Kirjahaku

A look at the life and works of John Tripp.

Welsh poet Nigel Jenkins returns to Swansea for another look at his hometown. With humour, insight and an eye for the odd and the unusual, Jenkins explores the areas of the city that fall beyond the gaze of the original Real Swansea (Seren, 2008).Jenkins's subjects include sport, the Welsh language, drama, sex, drugs, refugees and asylum seekers, key buildings like the Guildhall, the Glynn Vivian and the National Waterfront Museum, and the districts of Morriston, the Hafod and Sandfields. From Dylan Thomas' Kardomah café, the Grand Theatre and the Welsh School of Architectural, to Mumbles Pier, Llangyfelach and Salubrious Passage, all Swansea life is here, celebrated in stylish prose and pin-sharp poetry.Nigel Jenkins is a poet, prose writer and editor of the Welsh Academy Encyclopaedia of Wales (2008). Gower, his book of essays about the Gower peninsula, with photographer David Pearl, was published in 2009. He won the Wales Book of the Year Award for Khasia in Gwalia, about Welsh missionaries in the Khasi Hills of north-east India (1996). He is currently Co-Director of the Creative Writing program at Swansea University.

Nigel Jenkins's body of work is remarkable not just for the range of its forms and occasions, but for the variety of its literary, cultural and political commitments. He campaigned for Welsh devolution and international solidarity with the same sense of purpose as he campaigned against nuclear power, militarism and racism. A politically- and culturally committed poet he was unafraid to be satirical, or epic, or polemical, or to be simply and frankly angry. This book contains love poems and poems of desire, lyric poems and public poems for public spaces, occasional poems that transcend their occasions, merciless satires, and poems that borrow epic voices, whether of bravado or lament, and retool them for today's challenges. There are poems written in the spirit of high-intellectual play and urgent poems about environmental degradation, militarism, nuclear folly, imperialism and capitalism. There is beauty and precision, outrage and indignation, savage wit and deep empathy. The book also contains a number of Jenkins's translations from the Welsh - a reflection of his commitment to the bilingualism and biculturalism of his country, and to the idea of a community of poets. A sense of history underpins Nigel Jenkins's writing, but it is the present that propels it. In that sense, his poetry and prose are part of a single, albeit various, oeuvre. They are the work of a writer who believed that poetry has a duty to engage with the world as it is, while holding out the imaginative possibilities of what it can be.