9781781721292

launch poster island of lightning feb 2014 600px

Minhinnick says of the book:

“Island of Lightning is an ambitious collection, selected from writings composed over recent years.

“It ranges from adventures in China, the US and Italy, to extremely locally-focused writing, depicting Kenfig, the Elvis festival and Pink Bay.

“The longest piece describes a pilgrimage from Cardiff to Penrhys in the Rhondda, while the title section stems from a literary residency I was awarded on the real ‘island of lightning’. This had a huge impact on my life as a writer.”

‘Island of Lightning’ comprises over twenty separate sections, and retails at £9.99. It comes with a cover design by Eamon Bourke.

Island of Lightning is the latest book of travel essays by the prizewinning Robert Minhinnick, poet, novelist, translator, cultural commentator and environmentalist. In it he travels from his home in south Wales to Argentina, China, Finland, Iraq, Tuscany and Piemonte, Malta, New York, Zagreb, Lithuania and the lightning island of Malta.

In conventional travel essays and leaps of imaginative narrative his subjects include the annual Elvis convention in Porthcawl, Neolithic sculptures, the cruelties of late twentieth century communism and its aftermath, rugby union, the Argentinian writer Alfonsina Storni, poets playing football, the body of a saint and the definition of cool. His themes are big ones: the relationship of man and landscape, man and time, man and nature, immigration and war, in one sense ultimately humankind itself.

Minhinnick explores with the eye of a poet and the gift of a telling image or metaphor. His walk from Cardiff to the Rhondda valleys is almost geological as he passes through the social and cultural strata of the area’s history. His astonishment at the sheer number of people – the scale on which society works – in China, results in an inventive grappling with the hugeness of the world (and its growing problems). At the other end of the spectrum his re-imagining of the life of Alfonsina Storni, her love for Borges and her suicide is a delicate commentary on the personal and the solitary.

Readers will be entertained, informed and provoked by this series of essays in which Minhinnick takes his subjects as though holding them in his hand, turning them for new perspectives and understanding.

Sustainable Wales Cymru Gynhaliol
4/5 James St.
Porthcawl
Bridgend
CF36 3BG
01656 783962

http://www.sustainablewales.org.uk/

Donate

Sustainable Wales is an environmental charity. Committed to sustainable development, we focus on society, economy, jobs, creativity and the arts and their inter-connection with the natural world.

Margaret Minhinnick
Director
Sustainable Wales Cymru Gynhaliol
4/5 James St.
Porthcawl
Bridgend
CF36 3BG
01656 783962

http://www.sustainablewales.org.uk/

Donate

Sustainable Wales is an environmental charity. Committed to sustainable development, we focus on society, economy, jobs, creativity and the arts and their inter-connection with the natural world.