Patrick Davidson Roberts’ Divided Tongues is a structurally expansive and thematically intricate collection that navigates national identity, violence, myth, and displacement with tonal precision and rhetorical urgency. Drawing on scriptural echoes, historical figures, and contemporary disaffection, the poems assemble a polyphonic lyric that shifts between reportage, lament, and surreal invocation. With recurring motifs of exile, fractured lineage, and cultural inheritance, Roberts interrogates the weight of language as both burden and possibility. The result is a layered poetic landscape where borders, geographic, linguistic, emotional, are repeatedly crossed and contested.  
 
PRAISE for Divided Tongues:
Divided Tongues extends an invitation to enter a landscape and history both familiar and enigmatic. Politics, love, spirituality and language itself all command attention, while at times confounding the effort to interpret them. These are poems of experience both real and imagined. Davidson Roberts’ gift is for letting a story tell itself, while a clarifying music emerges to redeem or illuminate the journey.
   — Sean O’Brien
 
The voice guiding you through Divided Tongues is that of an exile: someone roaming the borders, seeking a way back from the underworld to reality. Roberts’s speaker is a speaker for the dead and the trapped: witnessing those bound to their fates – from the first-class passengers on the Titanic to the working-class victims of Grenfell, to the woman made to tell of her assault then work alongside her abuser. Brutally precise, these poems smear time and space, mixing the erotics of martyrdom myths with the threat underlying alleyway sex. Characters burst “into prayers at the bar” or into sudden flight, craving both chaos and control. Denial and indulgence become the tide and the shoreline, as shame-shot excess hands over to “avoiding, or not being allowed, which become the same thing.” From start to finish, language in Divided Tongues is used as a tool of egress: brought down like a whip, drawn through us like a saw, or saved for a final spear-thrust to the side.
   — Kirsten Irving
 
ABOUT Patrick Davidson Roberts:
Patrick Davidson Roberts was born in 1987 and grew up in Sunderland and Durham. He was editor of The Next Review magazine 2013-2017, co-founded Offord Road Books press in 2017 and reviews for The Poetry School and The High Window. His debut collection is The Mains (Vanguard Editions, 2018), and a chapbook, The Trick (Broken Sleep Books, 2023), was recently published. His poetry has elsewhere been published in 14 Magazine, Acumen, Ambit, The Dark Horse, Eyot, The Interpreter’s House, Long Poem Magazine, Magma, The Quince, The Rialto, and on Atrium, Bad Lilies, The High Window, One Hand Clapping and Wild Court, as well as in anthologies published by Culture Matters, New River Press, Sidekick Books and Vanguard Editions.