W.H. Davies, the famous 'tramp-poet' of Newport, lived a swashbuckling life of vagrancy in London and America, rising from a life on the streets to life as a famous poet who was championed by Edward Thomas and George Bernard Shaw. While famous for his prose memoir The Autobiography of a Super-tramp, he is best-known as a poet for 'Leisure, ' a hymn to living slow and having 'time to stand and stare.' Saints and Lodgers offers an introduction to the wide range of Davies's poetry which lies beyond his famous reputation. Here are hymns to the beauty of his native South Wales and to the natural world, poems in praise of lives lived on the margins and on the streets, drinking songs and songs of the sea. More than anything, as Newport poet Jonathan Edwards argues in his compelling introduction, Davies emerges as a poet of people, who never turns away from the suffering or the beauty of the saints and lodgers among whom he lives. Jonathan Edwards's first collection of poems, My Family and Other Superheroes received the Costa Poetry Award and the Wales Book of the Year People's Choice Award. He lives in Crosskeys, near Newport. W.H. Davies, the famous ' tramp-poet' of Newport, lived a swashbuckling life of vagrancy in London and America, rising from a life on the streets to life as a famous poet, who was championed by Edward Thomas and George Bernard Shaw. While famous for his prose memoir The Autobiography of a Super-tramp, he is best-known as a poet for ' Leisure, ' a hymn to living slow and having ' time to stand and stare.' Saints and Lodgers offers an introduction to the wide range of Davies's poetry which lies beyond his famous reputation. Here are hymns to the beauty of his native South Wales and to the natural world, poems in praise of lives lived on the margins and on the streets, drinking songs and songs of the sea. More than anything, as Newport poet Jonathan Edwards argues in his compelling introduction, Davies emerges as a poet of people, who never turns away from the suffering or the beauty of the saints and lodgers among whom he lives.
