Category: Opinion

Poems about paintings, or ’painting poems’, are a great tradition. WH Auden’s ‘Musee de Beaux Arts’, about Bruegel’s masterpiece ‘The Fall of Icarus’ (ominously first published in the spring of 1939), is one of the most well known. And the Welsh poet and Anglican priest RS Thomas mastered this form of poetry in works such […]
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Land of Whose Fathers?

A digital project aims to map land ownership across Wales – and you can help. