Alexandra Davis lives in Suffolk with her husband and four sons and teaches English. Her poems have appeared in Agenda, Artemis and Emma Press anthologies.
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Her poem Stag won the Brian Dempsey Prize in 2017 and resulted in their publishing SPROUTS. The title poem was commended in the Back Room Poets Open Competition in 2015 and Loss was commended by Andrew MacMillan in the Ver Poetry Open Competition in 2016.
Web: www.alexandrapoet.wordpress.co.uk.

Books by Alexandra Davis

SPROUTS 

​Rebecca Goss writes:
"Alexandra Davis takes a magnifying glass to familial encounters, describing what she sees there with an honest and unsentimental eye. Her poems explore the fragility of being human, recognising the affection and hurt we can inflict upon each other, but there is such wiseness here, such tender detail, it left me feeling I had read something affirming, and hopeful."

​ISBN: 978-1-907435-46-1 
Published September 2017
24 poems
Perfect-bound paperback
​36 pages ​15cm wide x 21cm tall

​Price: £6.00 + p&p

From SPROUTS (September 2017):

Stag
From 'Sprouts' (2017)

I need to make one thing clear:
I didn’t see the stag. My husband did.
He’d been running; he came through the door,
eyes alight; stood taller in the kitchen,
his legs rooted wide, to tell us both;
his joy so urgent. Son and I sat, rapt
by the boy in his voice, the wild life
in his hands and his face as he drew us
a picture of man and stag who had met
in the field this bright autumn morning.
He lifted his arms in revelation, the size!
The size of his antlers! The span! The height!
The throat on him! He was praising the moment,
too big for the kitchen, and we praised it too,
for the gift of the stag now belonged to us all –
that glimpse of the creature briefly rewilded;
its beauty and might to be breathed, becoming
before us a blur of bristles and musk. ​

TORCHES AND SPARKS
responses to the poetry of the First World War​

​A critical appreciation of the poems of the WWI war poets  Edmund Blunden, Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, Ivor Gurney, Laurence Binyon, Edward Thomas and Edgar Wallace. The second half of the book includes poems written by Alexandra Davis in response to them.

ISBN: 978-1-907435-71-3
Published September 2018
60 pages of prose and poems
perfect-bound paperback
15cm wide x 21cm tall

Owing
for Wilfred Owen 1893-1918
 
The spirit is our vulnerable spot,
hidden in rough-lived grass, and seldom seen.
Exposed to shocks beyond the common realm,
unable to return to somewhere lost,
you sought out lines that claimed new territory.  
The landscape of a looted life, made vivid
by war-doomed youth, paints feelings deeply crimson
among the muted meadows of our minds,
finds that same tender place of pain and pity.
 
You had known love, so physical and real,
were wholly shaped as human man can be;
as such embodied beauty. And could write it –
an early summer ripening in warmth,
too far from family, and home, and hearth,
spills potent seed in flesh-corrupted soils.
Now we will always feel the loss of boy,
of man, naïve salutes at sin they made
before the so-called great war flattened them.   
 
You never saw them live the legacy;
bury the limbs of memory deep beneath
the mud and mire of human-savaged fields
and soldier on, but with something missing;
disabled spirits, eyes downcast and quiet.
These days we dare not deny our war heroes
their money, air-time, charity, attention –
such paltry lessons merely a distraction
from unlearnable ones about destruction.

©Alexandra Davis
(From 'Torches and Sparks')