Saints and Lodgers E-Book

William Henry Davies

• Herausgeber: Parthian Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

This is a selection of poetry by William Henry Davies about his return to his native south wales and people that live there.

Das E-Book Saints and Lodgers wird angeboten von Parthian Books und wurde mit folgenden Begriffen kategorisiert:
Natural world, Gritty, Real people, The past, Welsh

Leseprobe

Contents

About the Author

Title Page

Introduction

I am the Poet Davies, William

The East in Gold

Songs of Joy

A Beggar’s Life

Leisure

Love Absent

Days that have Been

The River Severn

The Mind’s Liberty

Old Acquaintance

The Villain

The Dragonfly

The Kingfisher

Robin Redbreast

The Hawk

Sweet Stay-at-Home

The Bed-sitting-room

The Start

Come, let us Find

The Lodging House Fire

Saints and Lodgers

Australian Bill

The Blind Boxer

The Heap of Rags

The Sleepers

Saturday Night in the Slums

The Old Oak Tree

Catharine

Jenny

The Inquest

Mad Poll

Nell Barnes

The Bird of Paradise

The Temper of a Maid

The Girl is Mad

Raptures

Passion’s Greed

A Dream

The Two Flocks

Sheep

The Child and the Mariner

The Poet

Thunderstorms

Killed in Action (Edward Thomas)

Francis Thompson

Ale

Come, Honest Boys

They’re Taxing Ale Again

The Soul’s Destroyer

A Poet’s Epitaph

Other Titles by W.H. Davies

Related Titles

Modern Wales

Parthian Voices

Copyright

W.H. Davies (1871-1940) was born in Newport. In his twenties, he spent several years moving around America as a beggar, leaping on and off moving trains to get around, ultimately leading to the loss of his right leg in a train accident.The Autobiography of a Super-tramp, which chronicles these experiences, was published in 1908.The Soul’s Destroyer and Other Poems, his first collection of verse, drawing on his experiences of a down-and-out existence in London lodging houses, was published in 1905. Supported and celebrated by literary figures such as Edward Thomas and George Bernard Shaw, as well as theGeorgian Poetryanthology series, Davies published more than twenty volumes of poetry, as well as works of fiction and non-fiction.Young Emma, an account of his courtship of his wife Helen Payne, was published posthumously in 1980. Though he is most famous as a poet for his much-anthologised ‘Leisure,’ which celebrates an ideal of rural life,Saints and Lodgersgives us the wider range of Davies’s poetic concerns, focusing in particular on the gritty social realism of the poems drawn from his experiences of poverty.

Jonathan Edwards is from Crosskeys, near Newport. His first collection of poems,My Family and Other Superheroes(Seren, 2014), received the Costa Poetry Award and the Wales Book of the Year People’s Choice Award. It was shortlisted for the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. His second collection,Gen(Seren, 2018), also received the Wales Book of the Year People’s Choice Award, and in 2019 his poem about Newport Bridge was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. He is editor ofPoetry Wales.

Saints and Lodgers

Poems of W. H. Davies

Selected with an introduction by Jonathan Edwards

Introduction

There’s something very odd in Newport. Lots of people would say, of course, that there are lots of very odd things in Newport, but I’m referring here to one thing in particular. There, at the bottom of the main street, surrounded by shoppers flouncing home from Next and Poundland, and other folk falling out of the nearby Wetherspoons, a dark figure stands. Half man, half tree, its face covered with a sculpted handkerchief, a necessary plaque tells you what it is: a statue in memory of W. H. Davies.

It was years, though, before I knew that. I walk past that statue most writing days, on my way from one Newport café to another, muttering under my breath a stanza or line from the latest draft of a poem. But it was only after years of doing this that someone pointed out to me what that statue was. No one would figure this surrealist thing, which must have been conceived on a day when the artist was either especially inspired or – fittingly, given Davies’s interests – especially drunk, as a statue of the poet, who is, above all, a writer of the real rather than the imagined. Once I did know it, I began occasionally saluting the statue on my way past, and it even made its way into a few poems. Sometimes I even felt that it was waving back or tipping me the wink, that Davies knew what I was up to or was cheering me on. When poets from India visited and I treated them to the Literary Highlights of Gwent tour (a short tour, it must be said), the first step was to read some of Davies’s poems in front of that statue.

So who was Davies and what washeup to? Born in Newport in 1871, he travelled around America and Canada as a hobo, jumping on and off moving trains as a way of getting round the country, a means of transport which had the advantage of cheapness and the disadvantage of being bloody dangerous. He eventually lost a leg in the process – these extraordinary experiences are documented in his famous prose work,The Autobiography of a Super-tramp. He lived a pauper’s existence in lodging houses in London, and was so desperate to become a writer that at one point he hawked his printed poems from door to door. Incredibly – and for those wanting evidence of the miraculous, here you might find it – his commitment paid off, his writing was discovered and brought him great fame, with press photographers turning up to the lodging house – one might imagine the modern equivalent, of a bloke living on the streets of London becoming a literary star overnight, and being hounded by the paparazzi. From there on, he was a prolific writer in poetry and prose, managing the further miracle of supporting himself by writing. In his fifties, he married Helen Payne, almost thirty years his junior, who he had met while out on one of his not infrequent searches for prostitutes – experiences documented in the posthumously publishedYoung Emma. They lived in rural contentment for the last twenty years of Davies’s life, as he continued to write and publish in volume.

So far, so Hollywood-friendly. There are grounds for arguing that every writer should live such an exciting life, particularly in this era of the writer-as-creative-writing-academic. But what about the poems such a life produced? Beyond ‘Leisure,’ which anthologies, teachers and – God help us – adverts have kept in people’s minds, how many of us know much about Davies’s verse? When I was approached to edit a selection of his poems, it was, to my shame, an opportunity to acquaint myself with the work of a writer from just down the road.

The poems I’ve selected from Davies’s work might in some ways seem like an eccentric choice, though in fairness, to work on the poems of someone like Davies, eccentricity might seem like a good qualification. I’m no Davies scholar and my interest here hasn’t been to compile a volume for scholars or which is necessarily representative of the enormous body of Davies’s published poems. The place to go for that is Jonathan Barker’sSelected Poems, and I would also recommend the 1963 Cape edition ofThe Complete Poems. What I’ve been after is a readerly edition. I wanted to put before the reader the poems I’ve found most affecting and important, and to sequence them in a way that showed them to their best advantage. Given my interests, it is inevitable that the Davies presented here will be skewed slightly. Of course, the poems about Wales are here. Where Davies praises Twmbarlwm, Allt-yr-yn and Malpas Brook, he’s writing poems that I want to survive, about places I’ve climbed or sighed or lurked in. As a former teacher, one of the reasons for my interest in Davies is that many people will be growing up now in those places not knowing that they have been written about in that way, or that theycanbe written about.