Robert Minhinnick (b1952) is the leading Welsh poet of his generation. After the Hurricane follows his Selected Poems with writing of considerable scale and ambition, unified by his political and environmental concerns. He moves easily between the long perspectives of large set-pieces and the witty ingenious detail of Elementary Songs, whick offer a poetic version of the periodic table, with the elements speaking fro themselves. Radium, for example, explains: "God was ashamed. / He hid his secret / Under the Black Mesa / Until Mr Oppenheimer arrives / And drove me back to the ranch / To freshen up."

Poetry with a cause can be fatally weakened if morality pre-empts or overshadows language, but, rather than viewing the world as a case of illustrative samples, Minhinnick concerns himself as much with process as with outcome. Thus the poems of his travels in Canada and the Middle East - A Natural History of Saskatchewan, the Ziggurat - are never simply exotic curios. Instead they serve as a continuing investigation of the meetings o the human and natural worlds, where an inescapable melancholy is matched by a celebration of the riches that may still, just, be encountered.

Sean O'Brien, Sunday Times, Sunday 11th August 2002