Docklands - A Ghost Story — A Ghost Story

Disgrifiad Cymraeg / Welsh Description

Yn ei gasgliad newydd o gerddi iasol, mae Damian Walford Davies yn cyflwyno stori am bensaer 'louche' a gaiff ei boenydio gan ysbrydd merch ifanc o Oes Fictoria, drwy ddociau ffyniannus Caerdydd yng ynghyd ag ystafelloedd tai dosbarth canol newydd dinas sydd yn tyfu yn gyflym.

Disgrifiad Saesneg / English Description

In Damian Walford Davies's compellingly eerie new poetry collection, Docklands - A Ghost Story , a louche architect is haunted by the ghost of a young girl through the booming docklands of Victorian Cardiff and the bourgeois drawing rooms of the expanding city.

Dosbarthu

Byddwn yn dosbarthu eitemau sydd mewn stoc o fewn 3 diwrnod gwaith, fel arfer drwy Royal Mail Tracked 48. Ar gyfer archebion o flaen llaw, byddwn yn dosbarthu’r eitem o fewn 3 diwrnod gwaith ar ôl ei derbyn gan ein cyflenwr.

Dispatch

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Bywgraffiad yr Awdur / Author Biography

Damian Walford Davies was born in Aberystwyth in 1971. He has published three previous collections with Seren: Suit of Lights (2009), Witch (2012) and Judas (2015) and has also edited a collection of R. S. Thomas's poems, Poems for Elsi (2013) for Seren. His other poetry books include the co-written Whiteout (2006); a pamphlet, Alabaster Girls (2015), and the forthcoming poem-libretto, The Mare's Tale . He is Pro Vice-Chancellor and Head of the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at Cardiff University. He lives in Cardiff.

Adolygiad y Cyhoeddwr / Publisher Review

Set in Victorian Cardiff between the years 1890 and 1892, this sequence of spare, vivid, one-page poems has the compelling quality of a ghost story, told in glimpses – and, from the opening poem, the speaker is introduced, the chief architect of a thriving architectural firm. Here, we meet O’Driscoll, the hansom-cab driver with his tragic broken-down pony, a ‘Revelation -/thin nag’. Here is the city, laid out before the architect, St Mary Street running ‘plumb//until, a quarter-mile away, it curves to kiss itself//beyond the French arcades’. Late nineteenth-century Cardiff is brought to life through its names – Sophia Gardens, Cathedral Road, Bute Dock, Stuart Street – and imagined in its details: ‘Quay street with its ziggurats of dung’, the new-build villas and dockland slums. The city is on the cusp of the new, where three ‘ragtag terraces//of lean abutting lives’ – Angeline, Louisa, Adelaide – are to be levelled ‘from Wharf Street to the dun canal’ and, in their place, ‘a perfect square with limes/and fountains’ is planned. This is what the architect is commissioned to do: out with the old and in with the new. By poems four and five, the central theme of this collection is introduced: the lost child. This is handled subtly, with impressive seeding of narrative fragments. The poem ‘Salvage’ seems ostensibly about the architect’s work: ‘They asked me for a church’. Yet, on ‘the pediment’, he gives them ‘such a pietà ! -/the son’s dead heft//deposed along his mother’s/knees’. The architect is characterised as a pragmatic man immersed in his work, outward regarding; it is his wife who seems to be carrying the burden of their recent loss. She is introduced in the following poem, ‘Spouse’, as being in the depths of mourning. It is night. He arrives home to find her waiting for him ‘on the landing, still in black’. Everything about her seems to needle him. We are told that ‘she has the desk lamp’ lit for his return, yet ‘the light’ seems to ‘prick darkness//like a spiteful eye’. Here is a relationship frozen after the couple’s child was stillborn: ‘Did I not also//hold the stillbirth in my palm/before they wrapped it in a pall//no bigger than my handkerchief?’ The marriage portrayed is one that has thinned to a faint flat line. He displaces his grief in work, and with floozies down the quays. His wife, dressed in her formal mourning attire, loiters indoors and, he says, ‘I loathe her pallor’. Through these early poems, we sense his inability to bear the intolerable agony of his wife’s grief. Then the revenant ‘girl’ is glimpsed by the speaker, where his new square is ‘rising from the ruins/of the terraces’. She is ‘ten, or younger,/standing by my unbuilt fountain’. He later discovers her name, her heart-breaking background. She, a poor snatch of troubled life, remnant of place, haunted herself, becomes a catalyst, an almost surrogate wisp, part of the journey that brings these characters through their grief and back to where the kick of new life begins and ‘return’ is possible. The poems themselves are taut, finely-wrought sixteen-line stanzas, each laid out in couplet form. The language is limber, sharp, dexterous; you notice its precision, marvel at its verve, even as you track the narrative forward to its denouement. This is, quite simply, a stunning collection. It is one to read, and read again. Its haunting, healing qualities will linger long after the pages end.