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DAVID BRIGGS has published three collections with Salt Publishing. The Method Men (2010) was shortlisted for the London Festival Poetry Prize, and Rain Rider (2013) was a winter selection of the Poetry Book Society. His third book — Cracked Skull Cinema (2019), a Poetry Wales pick of the year — took him on a reading tour ranging from a Festival of Death and Dying in Somerset to the Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh, from an American diner in Cheltenham to the Suffolk coast for Poetry in Aldeburgh. David received an Eric Gregory Award in 2002, and his work has appeared in journals and anthologies from The Poetry Review to the generational anthology edited by Roddy Lumsden, Identity Parade (Bloodaxe, 2010). A pamphlet, Habitat (Blueprint 2021), responds to the Covidian pandemic through the lens of W. H. Auden's 'Thanksgiving for a Habitat'. A teacher of English in Bristol since 2005, David founded and currently chairs the Writers' Examination Board, which offers the Apprentice of Fine Arts (AFA) in Creative Writing - a post-16 qualification that is currently live in ten UK schools. David has been poet-in-residence at Bristol University, and from 2019-2023 he was co-editor of the Bristol-based poetry journal Raceme. In 2023 he also completed his practice-based PhD research, The Odyssey Complex: Reading and Writing Midlife Poetics and Middle Style at the University of Exeter. As a recording musician, David released an album of original songs in the early 2000s, and he still performs regularly as a singer-songwriter.
David's fourth book, The Odyssey Complex and Other Poems, is due from Salt in 2024.
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This new collection further demonstrates David Briggs's extraordinary flair with form, music, imagery and theme. These poems are deeply sensitised to the processes of ageing, to the challenges and tendernesses of parenthood, friendship, and love, and are wonderfully alive to the quirky details of culture from which they spring. Inventive, witty and playful, profoundly musical, and robustly and beautifully made, Briggs’s poems assert his voice as one of the most mature, intelligent, and vital in contemporary British poetry." — Andy Brown The Odyssey Complex is a book which understands how now is haunted by then or, as the poet puts it, how ‘there’s just enough of the past swilling around in the present.’ A cactus on a windowsill witches us back through a life, a playful narrative involving Michael Douglas becomes a weighing of accomplishments, a display of shoes in a museum leads us to the loss of a father. Briggs is a poet I always look to for the real thing and, as he builds the body of work which only he can, this sparkling new collection gives us so much to admire, to be grateful for and to love." — Jonathan Edwards |
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“Middle Age and Space Age detritus excavated; ‘damsel-tupping goatswains’ and David Sylvian; method and magic; lyricism and deft use of the down-stroke. This poet delivers.” MATTHEW CALEY
“An interest in the forms and musicality of lyric verse is a strong feature in David Briggs’s attention-grabbing poems, as is the inscrutable relationship between landscape and the mind … Briggs’s personal narratives are imbued with ludic conceits, often played out in quirkily historical settings. This is a striking and varied debut collection.” RODDY LUMSDEN “David Briggs is brilliant at pointing out the absurd contradictions of being human – our struggles with romance and reason, superstition and cynicism. These poems, alert to the history of folklore – witchcraft, scrying, entrails laid out on stone ‘like a book’ – also wittily expose our own twenty-first century irrationality …The religious imagination and deadpan realism hang in constant tension. This is seriously good, intelligent poetry for those who like method in their madness.” CLARE POLLARD |
“Rain Rider is a kind of costume-drama sword fight between the forces of Art and Life, between the metaphorical and the literal, the fantastical and the mundane with a wonderful assortment of characters, landscapes, tastes, voices, vintages and weathers.”
ANNIE FREUD “Rain Rider is thrillingly wide-ranging, a book of echoes and intricacies where you’re as likely to meet the Devil as the Fool in poems after glittering poem. Briggs has written a mirror maze of a book you could lose yourself in for a very long time indeed.” JACOB POLLEY “Briggs has an artist’s eye for detail, but it’s an artist who has managed to bring their conceptual vision to bear on their formal accomplishment. He couples this with a robust and thrillingly far-reaching lexicon, the nuance as fitting as the sound, the imagery as ingeniously multilayered as the mirror maze where we encounter the devil and Samuel Beckett, the rival and the fool. This is also an unabashedly moral collection of poems, intellectually curious and broad-minded while refreshingly instructive – it cuts a swathe through a multitude of deposed grand narratives and never passes up the opportunity to dazzle, to succour or cajole.” LUKE KENNARD |
"Nothing remains unexamined in this skilful negotiation of personal and political shifts, real and imagined states, unease and trauma, as we discover Briggs's panoramic view on age and on the age. All of humanity's virtues and vices are at play in what is a sharp and entertaining collection. A new immediacy in the work marks a powerful stepping up of Briggs's momentum, and the result is timely."
RACHAEL BOAST "David Briggs writes sharp, intelligent poems that will move and intrigue readers in equal measure. These poems are both philosophic and very funny, and possess deep integrity. Keenly observed and making startling leaps of imagery, they invent scenarios that work through a unique (il)logic, to leave us ‘standing at a moment / that’s going to unfurl / in a great fathomless skein through our lives’. With characteristically rich language and a great sense of style, Briggs’s new poems are precisely shaped, yet various – from stanzaic verses, to witty prose poems, and experiments with layout. They also feel significantly contemporary in their political and historical concerns, their critique of ‘dyspeptic white men’ and their situatedness. A major step forward for this very exciting young poet.” ANDY BROWN |
It is very new poets like Maitreyabandhu and Kim Moore, poets of light touch like Janet Sutherland, and the secular visionaries A A Marcoff, Alan Stubbs and David Briggs, whose work most distinctively exhibits the kind of scope – in theme, flexibility of image, and movement of thought – Burnside permits ... These writers are recognisably Burnsidian in their use of the suspended grammatical phrase and ‘floating’ imagery to evoke the undetermined nature of experience.
FIONA SAMPSON Beyond the Lyric (Chatto & Windus, 2012)
