Nearly two years ago, I was asked to review the 2010 conference of the Association for Welsh Writing in English. As far as I know, the newsletter in which the review was to be published never appeared. (If I'm wrong, please let me know!) But I re-read the piece today and thought I'd like to put it out into the public domain, even if only as a matter of record. So here it is.
Here's the cover for my new 'Writers of Wales' book on Ruth Bidgood. It's being published by the University of Wales Press and is due out in the summer of 2012. Over the coming year, I'll be working with leading Welsh publisher Parthian Books to put together a volume of my new and selected essays about the recent English-language poetry of Wales. Parthian's Editor, the poet and commentator Kathryn Gray, will be guiding the project in-house. Having had the privilege of writing for New Welsh Review during Kathryn's stewardship of that magazine, it's great to have the chance to work with her again.
The book will include essays on the historical development of Anglophone Welsh poetry since the 1960s as well as on individual poetic figures during this period. Publication is provisionally scheduled for the first half of 2013. This January, exciting up-and-coming writer and editor Susie Wild will be giving a reading at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David in Lampeter. Following her reading, Susie will be in conversation with John Lavin of The Lampeter Review about her writing and her work as an editor with Parthian Books. Then there will be a chance for questions from the audience. The event is open to all and entry is free. So please come along! Venue: Roderic Bowen Library and Archives Reading Room, Lampeter Campus, University of Wales Trinity Saint David Date: Wednesday 25th January Time: Starts 5.10pm As my contribution to a collection of essays called Placing Poetry, edited by the poets Zoë Skoulding and Ian Davidson, I have written a piece on the poetry of John Barnie ('In/human Place: The Poetry of John Barnie'), which deals with the ways in which a range of Barnie's writing engages with ideas of land and environment. Apart from a short section on his 2003 book The City in Peter Barry's study Contemporary British Poetry and the City (MUP, 2000), this will be the first extended analysis of John's work. (Let me know if I'm wrong, please!) Placing Poetry is to be published by Rodopi, and is scheduled to appear in 2012.
For anyone who has been living under a rock and doesn't know, John Barnie is 'one of Wales's most distinguished and respected literary figures' (to quote the highly apposite back-cover notes of his 2009 Gomer volume, Tales of the Shopocracy). |