DAVIS, Dick

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Nationality: British. Born: Portsmouth, Hampshire, 18 April 1945. Education: King's College, Cambridge, 1963–66, B.A. in English 1966, M.A. 1970; University of Manchester, Ph.D. in Persian 1988. Family: Married Afkham Darbandi in 1974; two daughters. Career: Teacher in Greece, 1967–68, Italy, 1968–69, Margaret McMillan College, Bradford, Yorkshire, 1969–70, Tehran University, 1970–71, and College of Literature and Foreign Languages, Tehran, 1971–78; Northern Arts Literary Fellow, Universities of Durham and Newcastle, 1985–87; poet-in-residence, 1985, and visiting associate professor, 1987–88, University of California, Santa Barbara; assistant professor of Persian, 1988–1992, associate professor of Persian, 1993–98, and since 1998 professor of Persian, Ohio State University, Columbus. Reviewer, PN Review, Manchester, 1975–86, and The Listener, 1980–87, and Times Literary Supplement, both London. Awards: Arts Council grant, 1979; Royal Society of Literature Heinemann award, 1981; British Institute of Persian Studies grant, 1982–83; Ingram Merrill award, 1993; Guggenheim award, 1999. Address: NELC, 203 B+2, 1735 Neil Avenue, Ohio State University, 190 North Oval Mall, Columbus, Ohio 43210, U.S.A.

Publications

Poetry

Shade Mariners, with Clive Wilmer and Robert Wells. Cambridge, Gregory Spiro, 1970.

In the Distance. London, Anvil Press Poetry, 1975.

Seeing the World. London, Anvil Press Poetry, 1980.

The Covenant. London, Anvil Press Poetry, 1984.

Visitations. Colchester, Ampersand Press, 1983; as

Four Visitations, West Chester, Pennsylvania, Aralia Press, 1985.

What the Mind Wants. Florence, Kentucky, Barth, R.L. 1984. Lares. N.p., Sea Cliff Press/Cummington Press, 1986.

Devices and Desires: New and Selected Poems 1967–1987. London, Anvil Press Poetry, 1989.

A Kind of Love: New & Selected Poems. Fayetteville, University of Arkansas Press, 1991.

Touchwood. London, Anvil Press Poetry, 1996.

Other

Wisdom and Wilderness: The Achievement of Yvor Winters. Athens, University of Georgia Press, 1983.

Epic & Sedition: The Case of Ferdowsi's Shahnameh. Fayetteville, University of Arkansas Press, 1992.

Editor, The Selected Writings of Thomas Traherne. Manchester, Carcanet, 1980.

Editor, with David Williams, New Writing from the North. Ashington, Northumberland, MidNAG, 1988.

Editor, The Ruba'iyát of Omar Khayyám, translated by Edward Fitz Gerald. London, Penguin, 1989.

Translator, with Afkham Darbandi, The Conference of the Birds, by Attar. London, Penguin, 1984.

Translator, The Little Virtues, by Natalia Ginzburg. Manchester, Carcanet, 1985; New York, Seaver, 1986.

Translator, The City and the House, by Natalia Ginzburg. Manchester, Carcanet, 1986; New York, Seaver, 1987.

Translator, The Legend of Seyavash, by Ferdowsi. New York, Penquin Classics, 1992.

Translator, Borrowed Ware: Medieval Persian Epigrams. London, Anvil Press Poetry, 1996; Washington, D.C., Mage, 1997.

Translator, My Uncle Napoleon, by Iraj Pezeshkzad. Washington, D.C., Mage, 1997.

Translator, The Lion and the Throne: Stories from the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi. Washington, D.C., Mage, 1998.

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Critical Studies: "Immersions" by Thom Gunn, in British Poetry since 1970: A Critical Survey, edited by Peter Jones and Michael Schmidt, New York, Persea, 1980; "Dick Davis, A Kind of Love: Selected and New Poems" by David Middleton, in Classical Outlook, 70(3), spring 1993.

Dick Davis comments:

My themes are love, travel, and the meeting of cultures; my technique is formal to the point of pedantry. I admire wit and sentiment in poetry; I dislike obfuscation, density of texture at the expense of clarity, whatever cannot be paraphrased. I aim to write good verse.

