Donald Davie was, par excellence, the engaged poet of our time.His poems do not pre-empt us in the way that protest or political poetry does, though he protests and is political.He was a poet of English perspectives refracted through historical mediation, essay-poem, love lyric, satire, translation (notably of the Psalter), epistle, eclogue and other forms.His passion is for our common language, its registers and tonalities, what it can do responsibly and where it can go only at its peril.
This expanded edition of the Collected Poems includes the posthumous Poems and Melodramas.It restores to print the author's own selection from his Pasternak translations and the whole of The Forests of Lithuania, and it gathers together for the first time over two dozen poems which have not previously appeared in any of his collections.It also incorporates the corrections and revisions Davie made to his own copy of the 1990 Collected Poems.The Notes which he provided for his first Collected in 1972 at last reappear, supplemented by further notes and a new editorial introduction.

Born in Barnsley in 1922, Donald Davie served in the Navy and studied at Cambridge, becoming Professor of English at Essex, and later at Stanford and Vanderbilt. In 1988 he returned to England where he died in 1995. Carcanet's uniform Collected Works of Donald Davie includes Collected Poems (1990), Under Briggflatts (1989), Slavic Excursions (1990), Studies in Ezra Pound (1991), Older Masters (1992), Church, Chapel, and the Unitarian Conspiracy (1995) and Poems and Melodramas (1996). Purity of Diction in English Verse and Articulate Energy (one volume) are also available from Carcanet. NEIL POWELL was born in London in 1948.He was educated at Sevenoaks School, where he founded and edited the award-winning magazine Verve and wrote on jazz as a ‘young critic’ for The Daily Telegraph; and at the University of Warwick, where he read English and American Literature (BA, 1966–9) followed by postgraduate research on English Literature (MPhil, 1969–71).Between 1967 and 1970 he was editor of Tracks, and in 1969, while still an undergraduate, won a Gregory Award.He taught at Kimbolton School and St Christopher School, Letchworth, where he became Head of English; he was the founder-owner of The Baldock Bookshop in Hertfordshire; and since 1990 he has been a full-time author and editor, living in Suffolk. His books include eight collections of poetry – At the Edge (1977), A Season of Calm Weather (1982), True Colours (1991), The Stones on Thorpeness Beach (1994), Selected Poems (1998), A Halfway House (2004), Proof of Identity (2012) and Was and Is: Collected Poems (2017) – as well as Carpenters of Light (1979), Roy Fuller: Writer and Society (1995), The Language of Jazz (1997), George Crabbe: An English Life (2004), Amis & Son: Two Literary Generations (2008) and Benjamin Britten: A Life for Music (2013).He edited and introduced the Selected Poems of Fulke Greville (1990), the anthology Gay Love Poetry (1997), the Collected Poems of Donald Davie (2002) and the Collected Poems of Adam Johnson (2003). He has contributed to numerous journals and newspapers including Agenda, Critical Quarterly, Encounter, Gay Times, The Guardian, The Independent, The Listener, Literary Review, The London Magazine, New Statesman, PN Review, Poetry Review, The Spectator, The Sunday Telegraph and The Times Literary Supplement; to reference books such as British Writers, The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English, The Dictionary of Literary Biography, The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry and The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; to various anthologies; and to BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4.He was for fifteen years Co-ordinating Editor of PN Review. Literary Agent Natasha Fairweather, Rogers Coleridge & White, 20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN (020 7243 9517); [email protected]