Humfrey Coningsby
Humfrey Coningsby
Jonathan Davidson
Paperback
For Humfrey Coningsby – lord of the manor of Neen Sollars in South Shropshire – the world was a place of wonders and despair, of love found and then forsaken. He was a cantankerous, sentimental, petulant traveller; a gentleman soldier; a sly linguist; a confidant of Princes and Emperors; a receiver of such delights, and a doomed versifier.
He walked out of this world on 10th October, 1610 – and now he walks back in, with barely a word of explanation. This series of poems, complaints, explanations and demands for satisfaction forms the narrative of a life still being lived over four hundred years later.
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Imprint: Valley Press
Published: April 2015
ISBN: 9781908853486
Catalogue no: VP0060
Page count: 40
Trim size: 198 x 129 mm
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Praise for Humfrey Coningsby:
“Jonathan Davidson’s poetry is quietly authentic and beautifully controlled, able to give a spin to mostly familiar subjects with a Larkinian sense of the electrifying mot juste.”
— Adam Thorpe, The Observer
“Jonathan Davidson has a loving, observant and wry regard for the frailties of the human condition. He makes fresh something we thought we knew; writing the everyday the way Vermeer might be said to paint it.”
— Maura Dooley
About the author
Jonathan Davidson was born in 1964 in Didcot, South Oxfordshire, and now lives in Coventry. He won an Eric Gregory award in 1990, and is the author of various pamphlets and collections of poetry, including Moving the Stereo (Jackson’s Arm, 1993), The Living Room (Arc, 1994), A Horse Called House (Smith/Doorstop, 1997) and Early Train (Smith/Doorstop, 2011).