Glasfryn Project

Ian Davidson’s poetry is both moving and full of movement. It explores what it takes to weather a landscape, physical or political, placing the human body within longer histories as well as a present that bristles against the senses. As words are pitched against material forces, such as the battering of wind or the impassivity of stone, it is language as much as place that is made newly habitable.

By Tiny Twisting Ways unfolds against a vast, non-human context in which ‘nothing stays the same except / the steady state of change’, where poetry is a means of balancing hope and scepticism. Numerical structures offer symbolic resonance but also reveal the arbitrary patterns of statistics and phenomena. The use of old Welsh and Irish syllabic lines knocks English off-centre, brilliantly wrongfooting illusions of power and transparency. Saint Patrick may be an unreliable ‘saintsplainer / of visions and tall tales’, but he is also the poet who ‘stammers out a truth’ in the ‘stressed forms’ of embodied speech and its emotional charge.

Despite the intensity of their themes, from revolution to life-threatening illness, Davidson’s poems resist the monumental in favour of an agility that tracks the flux and shimmer of being alive. This is poetry that never says too much, but, in its radical commitment to the capacity of words to make new worlds, it asks for everything.

Zoë Skoulding

 Published April 2021. Uk £10.00

Aquifer Books

ISBN: 9781838358716

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More comments on the book:

Among the “tiny, twisting ways” of Ian Davidson’s beautiful new book is a trinity of stories told by the landscape of western Ireland, a loved one’s life with cancer, legends of St. Patrick and St. Brigid. These three “ways” inspire praise–—to wind, animals, and weather, rocky outcroppings and the wind whipped beaches of County Mayo—in lines that resist the rhetoric of praise. Davidson finds spirit in “the crooked / roads of the / world” but also in the body’s resilience in the face of disease. His spare lines and language testify to the miracle of conversion that is the cauldron of poetry—of spirit into words, of words into worlds.

Michael Davidson

  

In this poetry illness & environment – the wild west of North Mayo & its coastal

brashness – are interwoven:

 

How can disease prevail as

each wave heads to the shore as

each

 

fresh fall of rain becomes a

river of light

[pp23/4]

 

And illness’s dark anxiety:

 

At the back of the cave,

always another cave.

[p 36]

 

Quietness is a valuable trait in poetry, restraint. In this work the patient’s body merges with

the language & the landscape, & these, it is implied, can engage in the primordial task of healing:

 

fadas

align

 

on their vowels, feet on ridged ground,

hips swaying, landscape taking

[p 41]

A sentiment that would not be unintelligible to the medieval Gaelic mind.

Part Two of the book delves into poetry & belief using Patrick & Brigid and the lore around

them as main players in the drama of Ireland’s Christianization. These legends still leach

from the wild landscape of Connaught, an interesting trove from this Welsh poet.

Quietly powerful.

 Maurice Scully

 

From Kelvin Corcoran

 

How can disease prevail as

each wave heads to the shore as

each

fresh fall of rain becomes

a river of light.’

 

Certain experiences force poetry from the poet.  The poetry is out of his or her hands and imperative.  In By Tiny Twisting Ways Ian Davidson engages such experience without recourse to melodrama or inflated rhetoric.  Eschewing any such avoidance, he writes of love outstaring death with an economy of sinuous grace about a world of rock, sea, wind and sky.  His seven-syllable quantitative verse with its roots in early Welsh and Irish poetry shows it can bear a good deal of reality.  Its immediacy also encompasses the precise mythology and history of Ireland’s Atlantic facing coast.  There, wrapped around an account of surviving cancer three evocative concerns hold sway; the climate, hagiography and the origins of the poetry itself.  Which of these three best articulates the total condition explored in the achievement of the work is left to play in the restless air of a life renewed.

‘Wave

upon wave gathering then

returning, altered, every

time.’

Kelvin Corcoran

View all: Aquifer | Posted on 2 Apr 2021 |