Abstract
"Overall, Witch is an intriguing and moving poetry collection, which revisits an old story to throw a new and disturbing light on gender and power." - Planet
"...vividly imaginative, intelligent and engrossing." New Welsh Review
"...Walford Davies brilliantly confirms the terrifying cultural power of language. A masterly work perhaps comes to speak most chasteningly through the implacable cultural and linguistic contingencies it sets in play" Poetry Wales
With the narrative pull of a novel and the vibrancy of a play for voices, Damian Walford Davies s Witch offers a thrilling portrait of a Suffolk village in the throes of the witchcraft hunts of the mid-seventeenth century. The poems in this collection are dark spells, compact and moving: seven sections, each of seven poems, each of seven couplets, are delivered by those most closely involved in the making of a witch. The speakers from Thomas Love the priest, the villagers who slowly succumb to suspicion and counter-accusation, the discoverer of witches Francis Hurst, and the witch herself authentically conjure a war-torn society in which religious paranoia amplifies local grievances to fever pitch. Witch is a damning parable that chimes with the terror and anxieties of our own haunted age.
"...vividly imaginative, intelligent and engrossing." New Welsh Review
"...Walford Davies brilliantly confirms the terrifying cultural power of language. A masterly work perhaps comes to speak most chasteningly through the implacable cultural and linguistic contingencies it sets in play" Poetry Wales
With the narrative pull of a novel and the vibrancy of a play for voices, Damian Walford Davies s Witch offers a thrilling portrait of a Suffolk village in the throes of the witchcraft hunts of the mid-seventeenth century. The poems in this collection are dark spells, compact and moving: seven sections, each of seven poems, each of seven couplets, are delivered by those most closely involved in the making of a witch. The speakers from Thomas Love the priest, the villagers who slowly succumb to suspicion and counter-accusation, the discoverer of witches Francis Hurst, and the witch herself authentically conjure a war-torn society in which religious paranoia amplifies local grievances to fever pitch. Witch is a damning parable that chimes with the terror and anxieties of our own haunted age.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Seren Books |
| Number of pages | 72 |
| ISBN (Print) | 9781854115799 |
| Publication status | Published - 11 May 2012 |