Votive Messis a book of small rebellions against systems of exhaustion and alienation, tracing Welsh poet Nia Davies' efforts toa lost mother tongue, y iaith Gymraeg, andembracing lingual brambles and shabby theatre to assemble fragments gleaned from the rubble of Babel.. The navel of the dream is inside out.
Nia Davies'second collection follows her startling debutAll fours, emerging from an immersion in performance and ritual. The poems trace a path through the peaks and troughs of performance, bouncing between enchantment and disenchantment. These works are studies in the altered states of travel, masks, comedy, learning and love.
Nia Davies' first full-length collection,All fours(Bloodaxe Books, 2017), was shortlisted for the Roland Mathias Poetry Award 2018 (Wales Book of the Year Awards) and longlisted for the 2019 Michael Murphy Memorial Prize.
By:
Nia Davies
Imprint: Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Edition: Paperback original
Dimensions:
Height: 234mm,
Width: 156mm,
Spine: 8mm
ISBN: 9781780377155
ISBN 10: 1780377150
Pages: 80
Publication Date: 12 March 2025
Audience:
General/trade
,
ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
9 Ritual Steps, Paviland 10 Mieri 12 Communitas / Anti Communitas / Communitas 13 Dick Joke Poem 16 I Have Taken Many Forms Before I Took This One 20 Anti-poetics, anti-techniques 21 Theatres of the mouth 23 Scores for Ritual Poetry 24 Multi/direction Bio/poetics 26 Sites / drysfa 27 The phenomenology of cut-up 29 Rungs, fences 31 Resources from Coelbren 34 Hunter-Actor-Poet 35 Sominex love letter 38 Carotid properties 41 Fairy Business 43 To the east 44 Blod rite 47 Wassail 48 Fear and the Piano 50 Striatum 52 Rig Works (Wonder / Damage) 52 1 Oil rig gift shop 53 2 Ocean Nomad 54 3 Poetics: Diamonds / Middle Sea ripple 55 Lacey 56 This would be a retrospective 60 Tír na nÓg again 61 Wear the anklet as a mask 61 1 Separation: conditions of the poem 63 2 Liminality/Poesis 65 3 Dys-integration 67 4 Poesis 69 Hafod Jam: Documentation 72 What moving says 74 Llewaidd, Chauvet/Uplands 76 Mother of OYSTER 78 Notes & acknowledgements
Nia Davies is a poet experimenting with performance, embodied practice, intermedia and hybrid writing. 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 pamphlets, Then Spree (Salt, 2012), ekoslovakyallatramadklarmzdanmsnz 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. Her second full-length collection Votive Mess is published by Bloodaxe in 2024. She was recently awarded a doctorate for research into poetry and ritual at the University of Salford.
Reviews for Votive Mess
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. -- Leaf Arbuthnot * The Times Literary Supplement, on All fours * Nia Davies’ peculiar and witty All fours is an interrogation of language and sexuality, psychoanalysis and gender, violence and the body, and the values and meaning that we assign to each. Her poetry is surprising, strange, experimental… All fours is challenging, but its content…is urgent. -- Suzannah V. Evans * New Welsh Review *
