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Showing 1 - 15 of 15 matches in All Departments
Richard Parry is a painter who cannot paint, a writer who doesn't write. His obsession is Lulu, that 'orphan off the street', his aboriginal 'green child'. But on returning from Australia to his hometown he finds it has become notorious for the suicides of young people. As Parry tries to connect past and present he is haunted by dreams of Australia and of his youth. Yet is Parry all he seems? Isn't he frankly, 'a bit creepy'? How trustworthy is memory? And what has happened to the vivacious Lulu? A meditation on age and opportunity by prizewinning poet, essayist and novelist Robert Minhinnick. Limestone Man is this writer's second novel, after 2007's Ondaatje-nominated Sea Holly.
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.
In Albania, Mexico, China, Iraq, Israel, Wales, the US, London - people are on the move; migration and immigration are key issues of the twentieth and twenty-first century. The Keys of Babylon is a collection of 15 linked stories by award-wining poet and author Robert Minhinnick, giving voices to migrants around the globe. Both a fictional record of, and an exploration into their lives, the migrants and the people with whom they interact reflect a comprehensive mix of hope, success, failure, fear, indifference and passion. And the stories of each of the main characters are drawn together in a final narrative which surveys their situation on a particular day.
Join Robert Minhinnick is on a journey across a radioactive planet. Researching the use of depleted uranium in modern weapons, the writer follows a deadly trail from the uranium mines of the USA into Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Here, he is led into the temples of a deserted Babylon and to what his guides insist is the site of the Tower of Babel, and to the horrors of Iraqi society in the years after the first Gulf War. Interspersed with these 'radioactive writings', which seem part documentary, part dream, are essays on a host of different places. Minhinnick pursues Dante through Florence, sees the world through the eyes of Mr Ogmore from 'Under Milk Wood', and searches for a poem given to him by a murdered schoolgirl. The contemporary world is simultaneously familiar and bizarre, yet when Minhinnick is 'back' in his native Wales, its coastline and valleys are as extraordinary as anything encountered in a Babel that might be myth or alarmingly real.
Robert Minhinnick is a Welsh poet exploring the coves and caves of his home town, recalling its history, aware of its dangers. With 'Wild Swimming at Scarweather Sands', he remembers the countless wrecks on the dangerous coast of south Wales. Visiting the shoreline of his home he discovers a world where both history and climate change are inescapable.
Menna Elfyn is the best-known, most travelled and most translated of all Welsh-language poets. The extraordinary international range of her subjects, breathtaking inventiveness and generosity of vision place her among Europe's leading poets. This bilingual edition of her later poetry includes work from "Cell Angel" (1996) and "Blind Man's Kiss/Cusan Dyn Dall" (2001), as well as the first English translations of "Perffaith Nam" (2005) and a selection of new poems. 'These poems engage as deeply as ever with Menna Elfyn's treasured themes of possession and dispossession, the terrible vulnerability of those things which are precious and her joyously affirmative, inclusive views on how they may be protected. Her characteristic concern for humanity everywhere and her loving but uncompromising view of the conundrums of women's lives are framed here in a more reflective vein, but with her characteristic humour and sideways wit. She is a witty, gentle, compassionate gatekeeper between Wales and the wider world, her work as a poet constantly explaining, excusing and extolling each to the other' - Elin ap Hywel. 'Menna Elfyn is the firebird of the Welsh language, bright, indomitably modern and as indestructible as the phoenix. She gives hope to all writers in lesser spoken languages that great things can rise from the ashes' - Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill. 'Elfyn is a poet of healing...both compassionate and celebratory. Like a soul doctor she questions and probes, like St Teresa she endures the darkness, but in the end she sings a song which affirms that flawed humanity is indeed perfectible' - Katie Gramich, Planet.
New Selected Poems is a poet's choice of over thirty years' work. Minhinnick's poetry explores the complexities of belonging in the world. It is rooted in the rich particularity of industrial south Wales and the Welsh seaside resort in which he now lives, but its scope is global. New Selected Poems includes 'An Opera in Baghdad' as well as translations from six modern Welsh language poets; it mourns the ancient, savaged landscape of Iraq and listens to primeval echoes in the Welsh landscape; it celebrates the rhythms of the Americas. For Minhinnick, people, relationships and landscapes interconnect. The poetry that is true to that world is both lyrical and highly political.
