Poetry review – PORTRAIT OF MY FATHER AS A SNAIL: Katrina Moinet looks at a tender and searching examination by Kelly Davis of her father’s life
Portrait of My Father as a Snail
Kelly Davis
Palewell Press, 2026
ISBN: 9781917230025
£10
In Portrait of My Father as a Snail, Kelly Davis embarks on a journey which at first seems relatively simple: the intimate and lyric exploration of a father-daughter relationship. Even as Davis, within an autobiographical framework, paints her recluse father as the ‘soft creature’ of habit hidden inside the snail shell of his own making, simplicity gives way to trepidation at such an excavation. When we tug at familial threads, we risk the unmaking of memories we once held dear. How comfortable are we as curiosity unearths further questions? Any joy in retracing a loved one’s path to the point where roles reverse and we become carers to those who once cared for us must be bittersweet. Therein lies a slow-burn tension that leads us to this pamphlet’s patient work of understanding.
Alongside one collection honouring her mother, Glory Days (Grey Hen Press, 2021), and a second, The Lost Art of Ironing (Hedgehog Press, 2024),celebrating great female poets and the spaces in society women strive or struggle to occupy, Davis now gathers these twenty-seven poems in fitting tribute to a father-poet from a daughter-poet.
One of the opening poems, “The swan and the antelope”, confirms Davis’s long-standing love of words as handed down from her father. This connection runs deep along the grain of her identity and compels the writer to read aloud the many thousand poems he wrote, perhaps searching for that first spark. (This may have propelled Davis towards her editorial work at Penguin, Longman and BBC Books, and later to specialise in memoir as a freelance editor.)
Poems spring from a variety of rich sources – songs, old love letters, polaroids, visits to care homes, to A&E, discovering the many thousand poems he wrote – each unlocking a fresh perspective. Don’t we all wish for a glimpse of our parents as they were before we landed in their laps, their lives?
In “A psychiatrist assesses my father, aged seven” we are thrust back decades to a young boy hiding an undiagnosed disorder ‘we don’t yet have a name for.’ Time collapses between today’s knowledge and the lifelong effects of how certain learning needs in the past were (mis)handled.
Davis sees not only the elderly man manacled by pain, clinging to patterns and routine, but also the strength in these gestures. This soft creature will never cease to fascinate Davis. She observes the ‘whaleness’ of his absence, a shell-shape of his presence, and the mystery of how he survived without being crushed.
This collection is a poignant portrait of the father, and concurrently sketches lines from sister to brother, girl to mother, woman to child-self, considering how Davis survived such a formative relationship which made her who she is but also (as a carer) keeps remaking her in small and palimpsestic ways.
In the act of caring for her father, questions arise around fragility of continuity of care, her own fallibility and arrangements made in case should she herself become dependent. Our care systems have become ill-equipped and alienating: “You are at queue position 32” presents a staccato single sided phone-call to a health care provider. Through cuts and repetition Davis plays out an all too familiar struggle to navigate a strained system, the impractical demands of the digital-era and its gate-keeping, a powerlessness to alleviate a loved one’s pain, inherent loneliness from carrying the care burden, and most crucially how an intermediary’s attempt to communicate can become their own cry for help:
there’s a bit / a bit of me / inside
inside the shell / with my dad
What happens / when I can’t get out /
when I can’t / phone you / anymore /
Will there be / an intermediary?
Carers’ lives are often layered with such observations and the lack of time to fully digest these concerns. No wonder the writing of these poems spans a decade of Davis’s life.
There’s a physicality to some poems: “My father’s house” rouses a gentle intake of breath, as the father mounts the stairs at the end of the evening and ‘the house holds its breath / in case he falls’. “Back problem” provokes a vertebral twinge as her brother’s ‘bone rubbing / against the nerve / in the same place’ as the father’s suggest how family behaviours repeat across generations, and few of us escape becoming product of our upbringing, even down to way we handle pain.
