Alan Davies

Odes Alan Davies

Poetry. From a longer sequence of Odes & fragments these select few entail the processes of ruminative thought as they go over the edge into careening feeling. The reader is placed in an immanent experience. We pass our thought through the poems, we experience the language. There is a plasticity to the experience, a feeling of the poem molding itself--Geoffrey Olsen. These are poems which, dancing deftly among assonance, dissonance and diverse repetitions, while adroitly avoiding the risk of sounding like a bad Celan pastiche, are excessively difficult to get right. Luckily, they are right--Nicholas Manning.