Bondo is Menna Elfyn's latest collection in Welsh and English. Her title means eaves in Welsh, referring to poems about getting close to language as sanctuary. Other poems were written episodically over a number of years. These meditative poems began simply as a personal engagement with the grief of Aberfan, expressing solidarity with a nation's wound. Bondo is also the voice which echoes the role of the Welsh bard as remembrancer. Menna Elfyn is the best-known, most travelled and most translated of all Welsh-language poets. The extraordinary international range of her subjects, breathtaking inventiveness and generosity of vision place her among Europe's leading poets. Like her previous Bloodaxe titles, Bondo is a bilingual Welsh-English edition. Again, the facing English translations are by leading Welsh poets, in this case Elin ap Hywel, Gillian Clarke, Damian Walford Davies and Robert Minhinnick. It is her first new book since Perfect Blemish: New & Selected Poems / Perffaith Nam: Dau Ddetholiad & Cherddi Newydd 1995-2007 and the later collection Murmur (2012), a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation.
Texts from Gorwelion will be made available as digital contributions to events at the 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties COP26 in Glasgow, 1-12 November 2021, representing voices from the UK and India in uniting the world to tackle climate change, where the book will also be launched and available to buy. * Produced in collaboration with Sustainable Wales/ Cymru Gynaliadwy Gorwelion follows on from Sustainable Wales' initial project 'Our Square Mile', created to help us imagine the future.
A poet and essayist explores the environmental "badlands" of Europe, Asia, and the U.S. "A combination of Martin Amis-like hyperbolic prose and Bruce Chatwin-like wander-lust....An expansive map of the world's absurd zones". -- Kirkus Reviews Welcome to Badlands. Welsh poet and essayist Robert Minhinnick has been a long-time environmental activist. In this book, his second collection of essays since the award-winning Watching the Fire Eater, he writes about his travels from the impoverishments of Albania to the scorched suburbia of Silicon Valley, by way of a foreign country called England, twenty thousand lakes, and a desert of dinosaur bones, from the Albertan Badlands of Canada to a British nuclear plant, to the coast of southern Wales, and the unending bus trips, hotels, and motels. Industrial smoke turns the noon sky black; beneath its clouds the poorest people in Europe arrange flowers on a dictator's grave. At a nuclear power plant the only sound is the sighing of photocopiers; another party of visitors gets ready for a tour. In "Ripper Country", in Whitechapel, Minhinnick discovers a perverse form of commercial pollution, as "a poster extends an invitation to 'Join the Ripper Trail'". Welcome to Badlands. Our guides are a survivor of Europe's most bizarre political regime; Mars Barlow, a poet who wishes to be abducted by aliens and who brings the author to a strange museum, a "dinosaur death camp", just outside the Hoodoo Motel; and the author himself, reluctant aide worker, the observing tourist with a computer tan, regretting his decision to call in at The Zoo for a quick one.
Wales Book of the Year 2018. Winner of the 2018 Roland Mathias Poetry Award. Shortlisted for the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize. The opening poem sequence, 'Diary of the Last Man', sets the tone for Robert Minhinnick's book, a celebration of the dwindling Earth, an elegy, a caution. His Wales is a touchstone; other landscapes and cityscapes are tried against it, with its erratic weather, its sudden changes of mood, 'a black tonic'. The sequence remembers all the geographies of his earlier work, old and new world, but now unpeopled and the lonely spirit free to go anywhere, do anything, but meaning with mankind has drained away. Yet still alive, and still with language, registering. The rest of the book is filled with voices: of children, of rivers, terrorists, magicians; and voices translated from the Welsh, and from Turkish and Arabic, shared, enriching with their difference, their other worlds. History washes over and washes up on the strand of this Welsh book. It is seen and recognised, it begins to be transformed. In the long concluding poem, 'The Sand Orchestra', the poet returns to his own voice, and to the voice of a Bechstein piano abandoned in the open air, played now by nature, its winds and sand. The last man, who has been looking for Ulysses, is the very man he has been looking for.
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