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Since receiving an Eric Gregory Award in 2002, 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, where he also performed song versions of poems from his third collection. A pamphlet, Habitat (Blueprint 2021), showcases a response to the Covidian pandemic viewed through the lens of W. H. Auden's 'Thanksgiving for a Habitat'. David's work has appeared in journals and anthologies from The Poetry Review to Identity Parade, and as a recording musician he released an album of original songs in the early 2000s. From 2019-2023, David was co-editor of the Bristol-based poetry journal Raceme.
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CRACKED SKULL CINEMANothing 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 |
David's third collection is available from Salt.
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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 |
“This new chapbook from Maquette Press bristles with ideas that challenge the reader to hang on to the unravellings, encountering clever handholds of language along the visionary way."
MIKE FERGUSON “While Briggs is certainly very good at conjuring a sense of the things which have just eluded us, he’s also switched on to the wider scenarios where personal losses become indicative of and perhaps implicated in the subtle and not-so-subtle erasure of humanity and human geography.” TOM PHILLIPS “Briggs’ work is full of moments of shock and awe, phrases and words that creep up undetected to catch you at the throat and rip the stillness from the room. You have to know you’ve read something special when a poetry collection ends with ‘Leave every door, every window, open. / Risk the night’s small teeth at your throat.'" AARON KENT - Stride Magazine |
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)
