Victorian Cardiff - the world's busiest port, booming on the back of the coal mined in the Welsh valleys. 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 the chief of a successful Cardiff architectural firm - 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.

'When much new poetry looks no further than the poet's navel, this kind of imaginative leap is a tonic.' - The Telegraph

Docklands is a meticulous study of place, time and atmosphere, which opens the reader's eyes to a city behind the city, and to lives behind our own. - Wales Arts Review

Autorentext

Damian Walford Davies is a poet, writer and librettist. He is the author of three Seren collections - Suit of Lights (2009), Witch (2012) and Judas (2015), together with the pamphlet Alabaster Girls (Rack Press, 2015) and the co-written volume, Whiteout (Parthian, 2006).

He is pro vice chancellor of the College of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences at Cardiff University, where he specialises in Romanticism, the two literatures of Wales, and Creative Writing.