Imperium

Imperium opens with a high seriousness rare in contemporary poetry. Seven ‘sacraments’ – meditations on those moments at which the sacred can still touch our lives – are followed by nineteen sonnets dedicated to the ‘dismembered spirit’ of the poet’s father.  But the collection is dominated by the title poem, a fine successor to the historical sequences which distinguished Hilary Davies’ last collection, In a Valley of This Restless Mind.  Using a range of voices and perspectives, she creates a narrative of the Napoleonic Wars, taking us from Chatham Docks to Aboukir, from a Glamorgan foundry to Trafalgar.  Here and in the book’s final sequence, ‘Southwark’, which swings between a prehistoric ‘wattenmeer’ and the London of 1958, then back to Roman times via a wonderfully riotous Elizabethan South Bank, Davies satisfies us both emotionally and intellectually, drawing from her historical sources a rich, invigorating music.