Drawing Down the Moon is an anthology of work from Welsh writers in 1996. Inevitably the reader will identify glaring omissions and infuriating choices here? Where are the young writers? Is there enough political writing? Has the urban muse been given its due? Such is the deliciously contentious nature of the annual anthology.
So read on as the male establishment of Welsh letters rubs tentative shoulders with the younger women who now produce many of the best things to appear in literary Wales. And prepare to take issue with an editorial that castigates the jottings of middle-class incomers and forecasts that the future writers of English-speaking Wales will not hail from the semi-anglicised, working-class south and north-east, but the Welsh-speaking heartlands.
Drawing Down the Moon seeks to reflect a country in the process of shedding its exhausted mythologies. The nineties post-modern, post-industrial Wales it reveals is both exciting and confusing. Whether this anthology succeeds in its aims is up to you to decide.
Robert Minhinnick is the prize-winning author of two volumes of essays and seven volumes of poetry. He has also edited a book on the environment in Wales, written for television and provided columns for The Western Mail and Planet. He is the co-founder of the environmental organisation, Sustainable Wales, and is currently the editor of Poetry Wales.
So read on as the male establishment of Welsh letters rubs tentative shoulders with the younger women who now produce many of the best things to appear in literary Wales. And prepare to take issue with an editorial that castigates the jottings of middle-class incomers and forecasts that the future writers of English-speaking Wales will not hail from the semi-anglicised, working-class south and north-east, but the Welsh-speaking heartlands.
Drawing Down the Moon seeks to reflect a country in the process of shedding its exhausted mythologies. The nineties post-modern, post-industrial Wales it reveals is both exciting and confusing. Whether this anthology succeeds in its aims is up to you to decide.
Robert Minhinnick is the prize-winning author of two volumes of essays and seven volumes of poetry. He has also edited a book on the environment in Wales, written for television and provided columns for The Western Mail and Planet. He is the co-founder of the environmental organisation, Sustainable Wales, and is currently the editor of Poetry Wales.