The Covenant
Poems 1979-1983
Dick Davis
Publisher: Carcanet Press
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The Covenant contains Dick Davis’s poems written since 1979. It is his third collection, following In the Distance (1975) and Seeing the World (1980), which received the Royal Society of Literature Award under the W.H. Heinemann Bequest in 1981.
Dick Davis has developed a plain and economical style in which feeling, thought and form blend with uncommon precision. His distinctive personal rhythms spring from the controlled use of classical forms. For all their air of ordered, calmly paced craft, his poems delve into the inexplicable with an acute sense of the complexities of human nature and a fine intuition for those moments in which actual and symbolic realities connect. His gift for memorable lines, for brevity and grace under pressure make him a poet whose verse can be widely appreciated and understood.
A.E. Stallings, The TLS
'...throughout Love in Another Language, a strange perfusion of elements is at work, at once familiar and exotic; there are bizarre depths, weird echoes, beneath the seemingly traditional and seemingly quite "English surfaces of the poems... Dick Davis's collected poems of over forty-three years constitute what the great Persian poet Nizami called a "makhzan-i-asrar", a treasure-house of mysteries and perfected marvels.'
Eric Ormsby, the TLS
'It is marvelous to find a poet whose poetry lives through its metre. His handling of it is masterful, and you are never aware of the effort. And the language is exact but relentless, like the perceptions . . . Davis is one of the best poets around.'
Thom Gunn
