About
Imogen Davies is a 23-year-old Welsh poet from Aberystwyth, Wales. With a bilingual upbringing in Welsh and English, she went on to study French, Spanish, and Catalan at Durham University. Since graduating she has interned at Honno Welsh Women’s Press and self-published her first poetry collection, DISTANCES. Inspired by her travels across Europe during her year abroad, her poems explore human connection in the modern age, the natural world, and identity.
Her poetry has appeared online and in print in various literary magazines, such as Acumen Young Poets and the Stratford Literary Festival’s Young Poets Collection 2022.
Publications
Listed chronologically are Imogen’s CREATIVE WRITING PUBLICATIONS in various literary magazines and anthologies both online and in print from August 2021 to the present.
The most notable include:
- ‘Starlings Flit from Lobster Pots’ and ‘Overripe’ in Acumen Poetry.
- ‘Longitude’ in the Stratford Literary Festival Young Poets Collection 2022.
[You can click the links boxed at the bottom right of each publication to visit the site where they were originally published.]
Divided into five sections, DISTANCES explores what it means to go from being within TOUCHING DISTANCE to LONG DISTANCE, what it takes to GO THE DISTANCE, to travel and to notice what seems far IN THE DISTANCE, before present tense shifts into the past and becomes DISTANT.
ON THE CREATION
OF DISTANCES
As a student of French, Spanish, and Catalan at Durham University, I spent the third year of my degree abroad - 9 months in Barcelona as an English Language Assistant for the British Council at a Catalan secondary school in the city centre, and 3 summer months in a small, sleepy, seaside village on the southwest coast of France, in the Pays Basque near Biarritz, a receptionist in a Holiday Resort.
This collection reflects on the people I met and the experiences I had while abroad, travellig and exploring European cities alone or with friends. As I came to terms with being away from home for 12 months, learning to locate myself in a foreign setting, among people who couldn’t speak my language or were even aware of the existence of my culture, this collection also touches on my own Welsh identity.
Although I write in English, all my poems are anchored by a sense of hiraeth and my affinity with Welsh landscapes.
I also write about what it’s like to return to the UK to complete my final year at Durham University and feel so dislocated from the people I’d met abroad, how intense and entirely immersive the experience was, to then feel so cut off and adrift from the people, the languages, cultures, and lifestyle that constituted the rhythm of my life abroad. It was the culture shock, the grief almost, of not having these people in my life anymore. And although the internet enabled us to message and have long phone calls across different countries, I couldn’t help feeling this growing distance between us, that something was lacking.
In French “I miss you” is “Tu me manques” which literally translates to “you are lacking from me”, in grammatical terms, the other person becomes the subject, rather than “I miss you” it’s “you are missing from me”, which I think better captures the essence of what I felt.
And so, this collection created itself from these feelings over two years. Having always been one to spend late nights and early mornings with cups of tea at my desk scribbling in my journal, filling many pages and many journals, it was during my year abroad I had the time to finalise pieces and poems to submit to literary magazines and anthologies. With success I have been published by Acumen Young Poets and the Stratford Literary Festival, among others.
Yet, the majority of the poems I wrote while abroad and on my return remained in my notebooks or typed up on a word document left unread and unseen by anyone other than myself. It wasn’t until I graduated in the summer of 2023, I finally had the time to revisit this work. I returned home to Aberystwyth, beginning a 10-month internship at Honno Welsh Women’s Press, where I met several inspirational women and had an insight into the publishing world and joined a poetry group, The Word Distillery Poets, to whom I am also very grateful, they gave me the confidence to share more of my work and put this collection together.
This being my first collection, I wanted to fully realise my own vision, and so decided to self-publish. I made all the decisions, my own layout, cover design, number of pages and poems instead of being restricted by these elements by a publisher.
I also wanted to support local businesses, such as Y Lolfa, based in Tal-Y-Bont, just outside Aberystwyth, who have printed the collection, and organising a launch event in Ceredigion Museum.
First printing
DISTANCES manuscript
PRESS FOR DISTANCES
Cambrian News
BBC Radio Cymru
Click
here to listen!
“It wasn’t until I spent twelve months abroad that I truly realised what it meant to be a poet in Wales.”
Click here to read!
ON BEING A POET IN WALES
Cyfrol 36. Rhif 46.
08/ 08/2024
“Ddim am ddelfrydu dim byd”
Click here
to read!
DISTANCES LAUNCH EVENT
The DISTANCES launch event took place on Thursday the 11th of July 2024 at Ceredigion Museum.
Open to the public and advertised in the local paper, the evening consisted of a speech and a poetry reading from Imogen’s new collection.
Imogen wanted to host the event in Ceredigion Museum because she volunteered there for two years before leaving for Durham University, she was responsible for archiving the memory of local people and transcribing their interviews for People’s Collection Wales.
As Imogen was born and raised in Aberystwyth (as were her Mam and her Nana!) it meant a lot to her to launch her first collection in Ceredigion Museum, which has been at the heart of Aberystwyth’s local community for generations.
Click here
for an example!
Ceredigion Museum, first opened in 1905 as the Coliseum Theatre, hosting hundreds of theatrical performances until it converted to a cinema in 1932. Closing in 1977, the cinema was transformed into a museum.
Today, the museum is at the heart of Aberystwyth’s community, as well as celebrating local history and Ceredigion’s cultural heritage, the space is used for a variety of community activities and events.
To find out more
click here!
SPEECH
Shop
DISTANCES
£10.00
UK Postage: £2.50
Etsy:
https://imogendaviespoetry.etsy.com/
or send me an email!
Also available at...
Being one of the UK’s Legal Copyright Libraries, The National Library of Wales has archived a copy of DISTANCES to “be preserved for the benefit of future generations, and become part of the nation’s heritage”.
It is also available for purchase in the National Library gift shop.
Click here to find out more!
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