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Votive Mess is a book of small rebellions against systems of exhaustion and alienation, tracing Welsh poet Nia Davies' efforts to a lost mother tongue, y iaith Gymraeg, and embracing lingual brambles and shabby theatre to assemble fragments gleaned from the rubble of Babel. In these poems, there are love letters drowsy and excessive as well as uncanny happenings on stage and in the woods. Votive Mess is composed out of a tangle of sex, leaf, stumbles on stage, damage, blackberries and dyslexia. There is a discharge of Awen, otherwise known as poesis. The navel of the dream is inside out.
Nia Davies' second collection follows her startling debut All 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.
‘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
‘The processes of co-making and co-playing are central to Nia Davies’ Votive Mess. […] Working with the interactivity of rituals, which were the subject of her PhD, Davies makes poems which grow their meanings from things set before, and shared with, their reader […] so that we can travel with and through them towards their points of arrival.’ – alice hiller, The Poetry Review
‘This is a stunning collection of poems that stretches language in so many ways.’ – Taz Rahman, Just Another Poet
‘… boundary-breaking, dissolving, and defying. It’s energetic and elemental, dizzying and full of daring, and it makes the reader question poetry in the most intense of ways. Sometimes, you can find ‘sense’ by reading a piece aloud and, often, there is also glory and beauty in the less usual words and combinations of words.’ – Mab Jones, Buzz Magazine
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