Presence

Dannie Abse was born in Cardiff in 1923. He began his medical studies at the Welsh National School of Medicine and qualified as a doctor from Westminster Hospital, London in 1950. While still a student his first book of poems was published and his first play performed. He married Joan Mercer in 1951. She had been an economics student at the London School of Economics and together in a long and happy marriage they raised three children, Susanna, Keren and David. Joan would also develop a career as a writer.For Dannie Abse further poetry volumes followed over the decades, culminating in his New & Collected Poems (2003) and Running Late (2006). His first novel, Ash on a Young Man's Sleeve, appeared in 1954. It drew on his secular Jewish upbringing in a large cosmopolitan Cardiff family in the 1930s, it has become a much-loved modern classic, regularly studied in schools and in higher education. His brothers at home would become well-known in public life, the politician Leo Abse and the psychoanalyst Wilfred Abse. His final novel, The Strange Case of Dr Simmonds and Dr Glas in 2002, was longlisted for the Booker Prize. His three prize-winning plays were collected in The View from Row G, while his autobiography, Goodbye, Twentieth Century, was published in 2001. His collected poems, Ask the Moon appeared in 2014 following Speak, Old Parrot (2013) which mused on the challenges of ageing, "all pavements slope uphill"; but also allowed compensations especially the friendship of the poet Lynne Hjelmgaard.The Presence, published in 2006, was a moving memoir celebrating and mourning his wife, who had died in a traffic accident after a collision on the M4 motorway near Porthcawl in 2005. Dannie had been driving the car at the time. They had been taking part in a poetry reading at the Porthcawl pavilion.Dannie Abse also enjoyed a successful medical career specialising in pulmonary disorders which he saw as a counterpoint andenrichment to his literary output.Dannie Abse was an enthusiast and advocate for literature especially poetry and the people who create it. He reviewed and edited manybooks and was seminal in the development of Welsh writing in English through his chair of the Welsh Academy and as part of thefounding team of the publisher Poetry Press Wales, known as Seren Books. Seren's first office was housed in the garage of his house atOgmore-by-Sea. He regularly travelled throughout the UK and internationally to read from his work. He served on many boards andchaired several societies in a long career of engagement and support. He was awarded a CBE for services to poetry and literature in 2012.He died in 2014.

Introduced by Jasmine DonahayeSeveral months after the death of poet Dannie Abse’s wife, Joan, in a car accident, he began to write a diary which is both a record of present grief and a portrait of a marriage that lasted more than fifty years. It is an extraordinary document, painful but celebratory, funny yet often tragic, bursting with joy as well as sorrow and full of a deep understanding of what it means to be human.