[12/03/24] Davies, Nia: Votive Mess

Bloodaxe Books, paperback

Publication Date: December 3, 2024

Publisher Marketing: 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, iaith Cymraeg, 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.