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Although Dirt Roads (not the most seductive of titles), is John Davies’s fourth collection, I regret to say that he is a new name to me, which may be explained by the fact that he is, as his name suggests, a Welsh poet, and it is a sad truth that, with a few exceptions, poets of achievement and reputation in Wales are often virtually unknown across the border. One thinks of poets like the late John Ormond and John Tripp, both writers of unusual quality, yet scarcely known in England. On the evidence of Dirt Roads I would say that Davies deserves to be widely known, read and anthologised outside his native country.

     Some of the poems in this collection are set in the American West and the images of, and preoccupations with, search and with mining, both physically and symbolically; of exile, landscape, river and sea are echoed and reflected in the poems set in Snowdonia.

     Every one of the poems is more than merely readable and a large proportion are strong and memorable. We are told in the blurb that Davies is a woodcarver as well as a poet, and there is a tough tactile physicality in the imagery and language of many of the poems. He can make of a subject that would, in the world of prose, be of no interest to me, an absorbing and thrilling experience, as he does in his fishing poems and in a marvellously funny and vivid little narrative on amateur hawking called ‘Ray’s Birds’.

     What is perhaps the most ambitious work in this book is the sequence of fourteen sonnets, ‘Reading The Country’, in which his beloved homeland, art, language, their change and possibly threatened decay, are explored in poems of vast imaginative sweep and linguistic vigour. Am I right, I wonder, to hear something of Hopkins in, for instance, these lines from the last poem in the sequence?

Dead poets, tracks of the quarrymen, lakes
mining silver - why dabble in such things?
Because the living river of them slakes
now with then. Strongest in ground fractured,
it can flow speechless underground, go slack,
and mistrusts most the fluorescent sea.
But it runs on, pulling in the country.

     Dirt Roads is a book to buy, read and reread.