Book Launch: A Darker Way by Grahame Davies

Thursday 6th June, 6:30 - 8:00 Pm

Brecon resident Grahame Davies reads from his newly-published Seren volume A Darker Way. This collection of poems and songs traces a hard-won but redemptive path between idealism and irony, failure and faith.

The reading will accompany an exhibition of paintings by Brecon artist Jess Hinsley whose striking image of Pen y Fan provides the cover picture of the book.

Davies is a poet who speaks to and for the community, exploring what it is to be human. Davies is renowned, not only as a poet, but as a lyricist for some of the world’s best-known composers and soloists. His work has been broadcast to millions internationally, including during King Charles’s Coronation in the soprano solo ‘Sacred Fire’. English composer and impresario, Andrew Lloyd Webber, described the work as ‘mesmerising’ and journalist and film-maker Robert Hardman called it ‘exquisite’.

Dealing with love and loss with both realism and compassion, Davies’s lyrics explore belief and unbelief, meaning and mystery, speaking for a contemporary sensibility wearied by supposed certainties yet longing for a sense of significance.

A Darker Way also includes work arising from Davies’s Welsh roots. For example, ‘Wrth Ddŵr a Thân’ (‘By Water and Fire’) was commissioned by the Senedd for its 2016 opening and references the Pierhead Building’s mural ‘Wrth Ddŵr a Thân’, commemorating the country’s coal, steel and maritime industries.

The moving sequence ‘Aberfan’ memorialises the deaths of 144 people including 116 children, in the Aberfan Disaster of October 21, 1966. Davies, who played a role in the 20th and 50th anniversary events, revisits the tragedy, responding to historic pictures of the town taken in the days after the disaster by Life magazine photographer I.C. ‘Chuck’ Rapoport.

Being a poet seems to demand taking that ‘darker way’ close to the precariousness of life, but Davies’ quiet, unassuming style is powerful, moving, and redemptive.