Votive Mess

Nia Davies is a poet experimenting with performance, embodied practice, intermedia and hybrid writing. She is also a writer, researcher, performer and literary curator. She was editor of Poetry Wales from 2014 to 2019, and has worked on several international and collaborative projects such as Literature Across Frontiers, Wales International Poetry Festival and Wales Literature Exchange. Her poems and essays have been published and translated widely and she has appeared in several international festivals. A frequent collaborator with other poets and artists, she co-curated Gelynion, a Welsh Enemies project on collaboration in contemporary poetry in Wales in 2015. Her pamphlets, Then Spree (Salt, 2012), Çekoslovakyalılaştıramadıklarımızdanmısınız or Long Words (Boiled String, 2016) and England (Crater, 2017), were followed by her first book-length collection, All fours (Bloodaxe Books, 2017), which was shortlisted for the Roland Mathias Poetry Award 2018 (Wales Book of the Year Awards) and longlisted for the 2019 Michael Murphy Memorial Prize for a distinctive first book of poetry. Her second full-length collection Votive Mess is published by Bloodaxe in 2024. Other publications include Interversions (Poetrywala, 2018) with Mamta Sagar, Roid Rage (2019) with Rhys Trimble, Ooze Disco (forthcoming) with Amy McCauley, and a handmade miniature art book Key Blank from the Literary Pocket Book (2018). Oceanik – a poem with video work by Lucia Sellars was winner of Outstanding Poem and Poetry Impact award from the Film and Video Poetry Society, 2018. She was recently awarded a doctorate for research into poetry and ritual at the University of Salford.

For all their humour and disarming daftness, Davies’s poems do make space for the serious, the pertinent, the uncomfortable… Profane and charismatic, lovely and at times infuriating, Nia Davies’s poetry glitters above all thanks to its energy.

• 9    Ritual Steps, Paviland10  Mieri12   Communitas / Anti Communitas / Communitas13   Dick Joke Poem16   I Have Taken Many Forms Before I Took This One20   Anti-poetics, anti-techniques21   Theatres of the mouth23   Scores for Ritual Poetry24   Multi/direction Bio/poetics26   Sites / drysfa27   The phenomenology of cut-up29   Rungs, fences31   Resources from Coelbren34   Hunter-Actor-Poet35   Sominex love letter38   Carotid properties41   Fairy Business43   To the east44   Blod rite47   Wassail48   Fear and the Piano50   Striatum52   Rig Works (Wonder / Damage)52      1 Oil rig gift shop53      2 Ocean Nomad54      3 Poetics: Diamonds / Middle Sea ripple55   Lacey56   This would be a retrospective60   Tír na nÓg again61   Wear the anklet as a mask61      1 Separation: conditions of the poem63      2 Liminality/Poesis65      3 Dys-integration67      4 Poesis69   Hafod Jam: Documentation72   What moving says74   Llewaidd, Chauvet/Uplands76   Mother of OYSTER78   Notes & acknowledgements