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With the publication of a volume of selected poems in 1989, it is possible to give more than a merely provisional account of the poetry of Dick Davis, whose first full-length collection, In the Distance, was published only in 1975. Nonetheless, certain distinctive features were apparent in the first volume and in his next, Seeing the World. In poems like "The Diver" or "A Mycenean Broach" one can see his early work as definitely inheriting the mantle of the so-called tightlipped school of the late 1960s, plus that movement's inevitable tendency toward a minimalist art, exemplified in such pieces of Davis's as "Service," "Desire," or the positively paltry "An Affair …" A number of the poems of In the Distance are marred by a vagueness derived from either too much abstraction or an overanxiety for precision that leads to a gnomic and static utterance. Sometimes, too, there is a carelessness of syntax, as in "The Shore"—"he rolls / Aside to watch the deep / Thought may not sound"—or in "Old Man Seated before a Landscape"—"each separate / Discrete particular, an animate / Uncertain will claiming attention: no." In or out of context these lines verge on syntactical nonsense.

On the other hand, several of the poems in Davis's initial volume are fully achieved pieces. Particularly accomplished is the mythologically dreamlike "Diana and Actaeon," "Odysseus in Ithaca," and "A Memory," the last showing a lyrical propensity. In "Love in Another Language" the lines "The meaning crammed / Through unfamiliar channels, in new tones, / With a choked force" are an excellent summary of both Davis's problem with craft and that of modern poets in general.

Persisting, however, with his intolerable wrestle with words and form, Davis advances considerably with his second volume. There is more inevitability and less academic forcing about the poems. His gift for discovering the fine line, the meaningful and memorable utterance, is further developed; only now he is able, in poem after poem, to find a perfectly supportive context for his insights. "Marriage as a Problem of Universals" is quite brilliant. It is a poem on large abstractions that works on the practical level, the form being turned and turned in masterly fashion. In "Desert Stop at Noon" thought and compassionate feeling are communicated readily to the reader, and "Baucis and Philemon" and "Semele" further reinforce the sense of a sensitive and maturing talent, one informed by a serious authority.

If one may be permitted to generalize, there are several identifiable thematic strands in Davis's work, several distinct personae, as it were. There is the academic persona of "Art Historian" or of "The Epic Scholar," one "desolate with love" of his subject and with the past, one who would willingly "rest here and fantasize the willing past." Then, too, there is something of the philosopher in Davis. Indeed, there has to be to enable him to write "Marriage as a Problem of Universals," though the success of this particular poem also requires the poet to be celebrant, to be a man in love with not just the nuptial state (as a moralist or a philosopher might be) but with a real live woman too. In addition, the man who early perceived the limits of irony ("Irony does not save") is clearly on the way to some sort of religious awareness, and I think that there are pointers toward that end in many of the poems. I conclude this not just because of the occasional religious poem, such as "The Virgin Mary" or "St. Christopher," but also because of the more subtle evidence of a growing wisdom in the poet, the wisdom that always uncovers the divine in things. A yet further persona of Davis is concerned with classical myth, and even poems that make no reference to the Greco-Roman world—for example, "Scavenging after a Battle" or "Touring a Past"—strongly suggest a poet who has wandered, like Keats, much in the golden realms of Homer.

Consequently, in Davis we encounter a varied talent and one that, combining "imaginative ambitiousness with technical honesty" (to borrow the words of the Times Literary Supplement about his first volume), should suggest a sound poetic future. Provided that Davis can find things to say, it would seem that his future should be assured, for clearly his is a soundly based and intelligent talent. To borrow Michael Robert's famous pointer of genuine poetry, there is a certain "elegance" about Davis's writing.

Devices and Desires: New and Selected Poems 1967–1987 brings together all of Davis's best poems, some of which have been discussed above, and it is quite easy to appreciate the eulogies that have been lavished on his work by the likes of Thom Gunn ("Davis is one of the best poets around"), Michael Schmidt ("he belongs to an English and a European tradition of writing in which 'purity' of diction, of thought and theme, are virtues of the highest order"), and Glyn Pursglove ("Davis … is undoubtedly one of the most accomplished and most rewarding … of the younger English poets"). Indeed, Davis is one of the most deft and delicate technicians now writing in traditional forms. But what we can see—and began to suspect with The Covenant—is that Davis is increasingly in what I may term "inspirational difficulty." As he puts it in one of the new poems appended to the selected poems, entitled significantly "To the Muse," "I can't complain / If you disdain / To visit me— / Too often I / Tried to deny / Your quiddity." There is a distinct possibility that Davis's work as a lecturer and translator of Persian language and literature may have begun to dry up his fount of poetry and, to some extent at least, be turning his considerable linguistic skills away from poetry. Indeed, the appearance in 1992 of his lengthy translation of The Legend of Seyavash by Ferdowsi, which is part of the great epic poem of Iran, The Book of Kings—a considerable and accomplished undertaking—along with subsequent translations, would seem to indicate such a move.

—William Oxley