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New Selected Poems

Robert Minhinnick

New Selected Poems by Robert Minhinnick
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Categories: 20th Century, 21st Century, Welsh
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
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(Pub. Jul 2012)
9781847776457
£12.95 £11.65
Paperback (180 pages)
(Pub. Jun 2012)
9781847771339
£12.95 £11.65
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  • Description
  • Excerpt
  • Author
  • Contents
  • Awards
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  • Here on
    The Viking promontory, thin as its
    Name and the hail flung off the skerry
    We stop, breathless, laughing, looking
    Round. We, the inheritors, looking round
    To receive what we will never understand.
    But beginning our occupation with faith.
    from ‘Sker’
    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.

    Cover photograph © Robert Minhinnick
    from A Thread in the Maze (1978)
    Sap    
    Short Wave    
    A Live Tradition    
    Garlic Mustard, from Herbals    
    Dawn: Cwrt y Felin    
    1921: The Grandfather’s Story    

    from Native Ground (1979)
    Ways of Learning    
    The Children    
    J.P.    
    Llangewydd    
    The Drinking Art    
    Insomnia    
    Sker    

    from Life Sentences (1983)
    Rhys    
    Driving in Fog    
    Catching My Breath    
    An Address    
    On the Headland    
    Burmese Tales    

    from The Dinosaur Park (1985)
    The Dinosaur Park    
    On the Llyn Fawr Hoard in the National Museum of Wales    
    Dock    
    Eelers    
    The Resort    
    Picking    
    from Breaking Down    
    from The Looters (1989)
    The Looters    
    ‘What’s the Point of Being Timid when the House is Falling Down?’    
    The Mansion    
    Epilogue    
    from Fairground Music    
    Men    
    In the Watchtower    
    Looking for Arthur    

    from Hey Fatman (1994)
    Homework    
    Daisy at the Court    
    A History of Dunraven    
    Hey Fatman    
    Reunion Street    
    Listening to History    
    The Swimming Lesson    

    from After the Hurricane (2002)
    The Bombing of Baghdad as seen from an Electrical Goods Shop    
    Twenty-Five Laments for Iraq    
    The Discovery of Radioactivity    
    Carioca    
    Songs for the Lugmen    
    She Drove a ’Seventies Plymouth    
    Neolithic    
    The Porthcawl Preludes    
    From the Rock Pool    

    from The Adulterer’s Tongue (2003)
    Belly Button Song (from ‘Botwm i’r Botwm Bol’, by Menna Elfyn)    
    Taliesin (from ‘Taliesin’, by Emyr Lewis)    
    Beginning to Forget (from ‘Dechrau’r Anghofio’, by Gwyneth Lewis)    
    Landscape without a Hat (from ‘Tirlun heb Het’, by Bobi Jones)    
    A Song about Soup (from ‘Cawl’, by Elin ap Hywel)    
    Automobiles (from ‘Ceir’, by Iwan Llwyd)    

    from King Driftwood (2008)
    An Opera in Baghdad    
    The Hourglass    
    La Otra Orilla    
    Eavesdropping    
    The Castaway    
    The Saint of Tusker Rock    
    The Fox in the National Museum of Wales    


    Index of Titles and First Lines
    Robert Minhinnick’s recent publications include the novels, Sea Holly (2007) and Limestone Man (2015) from Seren and Fairground Music: the World of Porthcawl Funfair (Gomer, 2010). He edited the international quarterly, Poetry Wales, 1997 – 2008, and received a major Creative Wales award in 2008 to write a collection of ... read more
    Awards won by Robert Minhinnick Short-listed, 2017 The T.S. Eliot Prize  (Diary of the Last Man ) Winner, 2018 Wales Book of the Year (Diary of the Last Man ) Winner, 2018 Roland Mathias Poetry Award (Diary of the Last Man )
    Praise for Robert Minhinnick 'This is environmentalism turned into elegy. It's so powerful, so political...These are serious poems for serious times..that will stay with you and make you think about what we're doing with the planet.' 

    Carolyn Hitt, Wales Book of the Year Awards Judge  

     'While Robert Minhinnick's Diary of the Last Man is rooted in the dunescapes of the author's hometown of Porthcawl, it is also a work that is intrinsically internationalist in outlook. The long title poem is a wry, standing-ovation-worthy requiem for humanity predominantly set on the Welsh coast but it could be argued that Minhinnick reserves his most powerful poetry for when he casts his eyes abroad.'
    Wales Arts Review Highlights of the Year 2017


     'Diary of the Last Man presents an unsentimental, indifferent world, filled with cruelty and atrocity but, while there may be no Jesus in Minhinnick's geology, there is no shortage of beauty and, filtered through the sands of his language, this beauty is arresting and memorable.'
    Poetry blogger John Field on the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize newsletter


    'It is in observing these cycles of sea and river, human and animal, that Minhinnick most excels, and his collection as a whole is beautifully and acoustically attuned to what is most precious in out lives and around us' Suzannah V Evans, New Welsh Review on Diary of the Last Man 'Robert Minhinnick's new collection confirms his status as one of the most important poets of these turbulent times. Bleakly elegiac, environmentally political, vital and visionary, his poems cast an extraordinary light over our darkening landscapes.'
    Carol Ann Duffy
    'After the Hurricane is a rich and rewarding collection, full of flinty fragments which light a bonfire of the imagination.'
    Planet: The Welsh Internationalist
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