Donald Davie

Shortly before his death in 1995, Donald Davie sent his publisher the poem

'Our Father'. This ten-part meditation broke a poetic silence which had

stretched from 1988, when with "To Scorch or Freeze," the writer declared his

work as a poet finished. He continued to write essays and to add from time

to time to his verse 'Melodramas', with their roots in Landor and Leopardi.

It is clear that the Muse had not finished with Davie at all; a

body of poems gathered sufficient for a remarkable book, extending the

concerns of his late yearsconcerns with 'the sacred', with England, and

with our vexed age. In "Poems and Melodramas" his voice sounds with a humane

insistence on clarity and definition, and the uneasy certainties of a faith

hard-won."