In Votive Mess Nia Davies asks how time and desire move us errantly. Her 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 begins to learn a lost mother tongue, iaith Cymraeg, and presents unfinished experiments in liminality.
Votive Mess is a book of small rebellions against systems of exhaustion and alienation, embracing lingual brambles and shabby theatre to assemble fragments gleaned from the rubble of Babel. 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.
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Rite - pupils, neck diaphragm / Rite - breaking open and up, breathing and living adfelion (RITUAL STEPS, PAVILAND)
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(Bloodaxe Books, 24 October 2024, e-galley, 96 pages, ARC from the publisher via Edelweiss)
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This is a new poet for me. I thought Votive Mess was just okay. The poems are very well-written and I was impressed by the poet's use of language, themes and imagery. I like poet's where I feel their work, either their themes or styles calls to me in some way. It's often themes and ideas which I find I can relate to. Unfortunately, I struggled to really connect to any of the poems. They were well-written but didn't really speak to me. I couldn't get behind any of the poems as well-written and entertaining as they were.
