Category: books
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Peter Finch: Wales’s Mr Poetry
In front of me is a 24-page pamphlet published by ‘second aeon publications’ in 1971. It’s held together with a couple of rusting staples and contains seventeen short poems, typewritten and photocopied. Back then, that’s how you produced a skinny book of poems: gritty, home-made, no upper-case. But this one, John Tripp’s bute park and…
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Dust and roses: Philip Pullman’s vision
The rose field, published in October, completes Philip Pullman’s massive ‘Book of dust’ trilogy. More than that, it completes the whole cycle of ‘Lyra’ novels that Pullman began thirty years ago with Northern lights. It seems to me that it’s one of the greatest achievements in children’s literature in our time. Though ‘children’s literature’ is…
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Aber, prifddinas llên
Ar 31 Hydref cyhoeddodd UNESCO fod Aberystwyth/Ceredigion wedi ennill statws ‘dinas llenyddiaeth’, gan ymuno â rhai cannoedd o leoliadau eraill ledled y byd a gydnabyddir am eu ‘ymrwymiad i ddiwydiannau creadigol a bywyd diwylliannol’. (Does dim ‘dinas’ gonfensiynol yn yr ardal, wrth gwrs, ond mae’n bosib dadlau bod Aberystwyth yn rhyw fath o ‘ddinas-wladwriaeth’, fel…
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George Bowring: murdered by Welsh magic
The Victorian writer R.D. Blackmore, if he’s remembered at all today, is known for his three-volume novel Lorna Doone. It’s an adventure story, set on Exmoor in the seventeenth century, about the feuding and violent Doone clan and the love between the narrator, John Ridd, and the eponymous Lorna. The book sold badly on its…
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Goodbye, Paul Durcan
When the news came recently that Paul Durcan had died, I pulled from the shelf my copy of his sequence of poems, Crazy about women, published by the National Gallery of Ireland in 1991. They’re all inspired by paintings in the Gallery’s collection. Some of the poems are long, some short; some playful, others penetrating…
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Cerddwyr coll: Seosamh Mac Grianna a Hamish Fulton
Profiad cyffredin ond anochel, on’d yw e? Yn syth ar ôl ichi gyhoedd llyfr, dych chi’n dod o hyd i themâu neu bobl fyddai wedi bod ynddo, heb amheuaeth, pe baech chi wedi clywed amdanyn nhw’n gynt. Dyna a ddigwyddodd yn ddiweddar ar ôl imi ddarganfod gwaith gan y llenor o Iwerddon, Seosamh Mac Grianna,…
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An anatomy of early Welsh tourism
How many tourists visiting Wales today, I wonder, ever think about their early predecessors? I mean those who first arrived, in surprisingly large numbers, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. How many are aware that these travellers, rather than composing Instagram posts, blogs and TikTok videos, would most likely have busied themselves drawing…
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Is there a history of walking?
It’s a question that wouldn’t have been asked, let alone answered, before Rebecca Solnit’s pioneering book Wanderlust, published in 2000. Solnit is a writer probably best known for her books on women – she was the first to formulate the idea of ‘mansplaining’ – but her range of reference is startlingly wide, and her work…
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Kathleen Jamie’s ‘Cairn’
The old Athenian playwrights were expected to follow their three tragedies for the festival of Dionysus with a lighter ‘satyr’ play. The idea, it seems, was to take the edge off the horrors and traumas of the earlier dramas. Kathleen Jamie, after publishing a trilogy of collections of lengthy essays on the large themes that…
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Tro ar fyd: ‘Trothwy’, gan Iwan Rhys
Un o’r llyfrau ar restr fer Llyfr y Flwyddyn eleni yw cyfrol fach anarferol gan Iwan Rhys, sy’n dwyn y teitl Trothwy. Wn i ddim a fydd ganddo obaith o gipio’r brif wobr. Os yw’r beirniaid yn chwilio am gyffro ac antur, efallai ddim. Ond yn ei ffordd dawel, gywrain mae Trothwy yn gadael argraff…