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Nia (Paperback)
Robert Minhinnick
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R317
R260
Discovery Miles 2 600
Save R57 (18%)
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Under a Giant Sky (Paperback)
Toon Tellegen; Translated by Judith Wilkinson; Introduction by Robert Minhinnick
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R451
Discovery Miles 4 510
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This text draws on six previous collections published between 1978
and 1994. The earlier poems are diverse, ranging from descriptions
of work in heavy industry to observations of wildlife around the
writer's childhood home in Wales. Later poems deal with travel in
Brazil and the United States, and also deal with schizophrenia. The
book celebrates the life and characters of a close-knit community.
It then breaks away from the peopled landscape to consider history
and culture from wider persepectives.
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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