Donald Davie was born in Barnsley, Yorkshire, received his early education at Barnsley Holgate Grammar School, and spent his boyhood in “the industrially ravaged landscape,” as he called it, of the West Riding. An English professor for many years, he was an English Movement poet as well as a literary critic.
More By This Poet
Across the Bay
A queer thing about those waters: there are noBirds there, or hardly any.
I did not miss them, I do not remember
Missing them, or thinking it uncanny.
The beach so-called was a blinding splinter of limestone,
A quarry outraged by hulls.
We took pleasure...