Wild Cherry: Selected Poems

by Nigel Jenkins, Patrick McGuinness (Editor)

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.

190 pages, Paperback

Published May 1, 2024

About the author

Nigel Jenkins (1949-2014) was an Anglo-Welsh poet from South Wales. He was also known as a playwright, writer of prose (especially of psychogeography), and an editor. He passed away in 2014 of cancer.

He was brought up in the Gower. During his life, Jenkins was a journalist in the English Midlands before then travelling extensively. He studied film and literature at Essex University and was a winner of the Arts Council’s Young Poets Prize in 1974.

He returned to Wales and was a lecturer at Swansea University and director of the creative writing programme there.

In 2002, Jenkins published the first ever haiku collection from a Welsh publisher.

In 2008, he co-edited (with historian John Davies), The Welsh Academy Encyclopaedia of Wales (published by the University of Wales Press).

Notable works:
-Gwalia in Khasia (1995)
-Blue: 101 Haiku, Senryu and Tanka (2002)
-The Welsh Academy Encyclopaedia of Wales (co-ed., 2008)

Reviews

[Tôpher Mills · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nigel Jenkins has a staggering presence in the literature of Wales. His poetry is both political and beautiful, deeply human, wonderfully cosmological and often scathingly humorous. Swansea’s most amiable bard and, undoubtedly, it’s most popular poet since Dylan Thomas.

[Judith Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are so many writers out there! I first heard of Nigel Jenkins when his daughter Angharad mentioned him onstage when I saw her playing with the fantastic Welsh band Calan, but had been unaware of him beforehand. No doubt I would have come across him sooner if I'd moved to Wales earlier.

These are marvellous poems - it's so sad that Nigel Jenkins passed away at a relatively early age, and that there will be no more, but I look forward to collecting all of his books.

I love an angry poem, I have to say, of which there are some excellent examples here: Land of Song, Never Forget your Welsh, but the most splendid must surely be An Execrably Tasteless Farewell to Viscount No. I read it to my local poetry group and to my Siarad Cymraeg (speak Welsh) group, and it was received with much appreciation and howls of laughter. I must learn it by heart!

Nigel Evans does everything though - funny (The Creation), learned (An Aside from the Dunghill), deeply poetic/beautifully crafted, heartfelt and poignant (An Uncle's Satisfaction, addressed to a young man whose drinking is ruining him).

Here's a succinct comment on the limits of our charity, or at least, that of most of us:

'£23 will save a life'

So we send forty-six.

We do not send
ninety-two
or a hundred and eighty-four.

We buy the kids an ice cream,
ourselves another bottle of wine.

Englyns is a witty breakdown of the complexities of the Welsh poem form. And Advice to a Young Poet is well worth listening to.

All in all, shelling out £10 to the independent Welsh press Parthian Books would be money very well worth spent. Highly recommended not only to Welsh, but to all lovers of poetry!