Please join us to celebrate the launch of Selected Poems by Donald Davie, edited by Sinéad Morrissey. Sinéad will be joined by long-term editor and friend of Davie, Michael Schmidt. The event will feature readings and discussion, and audience members will have the opportunity to ask their own questions. We will show the text during readings so that you can read along.

To mark the centenary of Donald Davie’s birth, Carcanet publishes a new Selected Poems drawn from the full trajectory of his poetry and showing his skills as lyric, satirical, elegiac, epistolary and philosophical poet. He was, par excellence, the engaged poet of our time, not in the pre-emptive manner of protest poets, though he is political and does protest. But he is a poet of English perspectives, refracted through historical and theological mediation.

And he loved the writing of Ezra Pound in all its suggestive contradiction. Pound challenged him to try longer forms, to break away from the discrete lyric and to use poetry for the most compelling and complex themes. His passion was for our common language, its registers and tonalities, what it can do responsibly and where it can go only at its peril.

Sinéad Morrissey introduces this new selection, prepared by his long-term editor and friend Michael Schmidt. Davie developed some of the most dependable ways into the heart of Modernism – American, Irish, British, Continental. Davie’s poems are themselves an index of his directions and an invaluable resource for the contemporary reader and poet.

Registration for this online event will cost £2, later redeemable against the cost of the book. All attendees will receive the discount code and how to purchase the book during and after event.

Please note that there is a limited number of places for the reading, so do book early to avoid disappointment. You should receive a confirmation email with details on how to join after you register. If this does not arrive, please contact us to let us know. Please also be aware that clicking ‘attending’ on the Facebook event will not guarantee your place – you must complete the Zoom registration here https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_es-pQVyrSkatR4-HnFUinA

About the speakers:

Michael Schmidt FRSL, poet, scholar, critic and translator, was born in Mexico in 1947; he studied at Harvard and at Wadham College, Oxford, before settling in England. Among his many publications are several collections of poems and a novel, The Colonist (1981), about a boy’s childhood in Mexico. He is general editor of PN Review and founder as well as managing director of Carcanet Press. He lives in Manchester.

Sinéad Morrissey was born in Northern Ireland in 1972 and educated at Trinity College, Dublin. Her awards include a Lannan Literary Fellowship (2007), First Prize in the UK National Poetry Competition (2007), the Irish Times Poetry Now Award (2009, 2013) and the T.S. Eliot Prize (2013). In 2016 she received the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. On Balance was awarded the Forward Prize in 2017. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2019. She has served as Belfast Poet Laureate (2013-14) and is currently Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University.