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A Garland of Many Years
by Donald Davie
To some readers the poems will seem unusual as love poems because they do not idealize love and marriage. Their strength lies in their honesty and intimacy and in the openness to the pain and self-understanding that both ardor and conflict ("We, we throve on friction") can produce. This is a relationship in which each knows the other too well to be assuaged by a sentimental lyricism.
For this special edition, twelve of Doreen's photographs from their travels together have been included, so that her sensibility may be present, too, as an artist in her own right. Donald's handwritten poems are reproduced both in facsimile and in type.
Donald Davie is widely read in Britain and the United States by those who find the tensions of deep and complex emotion most effective in poetry when expressed with discipline and restraint. Davie, who taught for many years at Stanford and Vanderbilt, was also an influential scholar and critic.
Without being in any way confessional and with all the skill of verse technique for which Davie has been acclaimed, these poems distill what is most moving and sustaining in his life's work.
-- Albert Gelpi