William Henry Davies (1871-1940) was a Welsh poet and writer. He was
also a traveller and adventurer, often living on his wits as a tramp and
itinerant labourer. After a serious accident while attempting to board a
train in eastern Canada while on the way to the Klondike Gold Fields he
returned to London and began to write. He would become one of the most
popular poets of his time with his work championed by both Edward Thomas
and George Bernard Shaw.
Famous for his prose memoir The Autobiography of a Super-tramp, he is
best-known as a poet for 'Leisure', a hymn to living slow and having
'time to stand and stare'. Saints and Lodgers offers an introduction
to the wide range of Davies's poetry which lies beyond his famous
reputation. Here are hymns to the beauty of his native south Wales and
to the natural world, poems in praise of lives lived on the margins and
on the streets, drinking songs and songs of the sea. More than anything,
as Newport poet Jonathan Edwards argues in his compelling introduction,
Davies emerges as a poet of people, who never turns away from the
suffering or the beauty of the saints and lodgers among whom he lives.
Jonathan Edwards's first collection of poems, My Family and Other
Superheroes received the Costa Poetry Award and the Wales Book of the
Year People's Choice Award. He lives in Crosskeys, near Newport, and is
editor of Poetry Wales.
