Back to the War

Over thirty years in the making, Frank Davey's careful archaeology of the catalogue of innocence his youthful imagination assembled growing up in and immediately after the Second World War is a work of astonishment. This is no lyrical work of sentimental nostalgia, no attempt to return to a romanticized "simpler past," no rediscovery of "the child within," but rather a careful reconstruction of "the child without." The reader moves through these poems, neither sanitized nor updated by their passage through experience, as one would through a gallery installation of intensely personal epiphanies, both frightening and ecstatic, lucid and obscure.