Donald Davie: Poems and Melodramas

Shortly before his death in 1995, Donald Davie sent his publisher the poem'Our Father'. This ten-part meditation broke a poetic silence which hadstretched from 1988, when with To Scorch or Freeze , the writer declared hiswork as a poet finished. He continued to write essays and to add from timeto time to his verse 'Melodramas', with their roots in Landor and Leopardi.It is clear that the Muse had not finished with Davie at all; abody of poems gathered sufficient for a remarkable book, extending theconcerns of his late years—concerns with 'the sacred', with England, andwith our vexed age. In Poems and Melodramas his voice sounds with a humaneinsistence on clarity and definition, and the uneasy certainties of a faithhard-won.