In/human Place: The Poetry of John Barnie

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).