{"id":6386,"date":"2021-04-02T12:55:02","date_gmt":"2021-04-02T12:55:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/?p=6386"},"modified":"2025-10-10T14:47:30","modified_gmt":"2025-10-10T14:47:30","slug":"by-tiny-twisting-ways-ian-davidson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/6386\/by-tiny-twisting-ways-ian-davidson\/","title":{"rendered":"‘By Tiny Twisting Ways’ – Ian Davidson"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"By<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

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.<\/p>\n

By Tiny Twisting Ways<\/em>\u00a0unfolds against a vast, non-human context in which\u00a0‘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.\u00a0The use of old Welsh and Irish syllabic lines knocks English off-centre, brilliantly wrongfooting illusions of power and transparency.\u00a0Saint 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Zo\u00eb Skoulding<\/em><\/p>\n

 Published April 2021. Uk \u00a310.00<\/p>\n

Aquifer Books<\/p>\n

ISBN: 9781838358716<\/p>\n

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More comments on the book:<\/p>\n

Among the \u201ctiny, twisting ways\u201d of Ian Davidson\u2019s beautiful new book is a trinity of stories told by the landscape of western Ireland, a loved one\u2019s life with cancer, legends of St. Patrick and St. Brigid. These three \u201cways\u201d inspire praise–\u2014to wind, animals, and weather, rocky outcroppings and the wind whipped beaches of County Mayo\u2014in lines that resist the rhetoric of praise. Davidson finds spirit in \u201cthe crooked \/ roads of the \/ world\u201d but also in the body\u2019s resilience in the face of disease. His spare lines and language testify to the miracle of conversion that is the cauldron of poetry\u2014of spirit into words, of words into worlds.<\/p>\n

Michael Davidson<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

In this poetry illness & environment \u2013 the wild west of North Mayo & its coastal<\/p>\n

brashness \u2013 are interwoven:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

How can disease prevail as<\/p>\n

each wave heads to the shore as<\/p>\n

each<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

fresh fall of rain becomes a<\/p>\n

river of light<\/p>\n

[pp23\/4]<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

And illness\u2019s dark anxiety:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

At the back of the cave,<\/p>\n

always another cave.<\/p>\n

[p 36]<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Quietness is a valuable trait in poetry, restraint. In this work the patient\u2019s body merges with<\/p>\n

the language & the landscape, & these, it is implied, can engage in the primordial task of healing:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

fadas<\/p>\n

align<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

on their vowels, feet on ridged ground,<\/p>\n

hips swaying, landscape taking<\/p>\n

[p 41]<\/p>\n

A sentiment that would not be unintelligible to the medieval Gaelic mind.<\/p>\n

Part Two of the book delves into poetry & belief using Patrick & Brigid and the lore around<\/p>\n

them as main players in the drama of Ireland\u2019s Christianization. These legends still leach<\/p>\n

from the wild landscape of Connaught, an interesting trove from this Welsh poet.<\/p>\n

Quietly powerful.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Maurice Scully<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

From Kelvin Corcoran<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

How can disease prevail as<\/p>\n

each wave heads to the shore as<\/p>\n

each<\/p>\n

fresh fall of rain becomes<\/p>\n

a river of light.\u2019<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Certain experiences force poetry from the poet.\u00a0\u00a0The poetry is out of his or her hands and imperative.\u00a0\u00a0In\u00a0By Tiny Twisting Ways\u00a0<\/em>Ian Davidson engages such experience without recourse to melodrama or inflated rhetoric.\u00a0\u00a0Eschewing any such avoidance, he writes of love outstaring death with an economy of sinuous grace about a world of rock, sea, wind and sky.\u00a0\u00a0His seven-syllable quantitative verse with its roots in early Welsh and Irish poetry shows it can bear a good deal of reality.\u00a0\u00a0Its immediacy also encompasses the precise mythology and history of Ireland\u2019s Atlantic facing coast.\u00a0\u00a0There, wrapped around an account of surviving cancer three evocative concerns hold sway; the climate, hagiography and the origins of the poetry itself.\u00a0\u00a0Which 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.<\/p>\n

\u2018Wave<\/p>\n

upon wave gathering then<\/p>\n

returning, altered, every<\/p>\n

time.\u2019<\/p>\n

Kelvin Corcoran<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6389,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"footnotes":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/03\/By-Tiny-Twisting-Ways-Cover-e1617368303699.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p42xiC-1F0","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6386"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6386"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6386\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8620,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6386\/revisions\/8620"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6389"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6386"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6386"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6386"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}