Having recently been profoundly impressed by Lloyd Jones’s Welsh-language novels Y Daith and Y Dwr, I was delighted by this appearance of an English language version of Y Dwr – Water – to share with those friends unable to read Welsh. Lloyd Jones appropriately plays for high stakes in this story of a Welsh farm, Dolfrwynog, and its inhabitants, in a narrative which recalls other modern classic dystopian and apocalyptic novels – Hoban’s Riddley Walker, Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, McCarthy’s The Road, and the great traditional myths of flood. The rich imagery of Jones’s Water yields a myriad of evocative appropriations of Welsh myth, history and legend, such as The Mabinogi, Cantre’r Gwaelod, the fasting girl Sarah Jacob, and the drowning of Tryweryn...
The village of Marinaleda in Andalucía lies roughly equidistant from Malaga to the south and Córdoba to the north, Seville to the west and Granada to the east. Reading Hancox’s book made me determined to see Marinaleda for myself. Similarly intrigued and inspired by Hancox, a party of us from Wales visited Marinaleda last Spring. We were welcomed by the Deputy Mayor of the village council and had a conducted tour of the community. The immediately striking feature of the village is the political murals and the street names which celebrate local socialists as well as international figures such as Ché Guevara and Salvador Allende. This street art boldly expresses the vision and yearning for a socialist world of peace, equality and freedom. In the words of Marinaleda’s charismatic mayor, Juan Manuel Sánchez Gordillo, ‘No one can stop us. There is not enough blood, nor enough walls, to prevent that one day, land, rights, and, of course, liberty will be achieved by everyone.'...
The Irish poet Seán Ó Ríordáin invokes in his poems the idea of catching the robin by the tail – a metaphor for ‘the absolute’ which the poet can sense, and which he attempts to express in his poems, without ever really accomplishing that expression. The metaphor is a paradox, and to catch the robin by the tail would mean depriving the bird of its essence, stripping it of its sense, denying it its own existence and meaning. Ó Ríordáin writes: ‘I would like to catch the robin’s tail [...], I would like to travel to the end of day in sadness.’...
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