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9781781727515

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"'In this unusual and moving collection, Davies circles an elusive religious faith, and often finds redemption through community. With a novelist's empathy for ordinary, decent, slightly damaged characters, he introduces us to 'Speedway Eddie', 'Happy Larry', and a former work colleague who was the ""queen of parties"" but fell out of favour and ""had no leaving do."" When she re-emerges one night on the narrator's doorstep delivering his take-away, smart and feisty as ever, his distrust of a showy personality is banished: ""I could have wept, / and not with pity for her, but with pride.""'- Colleague.;'Encounters for Davies are forms of gentle learning and may extend to the edge of the supernatural. The sequence Visitors calmly recounts various kinds of haunting, ranging from a beautiful love-poem, 'Found', to a disappointed account of a hurried business-meeting with the devil ('VVIP'). Davies has the knack of writing poems-as-stories where nothing much happens, and yet, as in a novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, the reader's mind is planted with seedlings of insight and longing. He can bring places to life, too; when he says 'Goodbye to a Home' in one poem, and celebrates 'A New Home' in another, both homes are themselves imagined as conscious, copiously beneficent spirits.; Central to the collection is a sequence commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Aberfan disaster, accompanied by a selection of photos by I. C. ""Chuck"" Rapoport. Here, the power of the poems lies in their simplicity and child-eyed directness, qualities sustained even in the complex form of the villanelle chosen for the elegy, 'The Graves of Aberfan'.; Grahame's poems are touched by the sacred, achieving a balanced transcendence in their awareness that, so often, ""life is too big"". Despite the shadows, A Darker Way is like a glowing hearth where humour and lyricism, comfort and blessing are exchanged. It feels a privilege to have been invited.' - Carol Rumens."

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Grahame Davies is a poet, novelist, editor and literary critic, who has won numerous prizes, including the Wales Book of the Year Award. He is the author of 17 books in Welsh and English, including: The Chosen People, a study of the relationship of the Welsh and Jewish peoples; The Dragon and the Crescent, a study of Wales and Islam; a novel, Everything Must Change, based on the life of the French philosopher Simone Weil, and the popular work of psychogeography, Real Wrexham. His is a native of Coedpoeth near Wrexham but is now based in Cardiff and London. He travels internationally as a reader and lecturer, carries out many high-profile poetry commissions, and is a much sought-after lyricist for classical composers. His poetry has been translated into many languages and is widely anthologised. His latest non-fiction book Real Cambridge was published in 2021.

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