Shortly before his death in 1995, Donald Davie sent his publisher the poem 'Our Father'. This ten-part meditation broke a poetic silence which had stretched from 1988, when with To Scorch or Freeze, the writer declared his work as a poet finished. He continued to write essays and to add from time to time to his verse 'Melodramas', with their roots in Landor and Leopardi. It is clear that the Muse had not finished with Davie at all; a body of poems gathered sufficient for a remarkable book, extending the concerns of his late years--concerns with 'the sacred', with England, and with our vexed age. In Poems and Melodramas his voice sounds with a humane insistence on clarity and definition, and the uneasy certainties of a faith hard-won.