Docklands A Ghost Story

It is 1890, and three dark terraces down the docks of Victorian Cardiff are to be levelled to make way for a new square. A disquieting fin-de-siècle ghost story in verse, Docklands explores grey worlds at the edges of the eye, conjuring late-Victorian Cardiff’s hustling, booming, sullied docks and the horrors they conceal. A study of the violences perpetrated against wives and daughters, and of patterns of grief and longing, this disturbing sequence summons lost children and dark desires. Seen through the architect’s eyes, the well-to-do streets of an expanding Cardiff and the shady spaces of the docks become the stage for a haunting play of presences that threaten to unravel his uneasy bourgeois world.

Damian Walford Davies has published three previous collections with Seren and has also edited a collection of R. S. Thomas’s poems. He is Pro Vice-Chancellor and Head of the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at Cardiff University.