Kirjahaku

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.

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?Robert Minhinnick is the prize-winning author of two volumes of essays, seven volumes of poetry and a novel. He has also edited a book on the environment in Wales, written for television and provided columns for The Western Mail and Planet. He is the co-founder of the environmental organisation, Sustainable Wales, and was formerly the editor of Poetry Wales.

In a small Welsh coastal town a young woman is coming to terms with her past. Nia has returned with her daughter to the place where she was attacked as a teenager. Through her story, and those of friends who have also returned from travelling the world, Nia gradually reveals – and makes sense of – what took place one evening on the nearby dunes, an ancient and mysterious place of history and nature. The discordant strands of her life all come into focus – her dysfunctional parents, the daughter who she must raise differently, the friends with whom she shared the innocence of childhood, and her idle new friends. As events unfold, she strives towards a kind of resolution.Page-turningly evocative, immersive and compelling, Nia is the lyrically told story of a young woman at odds with convention and finding new ways to live her life.Robert Minhinnick has written a beautiful novel in which realism and poetry collide and mingle.

Robert Minhinnick’s square mile on the coast of south Wales is the starting point for a series of pieces which journey outwards to Sicily, Iraq and Burma among other places. They start too in the personal – hospital visiting, clearing a house, covid lockdown – and expand into the universal. And they begin in the everyday and take in life afflicted by the globalisation of society and of the mind. Minhinnick searches for meaning in a world of change, particularly of environmental change which is rushing towards an unpalatable future for the planet and its people. Delirium is classic Minhinnick. Consumerism, poetry, the implacability of the algorithm, local history, nature and much else jostle with each other in this book. The writing is characteristically broad ranging in thought and style, with a poet’s eye for the telling image and ear for the lyrical. From the war diaries of his father and to the depleted uranium of the Gulf War, from the Ford dealership in Bridgend to the ancient dunes a few miles away, sunflowers to Emily Dickinson, this is a kaleidoscopic book which provokes and intrigues.

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.

This dual-language collection indicates the vibrant poetry scene in the Welsh language, featuring poetry by Menna Elfyn, Llyr Gwyn, Iwan Llwyd, Sian Northey, Karen Owen, and Iestyn Tyne, all translated by the leading Welsh poet Robert Minhinnick.

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.

Former Arts Council of Wales Book of the YearFrom Copacabana to urban Yorkshire, from New Mexico to a Welsh funfair, from The Netherlands to the Clare coast, Robert Minhinnick's world is a shrinking one.Its cast of characters includes Rio beach beggars, Madison Avenue literati, saloon-bar poolsters and millionaire scrap merchants. These essays cover a variety of subjects: third world poverty and the internationalism of alcohol, rugby through the eyes of a vegetarian, nuclear power, sunbathing and a thanksgiving dinner for the demise of Margaret Thatcher. But at the core of this collection is a vivid series of attempts to strip away the exhausted mythologies of the writer's own country and the increasingly-packaged places he visits. Whether in the rainforest or the big match crowd, Minhinnick's language, acid, imagist, compassionate, celebrates the people he meets and, fleetingly, defines their lives.Robert Minhinnick is the prize-winning author of two volumes of essays and seven volumes of poetry. He has also edited a book on the environment in Wales, written for television and provided columns for The Western Mail and Planet. He is the co-founder of the environmental organisation, Sustainable Wales, and is currently the editor of Poetry Wales.

Industrial smoke turns the noon sky black. Beneath its clouds the poorest people in Europe arrange flowers on a dictator's grave. On Avienda de las Pulgas an Oldsmobile slows down for a better view. Emerging from a lemon grove is the last pedestrian in California. At a nuclear plant the only sound is the sighing of photocopiers. Another party of visitors gets ready for a tour. Welcome to Badlands. Our guides are a survivor of Europe's most bizarre political regime, a poet who wishes to be abducted by aliens, and the author himself, reluctant aid worker, tourist with a computer tan, regretting his decision to call in at The Zoo for a quick one. In these essays the writer travels from the impoverished of Albania to the scorched suburbia of Silicon Valley. On the way he encounters a foreign country called England, twenty thousand frozen lakes, and a desert of dinosaur bones. The people of Badlands include Coleridge and Ryan Giggs, Colonel Sanders and Freud, plus a host of minor deities from the numbing world of celebrity. Urban and rural, tragic and absurd, Badlands is a real place. But where the borders of Badlands begin, or finish, is difficult to say.Robert Minhinnick is the prize-winning author of two volumes of essays and seven volumes of poetry. He has also edited a book on the environment in Wales, written for television and provided columns for The Western Mail and Planet. He is the co-founder of the environmental organisation, Sustainable Wales, and is currently the editor of Poetry Wales.

