from 'A Welshman's Flora'

Hemlock

This time the mad cows
Are nothing to do with me.

Sea Holly

  One by one
I watch them drown,
The men from the lifeboat,
And the sea lays them out
Across inscrutable Sker.
But I hold my ground on this peninsula,
Looking the hurricane
Firmly in the eye.

Magnolia

People flung kale and cobblestones,
But all I did was bring reports
Of the world that is to come,
Now here I lie, here I lie
Under the walls of Segontium,
The colour of old bones.

After the Hurricane is a rich and rewarding collection, full of flinty fragments which light a bonfire of the imagination.




After the Hurricane is the first book from this major Welsh poet since Selected Poems. It is a wonderful collection of vibrant poems that showcase his affinity with the human and natural calamities that influence our environmental and mental ecologies. The geographical range of Robert Minhinnick's imagination is as wide as his travels have been. Robert Minhinnick observes people and places with a scientific attachment: a mixture of fascination and respect. His is a significant political voice, rooted in Wales but speaking for a wider constituency.

Robert Minhinnick is the editor of Poetry Wales, and a founding member of Sustainable Wales and Friends of the Earth Cymru.