Lightning Beneath the Sea is a lively first collection of poems in
English by Grahame Davies.
He brings a native warmth, an intimate, conversational tone, and a
raised cultural awareness to these poems. He favours rhyme and meter in
a number of memorable instances like 'Capital Bookshop' and 'Valley
Villanelle'; he can use a longer, narrative, free verse line as in
'Dangerous'; and there are several 'found' poems as in the witty 'The
Complete Index of Welsh Emotions'. He observes other nations with the
same keen, ironic eye that he casts on his own country and is as
concerned with character and the vagaries of relationships as he is with
wider cultural concerns.
"Poems which brilliantly describe Welsh life in the capital." - Peter
Finch
"There's a new world-view on our everyday lives here, overloaded with
memorable images and phrases." - Menna Elfyn
"He has an incredible gift of expression." - Meirion MacIntyre Huws
"Because Grahame Davies forever makes the perfect imperfect sense, the
smallest things exploding into God or Language or the Sea Itself. That's
the surprise of the poem, the ease of a great writer: that you don't
notice the lightning as it emerges from the depths, but what it
illuminates. No need to answer. Read the poems. Grahame Davies is a
known treasure in Welsh, and now we English-speakers get to share the
wealth."
Bob Holman
Grahame Davies is a Welsh poet, novelist, editor and literary
critic, whose accolades include the Wales Book of the Year. His books
include the cultural studies The Chosen People: Wales and the Jews
(2002) and The Dragon and the Crescent: Nine Centuries of Welsh Contact
with Islam (2011), the novel Everything Must Change (2007), and the
psycho-geography Real Wrexham (2007), all published by Seren. He lives
in Cardiff.
