“[H]is prosodic manners are immaculate; this guy knows how to write formal verse, without a dropped, stretched, or off-beat foot anywhere in sight. ... Marvelous reading.”
Booklist
“Davis’s poems exemplify Auden’s definition of the art as ‘the clear expression of mixed feelings.’ With a sly, self-deprecating wit, a wisdom that spurns bombast, they are charming, as well as intelligent, so clear and deftly controlled that a reader might overlook the ‘mixed feelings’ that they express, the disquiet and passionate ambivalence.”
Virginia Quarterly Review
“This volume is a perfect example of (Swallow Press/Ohio University Press’s) ability to find and publish the best of the genre. Davis has an uncanny knack of making amazingly accurate observations of seemingly everyday events.... Highly recommended.”
The Oklahoma Observer
“The pleasures it offers readers are rich and varied.”
The Hudson Review
In his new collection of poems, Dick Davis, the acclaimed author of Belonging, addresses themes that he has long worked with—travel, the experience of being a stranger, the clash of cultures, the vagaries of love, the pleasures and epiphanies of meaning that art allows us. But A Trick of Sunlight introduces a new theme that revolves around the idea of happiness—is it possible, must it be illusory, is its fleetingness an essential part of its nature so that disillusion is inevitable?
Many of the poems are shaded by the poet’s awareness of growing older, and by the ways that this both shuts down many of life’s possibilities and frees us from their demands. The levity of some verses here is something of a departure for Davis, but his insights can be mordant too, revealing darknesses as often as they invoke frivolity.
As Davis’s readers have come to expect, the poems in A Trick of Sunlight. aim at the aesthetic satisfactions that accompany accurate observations expressed with wit, intelligence, and grace. But they achieve as well an immediacy and rawness of vision that seem to belie his careful craft.
Dick Davis was born in Portsmouth, England. He is a professor of Persian at Ohio State University. He has published translations of prose from Italian and poetry and prose from Persian, and six books of his own poetry. His most recent collection, Belonging, was chosen by The Economist as a “Book of the Year” for 2002. More info →
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Paperback
978-0-8040-1089-4
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Release date: May 2006
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Dear Regime
Letters to the Islamic Republic
By Roger Sedarat
In his provocative, brave, and sometimes brutal first book of poems, Roger Sedarat directly addresses the possibility of political change in a nation that some in America consider part of “the axis of evil.” Iranianon his father’s side, Sedarat explores the effects of the Islamic Revolution of 1979—including censorship, execution, and pending war—on the country as well as on his understanding of his own origins.
Taken In Faith
Poems
By Helen Pinkerton
·
Afterword by Timothy Steele
In 1967, Yvor Winters wrote of Helen Pinkerton, “she is a master of poetic style and of her material. No poet in English writes with more authority.” Unfortunately, in 1967 mastery of poetic style was not, by and large, considered a virtue, and Pinkerton’s finely crafted poems were neglected in favor of more improvisational and flashier talents.
Nostos
By V. Penelope Pelizzon
In choosing the winning manuscript for the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, judge Andrew Hudgins remarked: “With immense poetic verve, Pelizzon finds flamboyance in places where it has been forgotten and brings it back to vivid life—and she sees it for what it is. Her vision is then both passionate and dispassionate at the same time, a maturity of perspective that is just one of the many accomplishments of this superb first book.”In
Waste of Timelessness and Other Early Stories
By Anaïs Nin
These stories precede all of Nin’s published work to date. In them are many sources of the more mature work that collectors and growing writers can appreciate.
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