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Once
Once is the journey from boyhood to the threshold of manhood of poet Andrew McNeillie. From an aeroplane crossing north Wales the middle-aged writer looks down on the countryside of his childhood and recalls an almost fabulous world now lost to him. Ordinary daily life and education in Llandudno shortly after the war are set against an extraordinary life lived close to nature in some of the wilder parts of Snowdonia. Continually crossing the border between town and country, a fly-fisherman by the age of ten, McNeillie relives his life in nature during a period of increasing urbanisation. Once is a beautifully written eulogy for a retreating countryside now valued more for its leisure potential than as a repository of nature and source of human fullfilment. The narrative is underlain by a way of thinking informed by the natural world and by nature poetry, and is an evocative and memorable book about the nature of experience of memory and writing.
Striking a Match in a Storm
The Welsh poet Andrew McNeillie brings together in this generous and timely volume his seven collections of poems – including his most recent, Making Ends Meet, and his Forward-Prize-shortlisted Carcanet collection Nevermore (2000). McNeillie's poems possess the same precision and ear for other voices which have made him a noted nature writer and an influential editor of the handsomely designed eco-literature magazine Archipelago, and like it, take as their focus the 'unnameable archipelago' of Britain and Ireland, at its wilder margins, with close observation of place, community, and hands-on outdoor experience. His celebrated memoir An Aran Keening (2001) is about a year's stay on one of the islands of that Archipelago. His publishing house Clutag Press produces beautiful limited editions of work by some of his favourite writers – Hill and Heaney among them. He is a witty writer and an ironist, but he is also a visionary in the sense that his poems sharpen vision of the environment and the crucial minutiae of the natural world we partly inhabit.
In Mortal Memory
In Mortal Memory is a collection of lyric poems, celebratory if often melancholy, both elegiac and ironic. Affirming that life is all becoming' McNeillie mourns what that means in terms of loss and sorrow at time passing. The sea is a powerful presence, its meaning drawn both from the northern landscapes in which McNeillie's work is rooted, and from the work of French poets, from Baudelaire and Hugo to Rimbaud and Corbière. The poems pitch up and down across formalities, against the idea of purity, while sustaining a rhyming, singing line.
Slower
"Slower, Andrew McNeillie's third collection, meditates on personal and natural history, nation states and mental states, violence, religion and poetry. It treats too of personal bereavement, and of love and marriage. The poem sequences at its core make connections between places, times and events, and meditate on continuities."--BOOK JACKET.
Winter Moorings
Andrew McNeillie's sixth collection returns to the sea and its immensity as a metaphor for fate. It also revisits the British and Irish archipelago ('For which read a figure for my heart. / For which read too a figure for time's hurt'), following a north-western trajectory from the Aran Islands to the Hebrides. The natural world is seen here in both its beauty and its indifference to human beings ('There's many a thing more lasting than a person'). From a version of 'The Seafarer' to an elegiac play for sounds and voices retelling the story of an English airman drowned off Aran in World War II, these poems speak of lives and deaths across the reaches of history.
The Common Reader
None
An Aran Keening
In November 1968, at the age of 22, Andrew McNellie left his job and his girlfriend in Wales and travelled to Inuishmore. He stayed for 11 months in Aran, living alone in a tiny house. Based on a journal and his letters home, Andrew McNeillie writes about his time in Aran, and island life.
Now, Then
Illusions and delusions, joys and jokes, mysteries of memory and temporal paradox figure in Andrew McNeillie's new collection. Here are new sequences of bird poems, and tree poems, lines from an autobiography, lines from America, and poems about old age, in elegiac, ironic, and even vitriolic mode. These poems are about being and longing, belonging and not belonging in the world, past or present, now or then. They are about having and not having a home to go to. Haunted by the rapt, rural and wilderness gaze of childhood, youth and young manhood, the poems in Now, Then express worlds and times past of immediate sensual being and seeing 'then' - 'bubble-rapt' - in a 'sound-warp...like a dipper submerged in a rushing pool' - before the world caught up with their author: now counting his blessings, cursing his luck as time flies faster in life's dark wood.
The Essays of Virginia Woolf: 1912-1918
Essays beginning at the time of her marriage to Leonard Woolf and ending just after the Armistice. More than half have not been collected previously. "In these essays we see both Woolf's work and her self afresh" (Chicago Tribune). Edited and with an Introduction by Andrew McNeillie; Index.
