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And another great review! This time for Pomegranate Garden by Haydar Ergülen on World Literature Today: 'Ergülen has a broad poetic range. Pomegranate Garden features works from 1982 to 2019. Pomegranate Garden delights in prose poetry, symbolism, free verse, narrative, premodern classicism, and the occasional mystic spiritual. But arguably, Ergülen best succeeds at what Parker notes as his “down-to-earth concerns of humanity itself.” In his poem “Borrowed Like Sorrow” (2005), he writes, “Mornings are tough / much more so than poetry.” His quotidian commentary becomes profound in his elegy to the Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, written the year he was assassinated....

'In Jill Piercy, Chamberlain has found a sensitive and respectful biographer whose principal strength is the enlightening discussion of the visual art [...] This portrait of a gifted, sometimes tortured woman will hopefully encourage people to seek out books such as ‘Tide-race’ and ‘A Rope of Vines’ which are both reasonably accessible. But seek out too her paintings and engravings, as here was a true artist, complex and compelling, a writer who paints with words just as her paintings and colourful linocuts sing of a woman ferociously and tenaciously engaged with the world.' Jon Gower reviews the new Modern Wales...

Happy New Year all!

It is lovely to see this very positive review of Notes from a Swing State by Zoë Brigley on our return to the office! Thanks to Sue Mackrell for writing it!

“She refuses to believe that violence is inevitable and works to challenge violence, hate crimes and discrimination against anyone who does not conform to a supposed ‘norm.’ She believes at the root of it all is a breakdown of communication, ‘an act of violent refusal' to recognise the humanity and to empathise with an individual perceived as ‘different.’”

Writing on Nation.Cymru Jon Gower finds much to admire in Zoë Brigley's new essay collection. 'Throughout this collection Brigley is challengingly open about her own life. Which turns out to have had its challenges especially because, as a young writer she found it hard to write about personal material, which she described as a ‘writerly shyness.’ As a young woman she found herself in an abusive relationship with an older man. So the essays prove she has overcome both and now faces her fears head-on. 'These Notes from a Swing State are written with an openness to ideas redolent of...

Zoë Brigley's essay collection Notes from a Swing State has had two recent, favourable reviews in the latest issues of Planet and the welsh agenda. 'If, as for Raymond Williams, great shifts in time and society are a picking up and setting back down again, then surely we are currently within just such an undefined state, the consequences of which are unknown until the settling and evaluating that comes with the aftermath. The swing state of this new collection of essays by Zoë Brigley is not only Ohio and the Electoral College, but self, home, nationhood and identity. Body, mind and...