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Selected Poems by Donald Davie: Carcanet Book Launch

Please join us to celebrate the launch of Selected Poems by Donald Davie, edited by Sinéad Morrissey. Sinéad will be joined by long-term editor and friend of Davie, Michael Schmidt. The event will feature readings and discussion, and audience members will have the opportunity to ask their own questions. We will show the text during readings so that you can read along.

To mark the centenary of Donald Davie's birth, Carcanet publishes a new Selected Poems drawn from the full trajectory of his poetry and showing his skills as lyric, satirical, elegiac, epistolary and philosophical poet. He was, par excellence, the engaged poet of our time, not in the pre-emptive manner of protest poets, though he is political and does protest. But he is a poet of English perspectives, refracted through historical and theological mediation.

And he loved the writing of Ezra Pound in all its suggestive contradiction. Pound challenged him to try longer forms, to break away from the discrete lyric and to use poetry for the most compelling and complex themes. His passion was for our common language, its registers and tonalities, what it can do responsibly and where it can go only at its peril.

Sinéad Morrissey introduces this new selection. Davie developed some of the most dependable ways into the heart of Modernism – American, Irish, British, Continental. Davie's poems are themselves an index of his directions and an invaluable resource for the contemporary reader and poet.

Registration for this online event will cost £2, later redeemable against the cost of the book. All attendees will receive the discount code and how to purchase the book during and after event.

Dec 7, 2022 07:00 PM in London