Recent publications by Nia Davies
BOOKS
Nia Davies’s second poetry collection, Votive Mess, will be published by Bloodaxe in 2024. All fours (2017) her debut collection was shortlisted for the Roland Matthias Prize for Poetry with Wales Book of the Year (2018) and longlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize for First Collections (2019). Order: Votive Mess or All fours from the Bloodaxe website.
ESSAYS, ARTICLES, POEMS
‘Mamaiaith: Poetics in commotion’ an essay forthcoming in Gestures – A body of work, edited by Nell Osbourne, Alice Butler and Hilary White, Manchester University Press, forthcoming in January 2025.
‘Wear the anklet as a mask’ – poetics from Votive Mess out in Futch Journal, June 2024.
“Song-Song Stare”: Maggie O’Sullivan’s Ritual Listening in Poetry and Performance
Peer-revied article in the ESLA – English Studies in Latin America, issue 24 on Performance, January 2023. Drawing from recent research into ritual and poetry in the field of creative writing, this poetics essay explores performance and ritual in the work of Maggie O’Sullivan. This research article focuses on sound, performance and listening to explore some of O’Sullivan’s ritual techniques of transformation. Link to full article, pdf: https://letras.uc.cl/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/DAVIES_Authorised-by-Author.pdf
Poems in Prototype Journal 5, 2023
Four Poems: Their attire, Anti-poetics – anti-techniques, Theatres of the Mouth, Mother of Oyster
Four new poems for Geraldine Monk in Blackbox Manifold 29, Winter 2022, from the University of Sheffield.
RESEARCH THESIS
Threshold Moves: A Ritual Poetry Practice
PhD Thesis, 2021, University of Salford. Nia Davies’s doctorate research (2017 – 2020) identifies and explores a practice of ritual poetry. Drawing on creative writing and embodied ritual practice, as well as theory from poetry, performance and anthropology, Davies presents new theoretical and practical understandings of a field of ritual poetry. The thesis is driven by and composed of original creative works of ritual poetry in text, performance and poetics. The thesis includes contextual-historical survey and readings of a selection of contemporary poets, particularly the works of Jerome Rothenberg, Maggie O’Sullivan and several other poets who experiment with ritual, as well as performance theorists and practitioners. Davies forms a novel methodology of practice-based research in poetry and poetics. The thesis also features a poetics, a culminating text oriented towards the making of future works of ritual poetry. She is currently preparing material arising from this research as book manuscript and further articles for publication, poems and poetics will appear in Votive Mess.
CURATION AND EDITORIAL
Nia Davies on the curatorial committee of the Nawr experimental arts live events series in south Wales and the editorial committee of Pamenar press focusing on experimental intercultural poetics.
The issues of Poetry Wales Davies edited from 2014 – 2019, seventeen issues 50.1 – 55.1 are available here: https://poetrywales.co.uk/product-category/back-issues/.
Nia Davies 