Kelly Davis’s work may be best read in a chiaroscuro silence of late evening, when routine loosens its grip and the brain slackens from the day’s chores. Davis shows deft skill in collapsing time to a single moment in a crux poem of this collection, “Conversation with my father”. Held in the embrace of the poet’s life-story, we also absorb the father’s anecdote about a troupe of deaf-blind actors on stage making and baking loaves to feed their audience, whilst also bearing witness to the years-long unfolding of this daughter’s relationship with her father in a ‘dark, silent world’. There is complicity and perhaps conjecture in the ‘we’ that Davis employs: ‘we thought of those actors… we wept for the silence between us.’ Our compassion swings between players in the poem, each overcoming a particular silence, and in doing so nourishing the other with ‘something more than bread’.
In “The pram in the hall” we sift through snapshots and letters from another era until the poet hands one to her father. Shaking his head he declares ‘I’ve lived my life – I don’t need to read it’ with a gesture that is both grand and worryingly small. The reader spirals between a man’s reluctance to face what he left behind, and his stout resolution to start each day on the front foot, creating new poems that may never be read.
At turns, these poems are tender, playful and delightfully vivid: a waft of ‘shameless lust’ from the Easter lilies on the kitchen table, that familiar worry about ‘brown stamens spilling rusty jizz’. Davis’s work brings surprise shifts in tone to reveal universal detail hidden in daily routines. I can’t help but hope the lilies stay ‘rude and sexy till the end’.
A pleasing final nod to the Caribbean writer Olive Senior’s collection Shell concludes by subverting the snail motif in favour of resilience and hidden agency. A shell can be the armour we build to travel safely, what we house ourselves in, or how we choose to live protected from a seemingly hostile world, as her father does through soothing habits that shield him from what lies outside his home.
In taking this ‘chambered shell apart’, Davis has found ways to navigate her father’s world and offer us ways to respond to each other through compassion, creativity and understanding. One poem towards the end declares ‘I don’t think I’ll run out of poems’ – I sincerely hope she never does.
Sep 4 2026
London Grip Poetry Review – Kelly Davis
Poetry review – PORTRAIT OF MY FATHER AS A SNAIL: Katrina Moinet looks at a tender and searching examination by Kelly Davis of her father’s life
Portrait of My Father as a Snail
Kelly Davis
Palewell Press, 2026
ISBN: 9781917230025
£10
In Portrait of My Father as a Snail, Kelly Davis embarks on a journey which at first seems relatively simple: the intimate and lyric exploration of a father-daughter relationship. Even as Davis, within an autobiographical framework, paints her recluse father as the ‘soft creature’ of habit hidden inside the snail shell of his own making, simplicity gives way to trepidation at such an excavation. When we tug at familial threads, we risk the unmaking of memories we once held dear. How comfortable are we as curiosity unearths further questions? Any joy in retracing a loved one’s path to the point where roles reverse and we become carers to those who once cared for us must be bittersweet. Therein lies a slow-burn tension that leads us to this pamphlet’s patient work of understanding.
Alongside one collection honouring her mother, Glory Days (Grey Hen Press, 2021), and a second, The Lost Art of Ironing (Hedgehog Press, 2024),celebrating great female poets and the spaces in society women strive or struggle to occupy, Davis now gathers these twenty-seven poems in fitting tribute to a father-poet from a daughter-poet.
One of the opening poems, “The swan and the antelope”, confirms Davis’s long-standing love of words as handed down from her father. This connection runs deep along the grain of her identity and compels the writer to read aloud the many thousand poems he wrote, perhaps searching for that first spark. (This may have propelled Davis towards her editorial work at Penguin, Longman and BBC Books, and later to specialise in memoir as a freelance editor.)
Poems spring from a variety of rich sources – songs, old love letters, polaroids, visits to care homes, to A&E, discovering the many thousand poems he wrote – each unlocking a fresh perspective. Don’t we all wish for a glimpse of our parents as they were before we landed in their laps, their lives?
