David Morley
B. 1964
Morley conjures a marvellous sense of nature as intimacy, something precise yet loaded and of immense importance to us. George Szirtes
Biography
David Morley is an ecologist, poet, editor and teacher. Emerging with Releasing Stone (Arc, 1989), he has since published five collections with Carcanet, the most recent, The Invisible Gift: Selected Poems (2015), won the 2015 Ted Hughes Award; his previous collection, The Gypsy and the Poet, was a PBS Recommendation. He teaches at Warwick University and is Alliance Professor at Monash University, Melbourne. An international advocate of Creative Writing, he is the author of the bestselling Cambridge Introduction to Creative Writing, and his podcasts are among the most popular iTunes downloads on the subject worldwide.
Morley’s background in zoology expressly influences his approach to language, as his collection Scientific Papers (2002, the first of a trilogy, ending with Enchantment) states, ‘each piece of writing is a scientific paper in itself, a series of findings’. Given the poet’s interest in the play of phonetics and form – these collections include concrete poetry, use of the pantoum, and the poet is known elsewhere for his ‘slow poetry’ sculptures – they are findings in the medium of language; language and science become a ‘single discussion of perception’. In ‘Goldcrests’, excerpted here, poetic language is mimetic of the fidgeting alterations of the birds and their environment:
She sings light, he sings lightly, from the pine-needled nestcup.
He shifts lightly; she shifts light, among the burrs in the nestcup.
How slightly, how very slight, the sky shrinks to their egg shell hue.
The trilogy also saw an increasing engagement in Romani lore and dialect, as here, with the ‘Bears’ who amble through Victorian England with a clan of Gypsies and their enlivening names for counties and cities. Tim Liardet wrote of The Invisible Kings that the ‘gutterals and cadences […] create the spell within which Morley’s universe turns to magic, and led me to ask whether understanding could exist in phonetics alone’. In introducing here work from The Gypsy and the Poet (2013), a book which brings together the real-life encounter between John Clare and the Gypsy Wisdom Smith in a sequence of sonnets, Morley states that Wisdom ‘leapt into me from the pages of John Clare’s notebooks’. ‘The Invisible Gift’ echoes Liardet’s words in that John Clare so tenderly ‘feathers a space’ for language charged with negative capability: he ‘does not know what to think’; song transcends thinking and knowing, as the song of goldcrests transcends the ‘pine-needle dark’. The poem’s careful incubating of such a ‘gift’ (read with careful attention to its ‘taps and lilts’) also fittingly echoes the poet’s lifelong commitment to nurturing the gifts of other writers and students.
Morley talks, in one of his generous introductions to his Archive recordings, of his interest in the ‘opening between fields of language and experience’, and one can hear in his delivery a close attention not only to the ambiguities of language and dialect but to the very spaces between words.
David Morley’s favourite quote about poetry:
‘This is why I value that little phrase “I don’t know” so highly. It’s small, but it flies on mighty wings. It expands our lives to include the spaces within us as well as those outer expanses in which our tiny Earth hangs suspended.’ – Wislawa Szymborska
This recording was made for The Poetry Archive on 11 January 2016 at Soundhouse and was produced by Richard Carrington.
Poems by David Morley
from Fresh Water – Port Meadow – Dragonflies - David Morley
David Morley in the Poetry Store
The free tracks you can enjoy in the Poetry Archive are a selection of a poet’s work. Our catalogue store includes many more recordings which you can download to your device.
Awards
Fellowship from the Freshwater Biological Association
Prize websiteCholmondeley Award
Prize websiteEric Gregory Award
Prize websiteTyrone Guthrie Award
Prize websiteHawthornden International Writers Fellowship
Prize websiteArts Council Writers Award
Prize websiteRaymond Williams Prize
Prize websiteNational Teaching Fellowship
Prize website