Robert Minhinnick

Diary of the Last Man

In Albania, Mexico, China, Iraq, Israel, Wales, the US, London... people are on the move; migration and immigration are key issues of the twentieth and twenty-first century. The Keys of Babylon is a collection of 15 linked stories by award-wining poet and author Robert Minhinnick, giving voices to migrants around the globe. Both a fictional record of, and an exploration into their lives, the migrants and the people with whom they interact reflect a comprehensive mix of hope, success, failure, fear, indifference and passion. And the stories of each of the main characters are drawn together in a final narrative which surveys their situation on a particular day.

The Keys of Babylon

“...small, beautiful gem-like fragments adding up to a satisfying, lapidary whole.” Jon Gower: Nation Cymru “Minhinnick makes the case for [delirium] in busy, fragmented prose, which is polyphonic in voice, time-bending in span, and a whirlwind to read.” Wales Arts Review. In Delirium Robert Minhinnick addresses his square mile: a small coastal town and massive sand dunes. But its uniqueness is challenged by the algorithms of globalisation, by the climate emergency, by a changing world led by corrupt, inept politicians. This thought-provoking book celebrates the ordinary and everyday, our vital bedrock for life.

Delirium

Life Sentences

Owen Sheers

Geraint Jones

Jon Gower

Gillian Clarke

Dan Llywelyn Hall

Eric Ngalle Charles

Sian Melangell Dafydd

Menna Elfyn

clare e potter

Laura Wainwright

Mary Gladys Coles

To coincide with the 50th anniversary of Offa's Dyke Path, a publication published by Ravenmade, featuring 12 newly commissioned poems & Dan's collection of paintings has been launched. The bilingual book features an introduction by Jon Gower and poetry by: Ifor ap Glyn (Poet Laureate of Wales), Gillian Clarke, Eric Ngalle Charles, Menna Elfyn, Robert Minhinnick, Oliver Lomax, Sian Melangell Dafydd, Owen Sheers, Laura Wainwright, Geriant Jones, clare e. potter and Gladys Mary Coles all inspired by Offa's Dyke.

Poetry and paintings inspired by Offa's Dyke

Walking with Offa / Cerdded gydag Offa

his new collection by Robert Minhinnick is full of the rich, sometimes strange, always telling, detail that we have come to expect from one of Britain's most compelling poets. The book opens with poems set in and around his home country of south Wales, and includes a sequence based on the history of an ancestral house, Dunraven. We then move on to work inspired by the poet's travels in South America and the U.S.A. This includes the title poem 'Hey Fatman', a splendid baroque essay on the characters gathered in a Rio beach bar. Indeed, the whole volume presents us with a series of vivid portraits, before closing with a long poem, 'The Swimming Lesson', an artful immersion in previously unexplored territory.

Hey Fatman

Robert Minhinnick's collection of poems draws on his travels in the Middle East, Eastern Europe and Argentina, and 25 years in the environmental movement.

King Driftwood

Wales Book of the Year 2018 Winner of the 2018 Roland Mathias Poetry Award Shortlisted for the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize The opening poem sequence, 'Diary of the Last Man', sets the tone for Robert Minhinnick's book, a celebration of the dwindling Earth, an elegy, a caution. His Wales is a touchstone; other landscapes and cityscapes are tried against it, with its erratic weather, its sudden changes of mood, 'a black tonic'. The sequence remembers all the geographies of his earlier work, old and new world, but now unpeopled and the lonely spirit free to go anywhere, do anything, but meaning with mankind has drained away. Yet still alive, and still with language, registering. The rest of the book is filled with voices: of children, of rivers, terrorists, magicians; and voices translated from the Welsh, and from Turkish and Arabic, shared, enriching with their difference, their other worlds. History washes over and washes up on the strand of this Welsh book. It is seen and recognised, it begins to be transformed. In the long concluding poem, 'The Sand Orchestra', the poet returns to his own voice, and to the voice of a Bechstein piano abandoned in the open air, played now by nature, its winds and sand. The last man, who has been looking for Ulysses, is the very man he has been looking for.

A deadly trail from the U.S. uranium mines to Saddam Hussein's Iraq is traced in this part documentary, part dream-travel narrative. From Berlin and Buenos Aires to New York and the place that the author's guides insist is the sight of the Tower of Babel, this singular blend of cultural referencing, poetic lyricism, and environmental concerns traverses the globe to find a world that is simultaneously familiar and bizarre, capable of communicating moments of utter silence alongside the background noise of contemporary society. Jet- and culture-lagged, the narrator returns to his native Wales and reflects on how the country's coastline and valleys are as extraordinary as anything encountered in the mythical lands of the deserted Babylon.

Robert Minhinnick

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