Dick Davis sagt, die globale Avantgarde serviere Mystizismus à la Josh Ashbery und Ted Hughes: “Privatistisches, das außer ein paar Eingeweihten keiner nachvollziehen kann”, grammatische Extravaganzen, einen “gewohnheitsmäßig exaltierten Ton” und experimentelle Techniken. Seinen eigenen Gedichten hält Dick Davis demgegenüber zugute, daß sich ihre Aussage paraphrasieren läßt und ihre Bedeutung jedem Leser einleuchtet. Die von “Castrum Peregrini” [Heft 274-275] abgedruckten Gedichte halten seinem hohen Anspruch stand. (Ingeborg Harms, Frankfurter Allgemeine)
The style is firm, totally without pretension, but all art. The majority of poems are metrical: at a time when most American poets consider metre obsolete and most English poets who use it do so as if it were obsolete, it is wonderful to find a poet (English) whose poetry lives through its metre. His handling of it is masterful, and you are never aware of effort. And the language is exact but relentless, like the perceptions. On the basis of this book, I would say that Davis is one of the best poets around. (Thom Gunn, Thames Poetry)
Davis does not belong to a school, and the crucial affinities run deeper: he belongs to an English and a European tradition of writing in which “purity” of diction, of thought and theme, are virtues of the highest order; in which poetry interprets experience by standing apart from it, and leaves the task of reflecting experience to mirrors and to prose. (Michael Schmidt, The Times Literary Supplement)
It is easy to be distracted, or too fascinated, by the surface brilliance of Dick Davis’ finely wrought poems. But the temptation should be resisted, for the soul of each poem lies in its depths, in a resonant ambiguity echoing between despair and hope, revulsion and love, absurdity and narrative, misunderstanding and translation. His poetry reverses Plato’s similes of the cave and of the Divided Line: to understand its truth, you must first be attracted by the light and precision of the form, and then find your way dialectically back down to earth or even below, where underground fires devour, play upon, or gently welcome, like a hearth, what matters most. (Emily Grosholz)
