Luke Davies
Peter Porter Poetry Prize Judges' Report 2016
Thursday, 10 March 2016More than 700 poets entered this year's Peter Porter Poetry Prize; just over 200 of these entries came from overseas. The judges were Luke Davies, Lisa Gorton and Kate Middleton. They completed their judgement without knowing the name, gender, background or nationality of any entrant.
This prize honours Peter Porter and its judges seek to honour him not only in name but in principle: by ...
Bonus Episode - Porter Prize Judges Lisa Gorton and Luke Davies in Conversation with Peter Rose
In this bonus episode of Poem of the Week Peter Rose interviews two judges of the 2016 Peter Porter Poetry Prize – Lisa Gorton and Luke Davies – about the judging of the prize and honouring the legacy of Peter Porter.
... (read more)Gillian Dooley reviews 'The Simple Act of Reading' edited by Debra Adelaide
Let's start with the title. The act of reading is anything but simple, as Fiona McFarlane and Gabrielle Carey both point out. Eyes, brain, and mind cooperate to create from a series of symbols with no intrinsic representative value a coherent message, or some amusing nonsense, or a persuasive argument, or a boring anecdote, or a parade of transparent lies.
D ...
Jennifer Maiden's The Fox Petition: New Poems (Giramondo) conjures foxes 'whose eyes were ghosts with pity' and foxes of language that transform the world's headlines
... (read more)It is tempting to draw parallels between Anton Corbijn’s Life and the director’s own personal history, in particular his series of striking 1979 black-and-white photographs of UK band Joy Division. The Dutch photographer, upon hearing the band’s first album, Unknown Pleasures, was convinced something great was in the offing, and set out for Engla ...
Anthony Lynch reviews Luke Davies's 'Four Plots for Magnets'
In 1982 a young Steve Kelen published a slim volume by an even younger poet by the name of Luke Davies. Four Plots for Magnets was a chapbook of thirteen poems written mostly when the poet was eighteen and nineteen. Published by Glandular Press, an outlet established by Kelen and the painter Ken Searle in 1980, this ‘sampler’ (as Kelen later calls it) was in a monochrome, staple-bound format. The cover layout came courtesy of another poet, Ken Bolton, its one adornment an image from a 1970 American NFL yearbook illustrating moves in gridiron, a game for which Davies had a childhood obsession.
... (read more)It is strangely affecting to see people’s lips moving as they sit silently reading to themselves. Apparently, when we read we can’t help but imagine speaking. Even silent reading has its life in the body: seeing words, the part of our brain that governs speech starts working. When we read poetry silently to ourselves, is it our own voice or the poet’s voice that we hear?
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The title is presumably meant to be ambiguous. Not only did the protagonist, Howard Hughes, hurtle round the world in aeroplanes of his own devising, and not only did he ingest amphetamines at a rate that would finish most of us, but there is also a sense of his crashing non-stop through life itself. And 'speed', he tells us in Luke Davies' remarkable new novel, 'shouldered some of the weight for me ... helped me maintain control over a bucking project, since, control, ultimately, is all there is.'
... (read more)
The title is presumably meant to be ambiguous. Not only did the protagonist, Howard Hughes, hurtle round the world in aeroplanes of his own devising, and not only did he ingest amphetamines at a rate that would finish most of us, but there is also a sense of his crashing non-stop through life itself. And 'speed', he tells us in Luke Davies' remarkable new novel, ‘shouldered some of the weight for me ... helped me maintain control over a bucking project, since, control, ultimately, is all there is.’
... (read more)Oliver Dennis reviews 'Totem: Totem poem plus 40 love poems' by Luke Davies
Luke Davies is best known as the author of Candy (1997), a novel about love and heroin addiction. His poetry, meanwhile, has attracted attention for its characteristic interest in how we relate to an unknowable universe; it is also unusual in that it draws on a more-than-everyday understanding of theoretical physics. In this latest volume, which comes in two parts – a long meditative poem followed by forty short lyrics, both celebrating love – an awareness of the vast reaches of space remains, although its expression is now less factual and has acquired a new subtlety.
... (read more)