David Nowell Smith – författare

On the peripheries of UK poetry culture during his lifetime, W. S. Graham is now recognized one of the great poets of the twentieth century. In the first concerted study of Graham's poetics in a generation, David Nowell Smith argues that Graham is exemplary for the poetics of the mid-century: his extension of modernist explorations of rhythm and diction; his interweaving of linguistic and geographic places; his dialogue with the plastic arts; and the tensions that run through his work, between philosophical seriousness and play, solitude and sociality, regionalism and cosmopolitanism, the heft and evanescence of poetry's medium. Drawing on newly unearthed archival materials, Nowell Smith orients Graham's poetics around the question of the 'art object'. Graham sought to craft his poems into honed, finished 'objects'; yet he was also aware that the poem's 'finished object' is never wholly finished. Graham's work thus facilitates a broader reflection on language as a medium for art-making.

Sounding/Silence charts Heidegger's deep engagement with poetry, situating it within the internal dynamics of his thought and within the domains of poetics and literary criticism. Heidegger viewed poetics and literary criticism with notorious disdain: He claimed that his Erläuterungen ("soundings") of Holderlin's poetry were not "contributions to aesthetics and literary history" but rather stemmed "from a necessity for thought." And yet, the questions he poses—the value of significance of prosody and trope, the concept of "poetic language," the relation between language and body, the "truth" of poetry—reach to the very heart of poetics as a discipline and indeed situate Heidegger within a wider history of thinking on poetry and poetics. Opening up points of contact between Heidegger's discussions of poetry and technical and critical analyses of these poems, Nowell Smith addresses a lacuna within Heidegger scholarship and sets off from Heidegger's thought to sketch a philosophical "poetics of limit."

What do we mean by 'voice' in poetry? In this work, David Nowell Smith teases out the diverse meanings of 'voice', from a poem's soundworld to the rhetorical gestures through which poems speak to us, in order to embark on a philosophical exploration of the concept of voice itself.

The first collection of essays dedicated to experimental practice in contemporary British poetry, Modernist Legacies provides an overview of the most notable trends in the past 50 years. Contributors discuss a wide range of poets including Caroline Bergvall and Barry MacSweeney, showing these poets' connections with their Modernist predecessors.