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.
Read an extract of Wild Cherry Nigel Jenkins Selected Poems here:
Available now from your local bookshop.