This is Professor Davidson’s second poetry collection for Carcanet Press, and is a book of elegies and consolations through vividly evocative places, seasons, and translations.
Professor Davidson shapes the book around two long elegies: one for the Franklin expedition of the early 19h century, the other a “complex, neo-baroque memorial for a cosmopolitan dead friend, a fantastist who lived a number of secret lives.”
Described as “a mighty book of Norths”, much of the collection in Arctic Elegies is about northern geographies and histories, of travels in cold upland Britain and European backwaters. Professor Davidson evokes the past through his translations and imitations of Rilke and the Dutch poet Martinus Nijhoff.
