Ms Hilary Davies
Damnatio Memoriae: Problems of Faith and Forgetting
ABSTRACT: The long poem ‘Damnatio Memoriae,’ is a radical representation, in dramatic form, of the British poet, Sebastian Barker’s engagement with the Christian faith and the poet’s eventual conversion to Catholicism.
Using dialogue, soliloquy and direct address, it confronts the reader /listener with the problems that have troubled humankind through the ages: the theodicy of suffering; the conflict between history and the sacred economy; the corruption of political and religious institutions; the nature of individual and collective sin. But it also investigates how Christ, the incarnate God, overcomes ‘the inescapable terminus of death’ and gives the believer the chance to have spiritual life, ‘the true life of all’.
I will introduce the six different sections to show how the poem evolves dramatically; and give an account of its first performance, with a variety of speakers and music, in the crypt of Canterbury Cathedral in September 2013, shortly before the poet’s death.
Hilary Davies is a member of the Power of the Word Project Advisory Board. She has published four collections of poetry from Enitharmon Press. She has been a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at King’s College, London (2012-6) and the British Library (2018-9). She is a former Chairman of the Poetry Society of Great Britain, a Fellow of the Temenos Academy and of the English Association. She was co-editor of Prophetic Witness. The Re-Imagining of the World, (Routledge, 2020). In 2023 she was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Environmental Poet of the Year award.
https://www.enitharmon.co.uk/product/exile-kingdom-hilary-davies/