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This collection of 101 haiku and senryu follows Nigel Jenkins’s highly successful haiku publication Blue, published by Planet in 2002. Jenkins’s poems are linked by an affectionate sense of place and community and resonate in a way that makes one want to visit them again and again. The subtlety and lightness of Nigel Jenkins’s haiku is punctuated by the wry humour of the senryu. He has a talent for finding two memorable images that together create a third; encouraging the imagination to explore this space, and thus opens up a dialogue between poet and reader. Illustrated by David Pearl, O for a Gun includes an illuminating afterword that explores parallels between Welsh and Japanese poetic forms.

 

 

 

THE CARADOC EVANS COLLECTION

edited by John Harris

An authority on Caradoc Evans, John Harris has edited numerous of his books, most recently My Neighbours (Planet 2005). He is author of Goronwy Rees, in the Writers of Wales series, and compiler of A Bibliographical Guide to Twenty-Four Modern Anglo-Welsh Writers.

        Morgan Bible

                                 & Journal 1939 - 44

                                           By Caradoc Evans

This new edition brings together two of the author's late works. Morgan Bible describes the day when the past catches up with a murderous bigamist, a canting village pedlar racked by lust, greed and religion. Evans tells his violent story with delicious dark wit, a sharp eye for our human failings and a daring force of language. The novella has the feel of a fairy tale but underpinning its fantasy are deep personal convictions about the everyday working world.

That world is approached directly in the journal Evans kept at the time. Beautifully crafted in plain clear prose, it evokes, often unsparingly, life in a small Welsh hamlet during wartime. We meet his New Cross neighbours, learn of their daily concerns, their habits, their ways of thinking, the many stories they tell. We gain too a rare private glimpse of Caradoc and his wife Marguerite, the odd writing couple who had suddenly landed among them. Background notes enhance the journal and a substantial afterword sets both works in context.

Click here for an excerpt of Caradoc Evans's Journal

ISBN: 0-9540881-6-6         £6.95; paperback (sewn), 196pp

        978-0-9540881-6-3

  My Neighbours

                                           By Caradoc Evans

Damned by the Western Mail as “literary filth” this collection of stories, from Caradoc Evans’s greatest creative period, takes stock of the London Welsh. We meet them at home and at work, and in their prized places of worship. We are shown the Wales that bred them and the heaven promised by their faith. In the meantime, they make their way in the English commercial kingdom, led by a go-getting preacher-politician (not a world away from Lloyd George).

Click here to hear Damian Walford-Davies's critique of Caradoc Evans

In these unsparing, compassionate dramas, greed and religion go hand in hand. Evans’s drapers, dairymen and ministers, vivid as persons and types, reveal themselves through their words and actions. Authorial comment is minimal, the emotional tone restrained, the humour pervasive and pointed. My Neighbours first appeared in March 1920. This reprint, newly edited with an afterword by John Harris, contains two stories originally destined for the collection but suppressed by the publisher on grounds of taste.

ISBN: 0-9540881-5-8            £6.95; paperback (sewn), 201pp

Wounded Wind

By Carlos Casares
Translated by Rosa Rutherford

Wounded Wind portrays vividly the the difficulties of life in Galicia, the poor, rainy north-western corner of Spain, in the 1950s and ’60s. Its characters struggle with the darker side of existence, with solitude, frustration, injustice and its accompanying urge to violence and revenge.

Summer Journal

Gwyn Williams

Mynydd Bach is an area of still unspoilt moorland in Ceredigion and a wild, special place even to those without local roots. For Gwyn Williams, writer and pioneering translator of Welsh poetry, it was the spiritual and ancestral home where he would live for many years. In the summer of 1951 he returned from Egypt to Trefenter for one of many home leaves and kept this journal. Living in a remote cottage with his artist wife, Daisy, he cut peat on the mountain, hunted and fished, observed wildlife and the migration of birds, and made hay in traditional style surrounded by friends and relatives. Illustrated by drawings paintings and photographs by Gwyn and Daisy, the journal captures a vanished life. Published to celebrate his centenary, it has all the earthiness and evocative detail of Gwyn Williams’s writing.

Summer Journal 1951 was launched successfully at the Ceredigion Museum Art Gallery on the 4th of June. Below are some pictures of the launch where Gwyn Williams's daughters, Lowri Gwilym and Teleri Williams, spoke briefly about the book.

      Guests enjoy a glass of wine.                   Lowri Gwilym and Teleri Williams.

Blue

Nigel Jenkins

This haiku collection, the first ever from a Welsh publisher, could be subtitled "A year and a day", for it follows, roughly, the passage of both a year and a day lived (mostly) in Wales. Short, observationally sharp and often humorous, these poems delight in the overlooked, "irrelevant" things we routinely edit out of our busy lives, but which are nevertheless at the very heart of existence.

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Sugar & Slate

Charlotte Williams -

Listen to her here talking about her book.

A mixed-race young woman, the daughter of a white Welsh-speaking mother and black father from Guyana, grows up in a small town on the coast of north Wales. From there she travels to Africa, the Caribbean and finally back to Wales. What begins as a journey becomes a fascinating confrontation with herself and with the idea of Wales and Welshness.

'It is Williams's Welshness that makes her examination of her mixed-race identity distinctive; but it is the humour, candour and facility of her style that make it exceptional.'
Gary Younge, The Guardian

'A rare gem of a publication… this book should be on Welsh citizenship syllabuses. It is an eye-opener for our narrow ideas about belonging… here is a new challenge to Welshness.'
Menna Elfyn, The Western Mail

Coulda bin summin

Mike Jenkins

Coulda Bin Summin follows up on the success of Mike Jenkins's groundbreaking collection of poems Graffiti Narratives in presenting the voices and characters of contemporary Merthyr.

It's a world of the out-of-work, the marginalised, who don't give up, who fight back through their humour and racy, imaginative language - brilliantly evoked in these dialect poems.

Alfonso R. Castelao

These very short stories, which approach prose poems in their lyric intensity, are Alfonso R. Castelao's contribution to a popular Galician art form. Partly based on stories his grandmother told him as a child, Things reflects Galician society at the beginning of the twentieth century, allowing us a glimpse of the fragments of a rapidly vanishing world.

Castelao was no backward-looking sentimentalist, however, and the stories gathered here forced his contemporaries to reflect on the nation's weaknesses as much as its virtues. The tool he chose for this was humour, or retranca: the deadpan statement of the obvious, the subtle irony of understatement, the dark, corrosive and macabre humour of which he was a master.

Castelao was an accomplished artist, and his illustrations (a feature also of the original edition, first published in 1926) make the book an unusual creative whole.

Considered one of the finest works of fiction to have appeared in Galician, Things makes this stunning book available to English-language readers for the first time.