Woodslane | Book - 9781784103484

Quick Search Category Search Publisher Search Bulk Search Clear Search

Popular Subjects

Woodslane Online Catalogues

Add to Cart

Diary of the Last Man

ISBN-13: 9781784103484
Publisher: CARCANET PRESS
Imprint: CARCANET PRESS
By Robert Minhinnick
Price: AUD $24.99
Stock: 1 in stock
Availability: Order will be despatched as soon as possible.
Local release date: 08/08/2017
Format: Paperback (216.00mm X 135.00mm) 96 pages Weight: 140g
Categories: Poetry by individual poets [DCF]

Description

Author Biography

Sales Points

Google Preview

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.

Robert Minhinnick was born in 1952 and lives in south Wales. He has published nine collections of poetry, including The Adulterer’s Tongue, translations of works by six Welsh poets. He has been the winner of a Society of Authors Eric Gregory Award and a Cholmondeley Award, and has twice won the Forward Prize for best individual poem. His books of essays have twice won the Wales Book of the Year Prize. He edited Poetry Wales magazine from 1997 to 2008. He co-founded Friends of the Earth (Cymru) and Sustainable Wales.

•Wales’s great poet of landscape listens to the river mouths of his Welsh home, their different responses to climate change.
•His book is a diary, dreamlike, delirious, an elegy for declining wilderness, a powerful call to action.
•Politically and culturally wide ranging, he fuses the global with an intensely local perspective.
•A film of Diary has been made by Eamon Bourke.
•Twice winner of the Forward Prize for Best Individual Poem.
•A powerful reminder of climate change from the co-founder of Friends of the Earth (Cymru).

Google Preview content