Leigh Robert Davis (20 June 1955 – 3 October 2009) was a New Zealand writer who created long poems and large-scale, mixed-media projects in which he worked with painters, designers and composers.
[1][4] Davis worked for several years as an analyst for the New Zealand Treasury,[5] then in 1985 joined the merchant bank of Michael Fay and David Richwhite.
Davis's literary career began with the book-length poetic sequence Willy's Gazette which won the Best New Zealand First Book of Poetry Award in 1983.
[5] It was described by Elizabeth Caffin in The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature in English as "a rich, clever, and sophisticated exploration (in mock sonnet form) of the arbitrary and purely conventional nature of cultural signs".
[5] This provided a platform for some of New Zealand's most experimental prose and poetry writers, and also broke new ground in literary criticism by applying post-structuralist theory to local literature and art.
The work incorporated many elements in juxtaposition (in the manner of Ezra Pound's Cantos), and was based primarily on the famous Maori historical figure Te Kooti.
General Motors (2001) was a sequence of poems that focused on a 16th-century painting by Garofalo (Benvenuto Tisi) of “Saint Nicholas of Tolentino Reviving the Birds".
[10] In collaboration with artist Stephen Bambury and others, General Motors was produced both as a limited-edition book and as an on-line, partly animated text on Davis's website jackbooks.com.