In “A psychiatrist assesses my father, aged seven” we are thrust back decades to a young boy hiding an undiagnosed disorder ‘we don’t yet have a name for.’ Time collapses between today’s knowledge and the lifelong effects of how certain learning needs in the past were (mis)handled.
Davis sees not only the elderly man manacled by pain, clinging to patterns and routine, but also the strength in these gestures. This soft creature will never cease to fascinate Davis. She observes the ‘whaleness’ of his absence, a shell-shape of his presence, and the mystery of how he survived without being crushed.
This collection is a poignant portrait of the father, and concurrently sketches lines from sister to brother, girl to mother, woman to child-self, considering how Davis survived such a formative relationship which made her who she is but also (as a carer) keeps remaking her in small and palimpsestic ways.
In the act of caring for her father, questions arise around fragility of continuity of care, her own fallibility and arrangements made in case should she herself become dependent. Our care systems have become ill-equipped and alienating: “You are at queue position 32” presents a staccato single sided phone-call to a health care provider. Through cuts and repetition Davis plays out an all too familiar struggle to navigate a strained system, the impractical demands of the digital-era and its gate-keeping, a powerlessness to alleviate a loved one’s pain, inherent loneliness from carrying the care burden, and most crucially how an intermediary’s attempt to communicate can become their own cry for help:
there’s a bit / a bit of me / inside
inside the shell / with my dad
What happens / when I can’t get out /
when I can’t / phone you / anymore /
Will there be / an intermediary?
Carers’ lives are often layered with such observations and the lack of time to fully digest these concerns. No wonder the writing of these poems spans a decade of Davis’s life.
There’s a physicality to some poems: “My father’s house” rouses a gentle intake of breath, as the father mounts the stairs at the end of the evening and ‘the house holds its breath / in case he falls’. “Back problem” provokes a vertebral twinge as her brother’s ‘bone rubbing / against the nerve / in the same place’ as the father’s suggest how family behaviours repeat across generations, and few of us escape becoming product of our upbringing, even down to way we handle pain.
Kelly Davis’s work may be best read in a chiaroscuro silence of late evening, when routine loosens its grip and the brain slackens from the day’s chores. Davis shows deft skill in collapsing time to a single moment in a crux poem of this collection, “Conversation with my father”. Held in the embrace of the poet’s life-story, we also absorb the father’s anecdote about a troupe of deaf-blind actors on stage making and baking loaves to feed their audience, whilst also bearing witness to the years-long unfolding of this daughter’s relationship with her father in a ‘dark, silent world’. There is complicity and perhaps conjecture in the ‘we’ that Davis employs: ‘we thought of those actors… we wept for the silence between us.’ Our compassion swings between players in the poem, each overcoming a particular silence, and in doing so nourishing the other with ‘something more than bread’.
In “The pram in the hall” we sift through snapshots and letters from another era until the poet hands one to her father. Shaking his head he declares ‘I’ve lived my life – I don’t need to read it’ with a gesture that is both grand and worryingly small. The reader spirals between a man’s reluctance to face what he left behind, and his stout resolution to start each day on the front foot, creating new poems that may never be read.
At turns, these poems are tender, playful and delightfully vivid: a waft of ‘shameless lust’ from the Easter lilies on the kitchen table, that familiar worry about ‘brown stamens spilling rusty jizz’. Davis’s work brings surprise shifts in tone to reveal universal detail hidden in daily routines. I can’t help but hope the lilies stay ‘rude and sexy till the end’.
A pleasing final nod to the Caribbean writer Olive Senior’s collection Shell concludes by subverting the snail motif in favour of resilience and hidden agency. A shell can be the armour we build to travel safely, what we house ourselves in, or how we choose to live protected from a seemingly hostile world, as her father does through soothing habits that shield him from what lies outside his home.
In taking this ‘chambered shell apart’, Davis has found ways to navigate her father’s world and offer us ways to respond to each other through compassion, creativity and understanding. One poem towards the end declares ‘I don’t think I’ll run out of poems’ – I sincerely hope she never does.