The Palace of Oblivion

Description

Baroque in its extravagance of language, in its delight in the bizarre and the prodigious, Peter Davidson's collection is a cabinet of curiosities, a world of ruined palaces, ghostly gardens and the fragile marvels of a secret past. It moves between languages and continents, English and Latin, the Spanish Netherlands and Spanish America, the Mediterranean and the north. The title sequence evokes a half-known, half-fantastic, seventeenth century; a shorter sequence transforms contemporary England through the eyes of a spy. The collection ends with a group of elegies and epistles concerned with place and history in northern Scotland. Erudite and witty, "The Palace of Oblivion" is about remembering and inventing out of memory, and provides haunting visions of decay and splendor.

Peter Davidson was born in Scotland in 1957. He is currently Professor of Renaissance Studies at the University of Aberdeen. Peter has edited the Clarendon Poems and translations of Sir Richard Fanshawe (Vol I, 1998; II, 1999); The Clarendon Anthology of seventeenth century English Poetry , Poetry and Revolution ( 1998), and (with Jane Stevenson) Early Modern Women's Poetry (2001). He has also published numerous articles and studies of the post-reformation culture of British Catholicism, most recently in the monograph The Universal Baroque Manchester University Press, 2007.