Winner of the Wales Book of the Year Award 2006Join Robert Minhinnick 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.Interspersed with these 'radioactive writings', which seem part documentary, part dream, are essays on a host of different places. Minhinnick pursues Dante through Florence, and searches for a poem given to him by a murdered schoolgirl in south Wales.Berlin, Prague, Buenos Aires, New York, Italy, England, Finland, Canada: this globalised world is simultaneously familiar and bizarre, filled with the background noise of contemporary society yet capable of providing places and moments of utter silence. Jetlagged, culture-lagged, Minhinnick returns to his native Wales, its coastline and valleys as extraordinary as anything encountered in a Babel that might be myth or alarmingly real."a gallery of snapshots; a series of lightening impressions from all corners of the world... Minhinnick's writing is quirky, sometimes untidy, often lyrical, packed with glancing references to literary figures (Dylan Thomas makes an appearance, reminding us that the author edits Poetry Wales) and contemporary events... Not easy to read, but highly interesting to untangle"The Times"On the strength of this book alone, Minhinnick stakes his claim to be regarded as the finest writer working in any genre in Wales today."The Guardian"Minhinnick's eye for beauty and his light touch for description in To Babel and Back are a delight"South Wales Evening Post"… this uncategorisable book by the outstanding English-language poet of present-day Wales... To Babel and Back is an extraordinary achievement."New Welsh Review"Robert Minhinnick is an accomplished poet and his beautiful language shines throughout his work"Tribune"... the result is a white-lightening cocktail that both dizzies and thrills by blending motion and contemplation, beauty and horror, minutes ticking us through our brief lives and eons compressed in Welsh limestone, all topped by the paranoiac unease of a sane man tripping across a suicidal plant... always agile and metaphorically vivid"PlanetRobert Minhinnick is an acclaimed poet and editor of Poetry Wales magazine. He is a freelance writer and also works for the environmental organisation, Sustainable Wales.

"Sea Holly" tells the story of John Vine, a hard working English teacher who has left job and family and moved to a nearby coastal caravan park, calling bingo numbers for a living. "John Vine - He has it all. Home, family, career. You can't knock that. But he has this worm inside him, this dissatisfaction...A boy of twenty, that's OK, he's going to dream. But a man of fifty? With a young piece who thinks he's not half bad?...believe me that's when everything's going to come loose. That's when it's going to get dangerous.' Key to the novel is a deeply rooted sense of place: a seaside town of shifting sand, illegal immigrants, a decaying funfair with it's own 'kingdom of evil', amusement arcades and dubious pubs and clubs, existing cheek by jowl with town houses and middle-class intelligentsia. The narrative stretches over one week and is told by several different characters. Minhinnick makes an assured transition to fiction and dialogue. And, as with his poetry, his prose is superb, rich with vibrant, exotic imagery, from the black sands of Spain to the black sea of 'The Caib'. His novel creates a sinister but vivid human world, existing as a part of the natural world on the edge of the ever-present sea and sand, which seep through the novel. Through its characters and environment, "Sea Holly" explores transience and permanence, stretching from the prehistoric past to the present day obsession with mobile phone filming and images. And behind all the lives captured is the image of Rachel, an 18-year-old pupil of Vine's who has suddenly vanished, leaving only briefly visible traces of her existence, and a deep sense of unease.

Author shortlisted for the £30,000 Sunday Times Short Story Award 2012.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-winning poet and author Robert Minhinnick, giving voices to migrants around the globe. These stories of migration reflect a comprehensive mix of hope, success, failure, fear, indifference and passion. Finally, the stories of each of the main characters come together in the closing narrative, surveying their circumstances on one particular day.Robert Minhinnick was born in 1952, and now lives in Porthcawl, south Wales. He has twice won the Forward Prize for Best Individual Poem, as well as the Wales Book of the Year Award in 1993 and 2006 for his collections of essays Watching the Fire Eater (Seren, 1995) and To Babel and Back (Seren, 2005). His first novel, Sea Holly (Seren, 2007), was shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize.

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.

The poems in Welsh poet Robert Minhinnick's latest collection were written with a keen awareness of both climate change and the current situation in the Middle East. King Driftwood draws upon the poet's travels in the Middle East, Eastern Europe and Argentina, and his 25 years in the environmental movement. Politically-charged poems such as "An Opera in Baghdad" and "An Isotope, Dreaming" address the political and environmental destruction wrought by the ongoing war in Iraq. Moving closer to home, poems such as "The Saint of Tusker Rock" and "The Castaway" are vivid evocations of the historical and modern communities of the Welsh coast, where the poet lives. They introduce us to a cast of memorable characters, from treasure-hunters to drug dealers, from ancient Celtic warriors to eccentrics from the local funfair. A sensitivity to the sonic structures of Welsh language poetry runs throughout the book, lending the poems their vigorous musicality and rhythmic energy.

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.

Duncan Bush (1946–2017) was an ambitious, challenging and self-styled ‘working class’ writer from Cardiff, who spent periods living in France and Luxembourg. Following early academic success, he devoted himself to his own prose and poetry and published several volumes of writings that include Aquarium (1984), The Genre of Silence (1987) and The Flying Trapeze (2012). In both personal and political contexts, Bush’s novel Glass Shot (1991) elaborated on feelings arising from the 1984–5 miners’ strike, and his works more broadly express an interest in cinema and the nuanced influence the USA had on his life. The present volume also contains material by Bush not previously freely available in the public domain, including his largely uncollected translations from French and Italian poetry.

The Adulterer's Tongue casts a brilliant light on the world of Welsh-language poetry. Poetry has been written in Welsh for over fifteen hundred years: an ancient literature, it is also a vibrant part of the culture of modern Europe, often overlooked by English speakers. Robert Minhinnick's translations bring six outstanding contemporary Welsh language poets into the spotlight, providing the Welsh texts en face. Minhinnick, himself a leading poet, is conscious of the responsibilities of translating out of a minority language. His versions take risks, but honour the originals' forms and intentions, making audible a wide array of individual styles and voices. The poets here each in different ways remake the language and culture they inherit. This collection testifies to the abiding creative energy of the Welsh language and culture. The poets are: Bobi Jones, Menna Elfyn, Emyr Lewis, Iwan Llwyd, Gwyneth Lewis and Elin ap Hywel.