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After the Hurricane

Robert Minhinnick

Cover Picture of After the Hurricane
Categories: 20th Century, British, Welsh
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (128 pages)
(Pub. May 2002)
9781857545630
Out of Stock
Digital access available through Exact Editions
  • Description
  • Excerpt
  • Author
  • Awards
  • Reviews
  • 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 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’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 )
    'After the Hurricane is a rich and rewarding collection, full of flinty fragments which light a bonfire of the imagination.'
    Planet: The Welsh Internationalist
    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
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