Literature Wales Newsletter
The Writers of Wales Database
DAWS, MARTIN
Email: thepoetmd@hotmail.com
Website: www.myspace.com/martindaws
Martin Daws is an original. He combines modern poetry with hip hop lyricism, free jazz and fiction to create electrifying live performances and high quality recordings of spoken word and music. Few poets can claim such a wide mastery of spoken rhythm in their work.
From his first efforts onwards, Martin Daws’ work has shown a willingness to deal with social issues through personal perspectives and their narratives; multi-culturalism, identity, personal integrity, and the evolution of culture are all important themes for him, and he is also fascinated by the way we build relationships with that which is bigger than us; nature, architecture, tribes, God…
Born in Surrey in 1969, the many environments in which he’s lived provide the backdrop to his work; from suburbs to inner cities and mountain villages. In his poetry the tongues of London and New York might speak in dialogue with double bass to articulate the lines of a Welsh mountain.
From 1987-1994 Martin was active as a DJ, based in London, playing nationally and internationally in music venues and on pirate radio. In 1994 he was inspired to start writing for performance after experiencing the New York slam poetry scene. His interest in writing led him to take an MA in Literature and Cultural History in Liverpool (1997). From Liverpool, it was a short step (geographically) to Snowdonia where he has lived and worked since 2001, combining his burgeoning career as a spoken word artist with his established freelance business facilitating rap and creative writing workshops with young people.
Martin was runner-up in the John Tripp Award for Spoken Poetry 2007, and second in the Glastonbury Festival Grand Slam 2008. His work has been broadcast by BBC Radio, published in international journals and been performed extensively around the UK and Ireland. He has worked in many collaborations, notably with dancer Sarah Mumford in the WID commissioned performance ‘Don’t Step on the Cracks’, and with acclaimed electro-acoustic composer Rob Mackay, with whom he has created experimental poetry and music compositions for concert performance in the UK, mainland Europe and America.
Reviews:
With respect to Skin Tight the Sidewalk (Martin Daws, 2008)
"…new wave beat poetry, with a musicality that rolls out a rhythmical ribbon of resonant rhetoric and rant. I witnessed an expression of thought, released through verses…combined with regulated, syncopated, rhythms and time…marvelous *****…"
Three Weeks Magazine (Edinburgh Fringe Festival, 2008)
Selected Publications:
Skin Tight the Sidewalk (Martin Daws 2008)
Skin Tight the Sidewalk (Martin Daws 2008)
Martin Daws’ poetry leaps off the page to dance the electric slide round your living room and you can’t help but follow. These words lead from the front, hitting you from every direction. The poems themselves walk you down Chicago backstreets in the dead of night through towers of slate covering Welsh villages from the effects of the present, and the stories themselves are as varied as the rhythms. A life lived around a love-affair with music and the culture of the African Diaspora has ended up in a collection tracing the two-step of a white man in love with hip-hop. The result is a raw honesty exploring themes of race and identity, how to tread that thin line between participating and exploiting. His poems dissolve completely the division between literature and song. Words roll round symbolism, showcasing language as its own music. Daws’ Skin Tight The Sidewalk creates poetic harmony, and his audiences turn the
final page much more at peace than when they cracked the front cover.
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