Donald Davis holds the world record for running the fastest backward mile. On February 21, 1983 it took him 6 minutes and 7.1 seconds to run backward one mile, faster than anyone else in history. He is in the Guinness Book of Records.
Davie regarded himself primarily as a poet, and in the 1950's became associated with the writers Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis in the so-called Movement in poetry in postwar Britain.
Davie eventually became disillusioned with the work of Larkin, and once wrote that the more famous poets who made up the Movement had been renowned not just for their talents, but also because "they fed our national wish to be a tight little island unto ourselves." But he never stopped writing poetry himself; Mr.
Donald Alfred Davie was born in Yorkshire in 1922, the son of a schoolmistress and a shopkeeper.
Davie, of course, is frequently mentioned, and perhaps that’s why I browsed in his book while photocopying a tax return form in the library.
Davie’s strength, most noticeably, is in his interests being well beyond what one comes despairingly to think of as “literary” - for him, poems are for use, the poet’s role “civic” and “honourable”.
Davie talks of “the hard bright surfaces which Pound’s language, when he is in control, presents to us as a sequence of images, each sharp-edged and distinct”; an attractive analogy between his verse and metal, or medals, something cast.
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