Port Talbot, Davies has spent half his life in north Wales, in Prestatyn, where he was a teacher. He also taught for periods in Utah and Washington state, and the tension between rootedness and movement, between belonging (with all that involves in Wales) and the cosmopolitan is a theme which runs throughout his work. Wherever he has lived and written, nature and man''s relationship with it has also played a significant role, from the ''Echoing shafts [that] speak / louder than men'' of coal and lead mines in Wales to the birds of the world (which Davies now carves in wood) this is a poetry through which the reader engages with the truths of the natural world.
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