Invisible Gift
Selected Poems
Over the past twenty-five years, the award-winning writer David Morley has become known as one of Britain's most original poets. Known for his energy and linguistic inventiveness, Morley is a master storyteller, whose poems uncover "universes bound together by language" (Guardian). From Romani tales to sharply observed lyrics about nature, from political allegory to vividly imagined histories, his poetry evokes the enchantment and truth of the natural world and our place in it. In the words of Les Murray, "He holds our world up to a language mostly kept secret; the refraction of the familiar is dizzying and often moving".
About the author
David Morley is an ecologist and naturalist by background. His poetry has won fourteen writing awards and prizes, including the Templar Poetry Prize, the Poetry Business Competition, an Arts Council of England Writer's Award, an Eric Gregory Award, the Raymond Williams Prize and a Hawthornden Fellowship. His previous collection "The Invisible Kings" (Carcanet, 2007) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. He is also known for his pioneering ecological poetry installations within natural landscapes and for the creation of "slow poetry" sculptures and I-Cast poetry films. His "writing challenges" podcasts are among the most popular literature downloads on iTunes worldwide: two episodes are now preloaded on to all demo Macs used in Apple Stores around the world. He has performed his poems and stories at many of the major literary festivals. He writes essays, criticism and reviews for the Guardian and Poetry Review. A leading international advocate of creative writing, he wrote "The Cambridge Introduction to Creative Writing" and is co-editor with the Australian poet Philip Neilsen of The Cambridge Companion to Creative Writing. He currently teaches at the University of Warwick.