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 years—concerns 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.