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. Vereen M. Bell, Professor of English at Vanderbilt University, is the author of Robert Lowell: Nihilist as Hero, as well as books on Yeats and Cormac McCarthy.

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