Wild Cherry: Selected Poems

Nigel Jenkins is a politically and culturally committed poet who was unafraid to be satirical, epic, polemical, or angry. His body of work includes love poems, poems of desire, lyric poems, public poems for public spaces, occasional poems, merciless satires, and poems that borrow epic voices. It also contains a number of Jenkins's translations from the Welsh, reflecting his commitment to bilingualism and biculturalism. His poetry and prose are part of a single, albeit various, oeuvre, believing that poetry has a duty to engage with the world as it is while holding out the imaginative possibilities of what it can be.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 190 pages
Publication date: 02 November 2023
Publisher: Parthian Books

Nigel Jenkins' body of work is truly remarkable, not only for the range of its forms and occasions, but also for the diversity of its literary, cultural, and political commitments. He approached campaigns for Welsh devolution and international solidarity with the same sense of purpose as he did in opposing nuclear power, militarism, and racism. Jenkins was a politically and culturally committed poet who was unafraid to be satirical, epic, polemical, or simply and frankly angry. This book encompasses a wide array of poetic styles, including love poems, poems of desire, lyric poems, public poems for public spaces, occasional poems that transcend their occasions, merciless satires, and poems that borrow epic voices, whether of bravado or lament, and retool them for today's challenges. Within these pages, you will find poems written in the spirit.

Urgent poems about environmental degradation, militarism, nuclear folly, imperialism, and capitalism. There is beauty and precision, outrage and indignation, savage wit, and deep empathy. The book also includes a number of Jenkins' translations from the Welsh, reflecting his commitment to bilingualism and biculturalism in his country and to the idea of a community of poets. A sense of history underpins Nigel Jenkins' writing, but it is the present that propels it. In this sense, his poetry and prose form a single, albeit various, oeuvre. They are the work of a writer who believed that poetry had a duty to engage with the world as it is, while holding out the imaginative possibilities of what it could be.

Dimension: 210 x 148 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781914595226