The blurb on the flyleaf of Bird, Blood, Snow characterises Cynan Jones’s reworking of the ‘Peredur’ story from the Mabinogion as ‘a modern Quixotian romp’. This hardly does justice to the complexities of what turns out to be the ‘tragedy’ of Peredur Ap Efrog, violently delusional progeny of a deprived Valleys estate…
Nationalism is an ideology engendered by a bourgeoisie which seeks to take state power from a feudal, aristocratic ruling class or an oppressive, imperialist, foreign nation. Wales has never possessed such a class of industrialists, entrepreneurs, bankers and investors in need of a sovereign, independent state to further its material and political interests and establish its hegemony over Welsh society…
In 2009 Ben Yagoda argued that too many memoirs were being published. Writing in The New York Times in 2011, Neil Genzlinger asserted that this problem has only got worse. Call Mother a Lonely Field, first published by Hag’s Head Press in 2010 and reissued by Seren Books in 2012, is the exception that proves the rule. Liam Carson’s delicately wrought memoir dissects the trauma that was ‘the Troubles’ of Northern Ireland with the most sensitive of scalpels…
Warriors is the third collection from the Welsh-American poet and academic David Lloyd, whose two critical editions of poetry and interviews have made a vital contribution to the reception of post-1980 Welsh writing across the Atlantic, and whose own poetry and fiction draws engagingly from his imaginative roots in two countries…
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