Island of Lightning is the latest book of travel essays by the
prizewinning Robert Minhinnick, poet, novelist, translator,
cultural commentator and environmentalist. In it he travels from
his home in south Wales to Argentina, China, Finland, Iraq, Tuscany
and Piemonte, Malta, New York, Zagreb, Lithuania and the lightning
island of Malta. In conventional travel essays and leaps of
imaginative narrative his subjects include the annual Elvis
convention in Porthcawl, Neolithic sculptures, the cruelties of
late twentieth century communism and its aftermath, rugby union,
the Argentinian writer Alfonsina Storni, poets playing football,
the body of a saint and the definition of cool. His themes are big
ones: the relationship of man and landscape, man and time, man and
nature, immigration and war, in one sense ultimately humankind
itself. Minhinnick explores with the eye of a poet and the gift of
a telling image or metaphor. His walk from Cardiff to the Rhondda
valleys is almost geological as he passes through the social and
cultural strata of the area's history. His astonishment at the
sheer number of people - the scale on which society works - in
China, results in an inventive grappling with the hugeness of the
world (and its growing problems). At the other end of the spectrum
his re-imagining of the life of Alfonsina Storni, her love for
Borges and her suicide is a delicate commentary on the personal and
the solitary. Readers will be entertained, informed and provoked by
this series of essays in which Minhinnick takes his subjects as
though holding them in his hand, turning them for new perspectives
and understanding.
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