Among the qualities that distinguish Dick Davis's poetry and scholarship are exacting technical expertise and wide cultural sympathy?an ability to enter into distant cultural milieus both intellectually and emotionally. In choosing his volume of poems Belonging as a ?Book of the Year? for 2006, The Economist praised it as ?a profound and beautiful collection? that gave evidence of ?a commitment to an ideal of civilized life shared by many cultures.? The Times Literary Supplement has called him ?our finest translator of Persian poetry.