Lightning Beneath the Sea is a lively first collection of poems in English by Grahame Davies.
He brings a native warmth, an intimate, conversational tone, and a raised cultural awareness to these poems. He favours rhyme and meter in a number of memorable instances like ‘Capital Bookshop’ and ‘Valley Villanelle’; he can use a longer, narrative, free verse line as in ‘Dangerous’; and there are several ‘found’ poems as in the witty ‘The Complete Index of Welsh Emotions’. He observes other nations with the same keen, ironic eye that he casts on his own country and is as concerned with character and the vagaries of relationships as he is with wider cultural concerns.
“Poems which brilliantly describe Welsh life in the capital.” – Peter Finch
“There’s a new world-view on our everyday lives here, overloaded with memorable images and phrases.” – Menna Elfyn
“He has an incredible gift of expression.” – Meirion MacIntyre Huws
"Because Grahame Davies forever makes the perfect imperfect sense, the smallest things exploding into God or Language or the Sea Itself. That's the surprise of the poem, the ease of a great writer: that you don't notice the lightning as it emerges from the depths, but what it illuminates. No need to answer. Read the poems. Grahame Davies is a known treasure in Welsh, and now we English-speakers get to share the wealth."
Bob Holman
Grahame Davies is a Welsh poet, novelist, editor and literary critic, whose accolades include the Wales Book of the Year. His books include the cultural studies The Chosen People: Wales and the Jews (2002) and The Dragon and the Crescent: Nine Centuries of Welsh Contact with Islam (2011), the novel Everything Must Change (2007), and the psycho-geography Real Wrexham (2007), all published by Seren. He lives in Cardiff.