Child Eating Snow

“[Wevill’s poems] often have a dreamlike or mythic quality….They have all the vividness and exactness of dreams. Wevill is not content to swim on the surface; he dives hazardously into the depths. He has a distinctive voice that compels attention, engenders a kind of concentration that most current poetry fails to engage in…. He is totally inimitable. His poems go deeper than those of most contemporary poets. [His is] a poetry that fulfills one of poetry’s functions – that of making you see the familiar as if for the very first time.” —Matt Simpson, British journal Stride

“Wevill’s poetry is varied, original, taut… elaborate, skillful and very highly organized. All remarkably and convincingly his own.” —A. Alvarez

David Wevill was born a Canadian in Yokohama, Japan, in 1935 and was educated in Canada and at Cambridge. He has lived in Burma, Spain, and currently teaches at the University of Texas in Austin. His published works include Birth of a Shark (1964), A Christ of the Ice-Floes (1966), Firebreak (1971), Where the Arrow Falls (1974), Casual Ties (1981), Other Names for the Heart: Selected Poems 1964-1984 (1985), and Figure of Eight (1987).