Tag: Gram Joel Davies

Featured Publication – Not Enough Rage by Gram Joel Davies

~ Claire Walker ~ 2 Comments

Our featured publication for November and December is Not Enough Rage by Gram Joel Davies, published by V. Press.

‘It’s rare for me to recognise, and feel kinship for, a lot of contemporary poetry. I recognise and feel kinship with this. Not Enough Rage is like a series of controlled explosions. Trembling houses. A burning voice. Experience dismantled and sewn back together with glowing needles and a mouth full of stars.’ Bobby Parker

‘Like a Dylan Thomas of the age of mental illness, Gram Joel Davies leaps and flies through the world with dark exuberance. These are speakable poems, full of love for unlovable places and impossible people. In touch with but not tied to rap’s rhymes and rhythms, this collection, for me, shifts the modern world into the painful focus of real poetry.‘ Peter Oswald

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Gram Joel Davies grew up in a council house in the Westcountry. Working-class and university-educated, he is enthusiastic about psychotherapy and works as a counsellor in private practice. His poetry concerns itself with an experience of being (through rural and urban landscapes) and with belonging (in relationships marked by emotional disturbance). Publications have appeared over the decades in Magma, The Moth, Poetry Wales, The Centrifugal Eye and many other places. His debut collection, Bolt Down This Earth (2017), is also published by V. Press. Twitter: @g_r_a_m_j_d

Copies of Not Enough Rage can be purchased from the V. Press website, here.

What He Would Do With A Walled Garden – Gram Joel Davies

~ Claire Walker ~ 1 Comment

What He Would Do With A Walled Garden

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Gram Joel Davies is a poet in Devon. His collection Bolt Down This Earth (V. Press) was published in 2017. It’s been a while, but he is getting back into writing after training as a counsellor. A recent poem in The Moth marked his return.

Madeline in Bubbles, Rising – Gram Joel Davies

~ Claire Walker ~ Leave a comment

Madeline in Bubbles, Rising

I wanted madness to explain you,
not crafted mascara and perfume
to force me from the crowded bar.

Your blisters, us hitchhiking
into a sandy city. You said my offer
to carry you just made you inhumane.

I saved one bar of Green & Blacks
all night. You loved me in pieces.

Under a snowfield of Guinness glass,
I found you in the roots of tables.

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Gram Joel Davies is a poet in Devon. His collection Bolt Down This Earth (V. Press) was published in 2017. It’s been a while, but he is getting back into writing after training as a counsellor. A recent poem in The Moth marked his return.

Sophia is Out of My League – Gram Joel Davies

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Sophia is Out of My League

I arrived at university but found
the glass had someone’s lips on the brim.

The wine-list was unreachable.
I smuggled the crystal-ware home

and tried to fit a kiss
where she had been.

Although I eavesdrop on tables
I can’t ask her back for discourse.

My shelves have dusty techno
and Dungeons & Dragons figurines.

I should have turned my body
through the sharpener

not learned to hold smoke.
Asthmatic exhalations

rehash my parents’
rejection of right-to-buy.

I turn to say something with shreds
of last year’s set text in my teeth.

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Gram Joel Davies is a poet in Devon. His collection Bolt Down This Earth (V. Press) was publihsed in 2017. It’s been a while, but he is getting back into writing after training as a counsellor. A recent poem in The Moth marked his return.

These Threads are the Singing – Gram Joel Davies

~ Claire Walker ~ Leave a comment

These Threads are the Singing

Your body becomes a tongue
when rain falls, arms agape
you taste popping candy droplets,
a topical confection. Rain to skin
is light to eyes, you see
with every pore. Rain beats

at downed leaves and sagging
blades, thrashes twigs to pulp
and saturates bark till each surrenders
Assam swirls, tendrils of clove,
and fingers of crushed rosemary:
lizard-licks to your nostrils.

The wept joys of reunion, rivulets
pour, wrap seams, silver-cocoon
your limbs and neck, charge you
like coalesced lightning.
These threads are the singing
of nerves. When rain falls,

every puddle, every street lamp,
every windowed eave disintegrates
into a scintillating dance of atoms,
the world is microscopically undone
but remade. Every ricocheting drop
pounds its bass-pulse in your ears,
unabating arteries, thudding womb.

You breathe like rain, open arms
and legs and mouth and skin
to rain – the curse of being
melts from you in torrents –
you become again the stuff
of motion, surfs and plasmic
hearts of solar systems. Suns.

 

Gram Joel Davies lives in Devon. His collection Bolt Down This Earth is published by V. Press. See http://gramjoeldavies.uk to find out more.