Contact us on (02) 8445 2300
For all customer service and order enquiries

Woodslane Online Catalogues

Arctic Elegies

  • ISBN-13: 9781800172630
  • Publisher: CARCANET PRESS
    Imprint: CARCANET PRESS
  • By Peter Davidson
  • Price: AUD $29.99
  • Stock: 17 in stock
  • Availability: Order will be despatched as soon as possible.
  • Local release date: 28/02/2023
  • Format: Paperback (216.00mm X 135.00mm) 72 pages Weight: 100g
  • Categories: Poetry by individual poets [DCF]
Description
Author
Biography
Sales
Points
Reviews
Google
Preview

This is a mighty book of Norths: northern geographies, histories, lights; a place of definition, frost and cold. There is an unfaltering Recusant spirit about these poems, a survival through defeat and a sense of underlying permanences. Each poem has an occasion: some of the occasions are personal meetings, conversations, which unlock shared scenes and themes; some are historical in origin, their past often one of early Christian faith or religious conflict. The poems abound in art, in specific lived detail, particulars of landscape, and in a harsh weather which is not unlike time itself in its effect on the living and aging imagination. Each poem requires a different metre, a different pace; each form is carefully attuned to its occasion. Peter Davidson was born in Scotland in 1957 and educated there and at the Universities of Cambridge and York. He is Senior Research Fellow of Campion Hall, Oxford, and Fellow-Curator of the Halls art collection. As well as academic works he has published several works of literary nonfiction. This is his second collection for Carcanet.

Peter Davidson was born in Scotland in 1957 and educated there and at the Universities of Cambridge and York. He is Senior Research Fellow of Campion Hall, University of Oxford, and Fellow-Curator of the Halls art collection. As well as many academic works he has published several books of literary non-fiction: The Idea of North (2005), Distance and Memory (2013), The Last of the Light (2015), and The Lighted Window (2021). He lives in Oxford.

• Second Carcanet poetry collection from Peter Davidson is a book of elegies and consolations for dead friends, past times, and spiritual consolations
• One of two main elegies is for the Franklin expedition of the early nineteenth century, lost in the arctic with no survivors
• The other main elegy is a complex, neo-baroque memorial for a cosmopolitan dead friend, a fantastist who lived a number of secret lives
• The collection explores places, regrets and memories – travels in cold upland Britain and European backwaters
• The past is also evoked by translations and imitations of Rilke and the Dutch poet Martinus Nijhoff

This is a poets book, his mind wide open to the cultures of the world [...] luscious, musical and precise - Gillian Clarke on The Palace of Oblivion

Google Preview content