Wild Cherry Selected Poems

Nigel Jenkins’s body of work is remarkable not just for the range of its forms and occasions, but for the variety of its literary, cultural and political commitments. He campaigned for Welsh devolution and international solidarity with the same sense of purpose as he campaigned against nuclear power, militarism and racism. A politically- and culturally committed poet he was unafraid to be satirical, or epic, or polemical, or to be simply and frankly angry. This book contains love poems and poems of desire, lyric poems and public poems for public spaces, occasional poems that transcend their occasions, merciless satires, and poems that borrow epic voices, whether of bravado or lament, and retool them for today’s challenges. There are poems written in the spirit of high-intellectual play and urgent poems about environmental degradation, militarism, nuclear folly, imperialism and capitalism. There is beauty and precision, outrage and indignation, savage wit and deep empathy. The book also contains a number of Jenkins’s translations from the Welsh – a reflection of his commitment to the bilingualism and biculturalism of his country, and to the idea of a community of poets. A sense of history underpins Nigel Jenkins’s writing, but it is the present that propels it. In that sense, his poetry and prose are part of a single, albeit various, oeuvre. They are the work of a writer who believed that poetry has a duty to engage with the world as it is, while holding out the imaginative possibilities of what it can be.

Patrick McGuinness is the author of three books of poetry, two novels, and a non- fiction book about place, time and memory, and his mother’ s small Belgian border town of Bouillon - Other People’ s Countries - which was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley Prize and the James Tait Black Prize, won the Wales Book of the Year, and the Duff Cooper Prize. He is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at St Anne’ s College, Oxford. Nigel Jenkins (1949-2014) was one of Wales's leading writers: a poet and essayist, he was also political activist, a teacher and a mentor. He first came to prominence as one of the Welsh Arts Council's Three Young Anglo-Welsh Poets (1974). In 1976, he was given an Eric Gregory Award by the Society of Authors. This was followed by numerous poetry collections, including Song and Dance (1981), Blue: 101 Haiku, Senryu and Tanka (2002) and Hotel Gwales (2006).