Dai Smith

This handsome, full colour book celebrates forty years of the work of Ken Elias, from student op art/collage to current work made in response to poetry. As an artist Elias is something of a conundrum. Born and once again based in Glynneath, he draws extensively on his locale and on his childhood in the Fifties, in particular his extended family and his frequent cinema going. Yet he is almost unique in Wales in his continuing adherence to Pop Art and collage. Taught by John Selway, Terry Setch and Ernest Zobole at Newport Art College in the 1960s collage and photomontage remain at the centre of his work, including his paintings: flattening perspectives, unexpectedly contrasting images, producing social and political commentary, assimilating a modernist urban artform into a Valleys context. Elias' is an art which blurs the edges of reality in a similar fashion to cinema. It asks the viewer to look afresh at the familiar and the domestic, and to question their own reality. The book, which accompanies a touring exhibition, includes five essays by leading commentators in the field: Hugh Adams - 'Who are you to decide what reality is?' Anne Price-Owen - 'Ken Elias and the Hidden Persuaders' David Briers - 'Ken Elias and the Art of Photomontage' Jon Gower - 'Going to the Pictures' Ceri Thomas - 'Ken Elias: An Overview'

Five poems from five poets. The bus pass tour.

When you come out for the bell aged eighty you have no choice but to employ a late style. This is mine. A mix of deceitfully plain reportage; fictive history and fictional forays into the past; personalised reflections and more shaded perspectives from others; some poetry and polemics; glances of delight at the playfulness of sport and the charisma of personalities; taking a stance, whether orthodox or southpaw, in the courage to live with what you are given no matter what is put in front of you. And the illusion of random repetition, the rat tat tat bam bam, before any change in the angle of attack. But that's enough bobbing out of reach, jabbing and sliding away with pretty dancing around the ring.One of Wales's most successful interpretive voices of a generation casts his mind back to the preceding decades to offer a retrospective take on the legacy of the Labour party in Wales in a genre-defying work written in Dai's inimitable signature style.

"Watch the poetry platforms. Our street fighting bard will be knocking them flat soon." - Peter FinchFor readers who are interested in both the pre- and post-devolutionary cultural landscape of Wales, this is a crucial addition to the canon of Welsh writing in English, crowning and celebrating a life filled with enriching work at the coal-face of Welsh culture.

In this beautifully written memoir Dai Smith engages and entertains with a personal life and times with the characteristic verve of a writer who has illuminated the modern history of the people of South Wales.

The Crossing bridges the past and the present and connects Wales with America, as it tells of coal owners and coal workers in the age of great transatlantic liners and fortunes to be made. At its heart is a father’s search for his daughter in Welsh valleys no longer proud, where creaming off regeneration grants has replaced coal mining as a way of life and development parks now stand where once did pit head wheels. It follows a lifetime’s search for lost love, the sinking of a great ship in a great war, misplaced family and forlorn hopes where individual lives are shaped and fated in the shadow of modernity and the cold hand of progress. This brave, bold and challenging work conjures a vivid cast of characters into being and offering – with ready vim and ample vigour – their compelling, complex and ultimately telling story.

This edition celebrates the centenary of Williams's birth. RAYMOND WILLIAMS (1921-1998) was the most influential socialist writer and thinker in post-war Britain. Now, for the first time, making full use of Williams's private and unpublished papers and by placing him in a wide social and cultural landscape, Dai Smith, in this highly original and much praised biography, uncovers how Williams's life to 1961 is an explanation of his immense intellectual achievement. "It is Smith's ambition to set out the lonely, almost monastic path Raymond took through childhood, army and adult education towards his deserved eminence. But the biographer's greatest achievement is to find his own discerning route through what often seems to be a jungle of contradiction... This is a worthwhile book and a very good one." - David Hare, The Guardian "It is a remarkable piece of work and will henceforth be essential to the understanding of the making of Raymond Williams." - Eric Hobsbawm "Becomes at once the authoritative account... Smith has done all that we can ask the historian as biographer to do." - Stefan Collini, London Review of Books "Carrying an impressive deal of intensive research lightly... the portraiture throughout is graphic, richly detailed and subtly shaded... in these packed, lucidly written pages..." - Terry Eagleton, New Welsh Review

In What I Know I Cannot Say / All That Lies Beneath, Dai Smith combines a novella and a linked section of short stories to create a dazzling fictional synthesis that takes the reader on a tour of the South Wales Valleys during the twentieth century. Picking up where his 2013 novel Dream On left off, What I Know I Cannot Say follows the life story of Billy's father, Dai Maddox. When Billy's former partner Bran shows up wanting to record Dai's life story to put together a documentary, Dai looks back on his past, remembering his childhood as a destitute orphan, his work as a collier in the mines and the subsequent drifting between menial jobs, alleviated only by reading and drawing; his enrolment in the British Army and participation in the invasion of Italy during the Second World War; and post-war life under socialism, when he was back in the pits and married to Billy's mother, Mona.Moving from the heyday of the pre-mechanised coal industry to the present day, What I Know I Cannot Say presents a moving and vivid panorama of twentieth-century Wales, brought to life by Smith's meticulous attention to historical detail and distinct gift of invoking the smells, sights and sounds of the past. We find ourselves smelling the cordite of ammunition among the ruins of Cassino in 1943, during the invasion of Italy; the damp coal in the mineshafts; the beer-soaked wood of pub floors; the smell of fresh coffee from a modern percolator. Dai's journey is an emotional and moving one, told in gritty, realistic prose.All That Lies Beneath is white-knuckle fiction ride: power, sex, money and ambition all twist through the pages as Smith creates a feast of intellectual and physical provocation in stories that send a shudder of fearful recognition directly through to the reader.

Dream On is a composite novel: part black comedy and flashlight noir thriller, part meditation on the stories that connect up the frayed wires in the business of living. There's Digger Davies and his one cap for Wales and ultimately untimely death...the award winning photographer whose return home will become a quest for his own forgotten identity and compromised life...the thwarted politician in a hospital bed writing his own obituary...and a beautiful girl caught in time, alive in an old man's memory...

Using a rich array of material from Raymond Williams' hitherto unused personal papers, diaries, letters, unpublished novels and stories, notebooks, work drafts and fragments, this title takes us through the formative years on the Welsh Border as the son of a railway signalman and his wife, on to Cambridge in 1939 and War service in Normandy. Hardcover.