Diary of the Last Man
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21st Century
A01=Robert Minhinnick
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Author_Robert Minhinnick
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British
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Language_English
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poltical
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Wales
Welsh
Product details
- ISBN 9781784103484
- Dimensions: 135 x 216mm
- Publication Date: 27 Apr 2017
- Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
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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.
Robert Minhinnick's recent publications include the novels, Sea Holly (2007) and Limestone Man (2015) from Seren and Fairground Music: the World of Porthcawl Funfair (Gomer, 2010). He edited the international quarterly, 'Poetry Wales', 1997 - 2008, and received a major Creative Wales award in 2008 to write a collection of short stories about refugees, The Keys of Babylon (Seren, 2011). His poems have twice won the Forward Prize for 'best individual poem' and his essays twice won 'Wales Book of the Year.' An established environmentalist, he is joint founder of Friends of the Earth Cymru, 1984, and the charity, Sustainable Wales, founded 1997, for which he is a special advisor. A film, 'Diary of the Last Man' made by Park6 Productions, is released in 2017.
