Biographical note

Born in Barnsley in 1922, Donald Davie served in the Navy and studied at Cambridge, becoming Professor of English at Essex, and later at Stanford and Vanderbilt. In 1988 he returned to England where he died in 1995. Carcanet's uniform Collected Works of Donald Davie includes Under Briggflatts (1989), Slavic Excursions (1990), Collected Poems (1990), Studies in Ezra Pound (1991), Older Masters (1992), Church, Chapel, and the Unitarian Conspiracy (1995) and Poems and Melodramas (1996). Purity of Diction in English Verse and Articulate Energy (one volume) are also available from Carcanet.;Sinéad Morrissey was born in Northern Ireland in 1972 and educated at Trinity College, Dublin. Her awards include a Lannan Literary Fellowship (2007), the T.S. Eliot Prize (2013), the Forward Prize (2017) and the European Poet of Freedom Award (2020). She has served as Belfast Poet Laureate (2013–2014) and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2019. She is Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University.