Launching Bolt Down This Earth

V. Press is delighted to launch Bolt Down This Earth by Gram Joel Davies.

Bolt Down This Earth pulses with energy. These poems hang between ambition and loss; they span survival in the home and on hilltops, stretch over break-ups and break-downs. Gram Joel Davies strips back the boards of existence to look at the wires—searching for human voices where the breeze hums though cable or branch. Adolescent ritual turns to a “lightbulb crushed into light.” His imagery is electrifying. Harmony and dissonance cause unexpected meanings to crackle and spark, while scenes and relationships fuse, so that a “power station is an ice cube / across the mica flats / and cider stymies us.” Bolt Down This Earth is very vital and very charged.

“Linguistically bold and alive to the thisness of its moments, Bolt Down This Earth is a debut collection of lyric energy and inventiveness, full-throated and confident in its own power to convince. An arrival to be celebrated.” Martin Malone

“Gram Joel Davies’s first collection slips deftly between a West Country past and the present. The poems are full of taut observation and meticulous attention to detail. And though there is an urban feel to many of them, the collection is brimful of nature. The poems are often peopled with the troubled or misunderstood, and the worlds they move in are shadowy and uncomfortable versions of those we know – almost dystopian at times. There is often a sense of the narrator or central character being the outsider (a boy almost drowning, two teenagers exploring a derelict hospital, a father too fond of his drink) and there is a disquieting and almost violent sensuality too. The complexity of the worlds these people move in is echoed by the complexity of the way Davies puts words together – sometimes joining two words together to create new words; weaving something rich and new that casts its melancholy spell over the reader, but never excludes them. In these poems the uncomfortable tinnitus of the past encroaches on the very real tinnitus of the present. This is compounded in the powerful Tinnitus sequence that is dotted throughout the collection − like a central column that the other poems hang on. The cumulative effect of the layering of numerous and various language is both troubling and stunning. These are poems whose subtle inventiveness works its way into your subconsciousness, poems that you will want to revisit time and again.” Julia Webb

A sample poem from the collection can be found below.

Buy Bolt Down This Earth now using the paypal link below. 

Bolt Down This Earth with P&P

Bolt Down This Earth with P&P for U.K. only £11.25 GBP Bolt Down This Earth with P&P for Rest of the World £16.50 GBP

Coming Up For Air

She makes him taste of tarragon,

olive oil, black pepper.

He does not rinse his beard.

He wants to wear it

into the warm street like a lit flume.

People gull around his wake,

scenting his beard

comb the line of hers.

A man with rolled sleeves

sniffs and wants to plunge

his tongue

but, through a window, a cab driver

draws breath, tasting

how he waited on

her nipple.

In the foyer, a clerk’s hand

floats over keys,

watching lift-numbers

kiss up her ribs, back down.

The lift fills with pepper

and tarragon. He parts the way,

his beard glowing like her olive

glow, he licks spiced lips

and remembers: goes in.


AND THERE'S MORE...


Bolt Down This Earth chosen for Other New Books in Poetry Book Society Spring Bulletin 2017