Wild Cherry

'He became the unacknowledged national poet of his generation, an open hearted soul whose poems embodied much of what our nation is today-diverse, passionate, tender and unafraid to take a hard look at its political and cultural complexity.' - Menna Elfyn 'Nigel Jenkins has a staggering presence in the literature of Wales. His poetry was both political and beautiful, deeply human, wonderfully cosmological and often scathingly humorous. Swansea's most amiable bard and, undoubtedly, it's most popular poet since Dylan Thomas.' - Topher Mills 'This selection of Nigel's work reminds us that a fine poet's voice need never be silenced.' - Gillian Clarke 'Peace, praise & revolution. Jenkins felt these were the true poet's pursuit. And he exemplified this in his own life. A lyrical and political idealist, he saw the writer's role as a necessary thorn in the side of any state or official agency. As excellent in describing snowdrops as he was acerbic about the world's smothered histories, including that of Wales, Nigel Jenkins remains a formidable and radical writer and satirist. His death at 64 was a profound shock to all those who loved his writings and music, both tender and tendentious.' - Robert Minhinnick

One of Wales's leading writers, this posthumous volume brings together a selection of Jenkins' poetry from across his career. Selected and introduced by Wales Book of the Year winner Patrick McGuinness.Nigel Jenkins's body of work is remarkable not just for the range of its forms and occasions, but for the variety of its literary, cultural and political commitments. He campaigned for Welsh devolution and international solidarity with the same sense of purpose as he campaigned against nuclear power, militarism and racism. A politically- and culturally committed poet he was unafraid to be satirical, or epic, or polemical, or to be simply and frankly angry. This book contains love poems and poems of desire, lyric poems and 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. There are poems written in the spirit of high-intellectual play and 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 contains a number of Jenkins's translations from the Welsh - a reflection of his commitment to the bilingualism and biculturalism of his country, and to the idea of a community of poets. A sense of history underpins Nigel Jenkins's writing, but it is the present that propels it. In that sense, his poetry and prose are part of a single, albeit various, oeuvre. They are the work of a writer who believed that poetry has a duty to engage with the world as it is, while holding out the imaginative possibilities of what it can be.