Damian Walford Davies

Richard Marggraf Turley

A volume of impassioned poems, from the elegiac to the tongue-in- cheek. It succeeds in examining the state of the world, its uncertainties and disorders. The book is co-authored, a feature which is commensurate with the varying voices and perspectives in the material.

Whiteout

Published to mark the centenary of Roald Dahl’s (Welsh) birth, Roald Dahl: Wales of the Unexpected breaks new ground by revealing the place of Wales in the imagination of the writer known as ‘the world’s number one storyteller’. Exploring the complex conditioning presence of Wales in his life and work, the essays in this collection dramatically defamiliarise Dahl and in the process render him uncanny. Importantly, Dahl is encountered whole – his books for children and his fiction for adults are read as mutually invigorating bodies of work, both of which evidence the ways in which Wales, and the author’s Anglo-Welsh orientation, demand articulation throughout the career. Recognising the impossibility of constructing a monolithic ‘Welsh’ Dahl, the contributors explore the compound and nuanced ways in which Wales signifies across the oeuvre. Roald Dahl: Wales of the Unexpected takes Dahl studies into new territory in terms of both subject and method, showing the new horizons that open up when Dahl is read through a Welsh lens. Locating Dahl in illuminating new textual networks, resourcefully offering fresh angles of entry into classic Dahl texts, rehabilitating neglected Dahl texts, and analysing the layered genesis of (seemingly) familiar works by excavating the manuscripts, this innovative volume brings Dahl ‘home’ in order to render him invigoratingly unhomely. The result is not a parochialisation of Dahl, but rather a new internationalisation.

Wales of the Unexpected

Roald Dahl

Victorian Cardiff -the world's busiest port, booming on the back of the coal mined in the Welsh valleys - is vividly imagined through the eyes of the speaker in Damian Walford Davies's new poetry collection, Docklands: A Ghost Story. It is 1890, and three dark terraces down the docks are to be levelled to make way for a new square. The commission is given to a local architect, a man supremely sure of himself. Yielding to docklands' temptations, he becomes ever more estranged from a wife tormented by the death of their child. As the square rises from the ruins of the terraces, the louche architect encounters 'the girl'. A disquieting fin-de-siècle ghost story in verse, Docklands explores grey worlds at the edges of the eye, conjuring late-Victorian Cardiff's hustling, booming, sullied docks -and the horrors they conceal. A study of the violences perpetrated against wives and daughters, and of patterns of grief and longing, this disturbing sequence summons lost children and dark desires. Seen through the architect's eyes, the well-to-do streets of an expanding Cardiff and the shady spaces of the docks become the stage for a haunting play of presences that threaten to unravel his uneasy bourgeois world. The architect's broken wife, Eleanor, is a central and unsettling presence. Among the architect's acquaintances -conjured as characters in their own right -is the Irish cabbie, O'Driscoll, who regularly ferries him to dark assignations and who confirms rumours of a ghostly girl; the 'ladybirds' or street walkers with whom the architect consorts; and Cardiff's trade magnates. Also making an appearance in the architect's social circle are the Dahls -the parents of the famous Cardiff-born children's author.

A Ghost Story

Docklands

Andrew Green

Kathe Koja

Simon Callow

Rex Harley

Clive Hicks-Jenkins

This book is the first to survey Clive Hicks-Jenkins' work as a whole, and was published in celebration of the artist's 60th birthday. Its wide-ranging texts, written by poets, novelists and art historians based in Britain and the USA, address the themes inherent in Hicks-Jenkins' different bodies of work. The book will be welcomed by the artist's growing following of supporters and collectors and by all those with an interest in contemporary narrative painting.

"A comprehensive appraisal of the work of poet R. S. Thomas is provided in this essay collection. Discussed are topics such as Thomass Welsh pastoral, the Iago Prytherch poems, Christianity and atheism, language, personal identity and autobiography, punning, and love poetry. Also explored are his relationships with other poets, especially Wallace Stevens and Geoffrey Hill, and his uncollected work."

Essays After R.S. Thomas

Echoes to the Amen

Cartographies of Culture: New Geographies of Welsh Writing in English offers a pioneering new examination of the links between maps and imaginative writing. Concerned to draw literary studies and geography into a fruitful dialogue, the book offers a genuinely interdisciplinary study of literary texts in relation to the spatialities of culture. Taking the anglophone literature of Wales as its main ‘data field’, the book offers a boldly imaginative and stringently theorised analysis of five literary ‘maps’. What emerges is nothing less than a new way of reading literature through, and as, maps.

Damian Walford Davies

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