David Wevill was born a Canadian in Japan in 1935, and was educated in both Canada and England. He has lived in Burma and in Spain but has made his home in Austin, Texas for the past forty years. While resident in England in the 1960s and 1970s, he established a substantial reputation as a poet, publishing four volumes between 1964 and 1974. He won prizes, was represented in all the major anthologies, and was included in the renowned Penguin Modern Poets series before his first full collection appeared. With his move across the Atlantic, he fell from view in Britain, although his work continued to be published in his native Canada. His main publications are: Birth of a Shark (1964), A Christ of the Ice-floes (1966), Firebreak (1971), Where the Arrow Falls (1973), Other Names for the Heart (1985), Figure of Eight (1987), Child Eating Snow (1994), Solo With Grazing Deer (2001). He has also published translations of Fernando Pessoa and Ferenc Juhász.

Associated in his early career with The Group, his work appeared in A Group Anthology before being selected for the Penguin Modern Poets series—where he shared a volume with David Holbrook and Christopher Middleton. Important for the development of his early work were Jungian theory and mid-century Spanish poetry, above all García Lorca, Neruda and Paz. As Martin Seymour-Smith observed, "The Jungian 'search', an admittedly circular one, is Wevill's main theme, and so his poetry needs to be read in its entirety to be fully appreciated".

The Shearsman edition of Departures was issued in a 2nd edition, in a larger format, in 2013.