Docklands E-Book

Damian Walford Davies

• Herausgeber: Seren
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 28

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

Victorian Cardiff – the world's busiest port, booming on the back of the coal mined in the Welsh valleys. It is 1890, and three dark terraces down the docks are to be levelled to make way for a new square. The commission is given to the chief of a successful Cardiff architectural firm – a man supremely sure of himself. Yielding to docklands' temptations, he becomes ever more estranged from a wife tormented by the death of their child. As the square rises from the ruins of the terraces, the louche architect encounters 'the girl'. A disquieting fin-de-siècle ghost story in verse, Docklands explores grey worlds at the edges of the eye, conjuring late-Victorian Cardiff's hustling, booming, sullied docks – and the horrors they conceal. A study of the violences perpetrated against wives and daughters, and of patterns of grief and longing, this disturbing sequence summons lost children and dark desires. 'When much new poetry looks no further than the poet's navel, this kind of imaginative leap is a tonic.' – The Telegraph Docklands is a meticulous study of place, time and atmosphere, which opens the reader's eyes to a city behind the city, and to lives behind our own. – Wales Arts Review

Leseprobe

Docklands

for Martin and Filó

Docklands

A Ghost Story

Damian Walford Davies

Seren is the book imprint of Poetry Wales Press Ltd.

57 Nolton Street, Bridgend, Wales, CF31 3AE

www.serenbooks.com

facebook.com/SerenBooks

twitter@SerenBooks

The right of Damian Walford Davies to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

© Damian Walford Davies, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-78172-493-4

ebook: 978-1-78172-494-1

Kindle: 978-1-78172-495-8

A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted at any time or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the copyright holder.

The publisher acknowledges the financial assistance of the Welsh Books Council.

Author photograph: Brychan Rhydderch Davies.

Printed in Bembo by Latimer Trend & Company Ltd, Plymouth.

Contents

Commission

Cardiff, August–November 1890

Perspective

Firm

Lecture

Salvage

Spouse

Villa

Commission

Consumption

Thirst

Fruit

Girl

December 1890–March 1891

Solus

Wives

Trade

Saw

Warp, Weft

Ceremony

Reflections

Bestiary

Decadent

Chattel

Square

April–August 1891

Butcher’s

Flora

Migrants

Interior

Opening

Spectrum

Bouquet

Dessert

Tea

Vesper

House

September–December 1891

Play

Trail

O

Visitation

Rime

Nocturne

Unto us

Siren

Periphrastic

À deux

Fountain

January–May 1892

Gauge

Cemetery

Gifts

Stole

Figure

Cross-section

Recipe

Waist

Nereid

Return

Note

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Commission

Cardiff, August–November 1890

Perspective

From this gothic bay, flung out

above the hansoms

where O’Driscoll’s pony

rests a ruined fetlock

on a backturned hoof,

I can see St Mary Street run plumb

until, a quarter-mile away,

it curves to kiss itself

beyond the French arcades.

I lead each client to this

balanced brink; instinctively,

they back away. Revelation-

thin, O’Driscoll’s nag

evacuates the day in coarse, tan

gobs, heady sweetness

mixing with my new bay rum.

Firm

They’re passable, as partners –

Prichard hidebound, wan,

unmacassared; Seddon fleshy,

soft-soaped by his wife,

able botcher of a country church;

both petted daft by flocks

of daughters, fond

of metaphors concerning bees;

temperate in everything

except the riot act

they read our Butetown lad

who grins and wrings the postbag

as he scans the ample camber

of our punters’ wives

from bosom down to bustle.

Myself, I like the boy enormously.

Lecture

Their stipulations tickle me.

This Friday I address

St Mary’s Mothers’ Union

on that frothy text, ‘The Architect

and God’. Mrs Aston’s invitation

on the cream-wove paper,

blind-embossed, was breathless

as the messenger. Each month

I speak to guilds and schools,

but savour most the vestry’s

chaste proximities. I can smell

each just-bathed body, each lavender-

dabbed wrist, the trail of scent

a woman draws from throat

to chest. Ladies, I’ll begin; I take

the swallow as my starting point.

Salvage

Abercarn the godforsaken.

They asked me for a church;

what their blistered spirits

longed for was a monument

to firedamp and flood,

to bodies gaffed up black;

to those beyond the reach

of grappling hooks,

past even pity’s plumbline…

So on the pediment

I gave them such a pietà! –

the son’s dead heft

deposed along his mother’s

knees, the cross and ladder

in the background conjuring

a headframe and the winding gear.

Spouse

Past ten, she has the desk lamp

in my study lit, to lure me

like a moth, she taunted,