ProfessorIan Davidson

I have published over twenty single author poetry works, including four book-length collections. Partly in Riga , based in part on my writing carried out during a one-month residency in Riga in August 2006, was published by Shearsman in 2010. Two other recent full-length collections are At a Stretch and As if Only . At a Stretch reinvents the notion of place in a globalised environment. Moving from the idea of place as a 'structure of feeling', an important concept for post-war British and US poets as diverse as Frank O'Hara, Philip Larkin and Seamus Heaney, the poems, both in the content and the forms they employ, explore increasingly interconnected and destabilised landscapes. As if Only continues to develop the idea of place and its relation to the mobile human body, and its relationship to increasingly globalised structures and systems. My work was, for many years, broadly concerned with the Welsh landscape, read through spatial and mobility theory in an international context, and drawing on the multilingual and multicultural nature of Welsh experience and the presence of two official languages. My work reflects this through the use of Cynghanedd metre, albeit in English language poems, and this has carried forward to my recent Tyne and Wear poems project where in some sequences I use Welsh forms to describe North East English experience, as well as ekphrastic work. The Tyne and Wear Poems are an extended project, published in a number of recent pamphlets (four so far), that will be collected together to form a more substantial publication. I also carry out work in the field of modern and contemporary literature. My first monograph, Ideas of Space in Contemporary Poetry (2007) gives a comprehensive account of the way processes of globalization and spatial theory have influenced the work of contemporary poets from the UK and the US. Key elements of the 'spatial turn' in cultural and social theory are drawn from the work of figures as diverse as Henri Lefebvre and Doreen Massey and related to developments in poetry and poetics. The book demonstrates how contemporary poetry, some of which is difficult and challenging, sustains an engagement with important social and political issues. My second monograph, Radical Spaces of Poetry (2010) introduces a diverse range of experimental writing from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and examines the ways that writers have used varieties of evidence to produce not only new information, but also new ways of working with information through innovations in poetic form. An edited collection, Placing Poetry , brings together critics, poets and poet/critics to re-evaluate the notion of place for the 21st century. My current project draws on ideas of mobility from cultural and human geography, sociology and anthropology to demonstrate the ways that increased movements of people and things have influenced the form and content of contemporary literary works. Essays are published or forthcoming in journals such as Textual Practice , Mobilities , the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry and Cultural Geographies , and a monograph is in preparation.