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Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch’s debut collection for Picador introduces a young poet with a remarkable range of imaginative tactics at her disposal, and seems to announce not one, but several new voices. Not In These Shoes is an act of uncanny ventriloquism, and a distinct spirit haunts each of Wynne-Rhydderch’s meticulously drawn spaces. Whether conjuring the interior of a toy snowstorm, a flooded valley, a woman in a backless dress, a ship’s figurehead or a matador in a hotel room, Wynne-Rhydderch finds a voice that perfectly commands our attention. ‘A major voice in contemporary poetry. Razor-sharp wit, a singing vitality of language, and remarkable technical prowess' Penelope Shuttle 'Mysterious and erotic, heartfelt, sophisticated and immensely readable - there's not a page that doesn't stir the imagination. It's a book I've been waiting years to read' Robert Minhinnick
An extraordinary celebration of Captain Scott's expedition to the South Pole from a bright voice in contemporary poetry While Banjo opens with a clutch of fine lyrics, elegies and set-pieces, at the heart of Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch's new book is a remarkable tale of darkness and light, music and silence. Celebrating the centenary of Captain Scott's arrival at the South Pole in 1912, Banjo gives us new psychological insight into the lives of the early Antarctic pioneers, as well as an extraordinary account of the role played by music in surviving the long Antarctic winters. Banjo is Wynne-Rhydderch's most accomplished collection to date, and further evidence of a writer of great imaginative versatility.
‘These stories make the wall between worlds thrillingly thin. Their enchantment calls to us ever from the other side of the door’ Michael Sheen, from the foreword If you think you’ve heard all the fairy tales out there, think again. Inside this book you will find eleven epic Welsh tales from long ago, but not so far away, that are bound to enchant you. The Mab is a collection full to the brim with brand new versions of really, really old stories from the Mabinogi – maybe the oldest written-down stories in the history of Britain. But as well as being really, really old, the stories in The Mab are strange and funny and thrilling. Alive with mystery and magic, they speak of a time when the gates between the Real World and the Otherworld were occasionally left open. And sometimes, just sometimes, it was possible to step through. The stories in this illustrated edition have been reimagined by an extraordinary team of writers, and each appears alongside a Welsh-language translation.
Poetry, Geography, Gender examines how questions of place, identity and creative practice intersect in the work of some of Wales' best known contemporary poets, including Gillian Clarke, Gwyneth Lewis, Ruth Bidgood and Sheenagh Pugh. Merging traditional literary criticism with cultural-political and geographical analysis, Alice Entwistle shows how writers' different senses of relationship with Wales, its languages, history and imaginative, as well as political, geography feeds the form as well as the content of their poetry. Her innovative critical study thus takes particular interest in the ways in which author, text and territory help to inform and produce each other in the culturally complex and confident small nation that is twenty-first century Wales.
While Banjo opens with a clutch of fine lyrics, elegies and set-pieces, at the heart of Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch’s new book is a remarkable tale of darkness and light, music and silence. Celebrating the centenary of Captain Scott’s arrival at the South Pole in 1912, Banjo gives us new psychological insight into the lives of the early Antarctic pioneers, as well as an extraordinary account of the role played by music in surviving the long Antarctic winters. Banjo is Wynne-Rhydderch’s most accomplished collection to date, and further evidence of a writer of great imaginative versatility.
Some revision of public schooling history is necessary to challenge the dominant mythology that public schools were established on the grounds of values-neutrality. In fact, those responsible for the foundations of public education in Australia were sufficiently pragmatic to know that its success relied on its charter being in accord with public sentiment. Part of the pragmatism was in convincing those whose main experience of education had been through some form of church-based education that state-based education was capable of meeting the same ends. Hence, the documents of the 1870s and 1880s that contained the charters of the various state and territory systems witness to a breadth of vi...
... Long ago in a far distant and different – though maybe not so – world, 1,250BCE, yet-to-be Greeks tried to retake that world’s most beautiful woman, Helen of Troy, ‘the face that launched a 1,000 ships’ (actually 1,034). She’d been seduced/abducted by Paris, the Trojan prince. If she existed she may have been an excuse for colonial conquest, like the non-existent ‘weapons of mass destruction’ of Iraq 2003, as Troy was a key trading centre. Or the war may have been due to widespread famine, thus mass migration in the Med. This innovative take on Homer’s ancient epic Iliad uses a stream-of-consciousness style within a traditional ten-syllable rhyming structure. There are ...
While Banjo opens with a clutch of fine lyrics, elegies and set-pieces, at the heart of Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch’s new book is a remarkable tale of darkness and light, music and silence. Celebrating the centenary of Captain Scott’s arrival at the South Pole in 1912, Banjo gives us new psychological insight into the lives of the early Antarctic pioneers, as well as an extraordinary account of the role played by music in surviving the long Antarctic winters. Banjo is Wynne-Rhydderch’s most accomplished collection to date, and further evidence of a writer of great imaginative versatility. 'Everything is close to the nerve, everything under cool emotional pressure. The cuts blossom into freshness and colour. And delight, the delight borne out of precision of sound and an exquisite command of register’ George Szirtes ‘Lines full of beauty, sometimes gorgeous, sometimes stark . . . implicating us in the essential human situations, life, death and survival, she explores’ Philip Gross
Policeman-turned-detective-turned-writer A Yi describes life as a provincial gumshoe in China. Physician Siddhartha Mukherjee visits a government hospital in New Delhi, where he meets Madha Sengupta, at the end of his life and on the frontiers of medicine. Robert Macfarlane explores the limestone underworld beneath the Peak District. And Haruki Murakami revisits his walk to Kobe in the aftermath of the 1995 earthquake. In this issue - which includes poems by Charles Simic and Ellen Bryant Voigt, a story by Miroslav Penkov and non-fiction by David Searcy, Teju Cole and Hector Abad - Granta presents a panoramic view of our shared landscape and investigates our motivations for exploring it. '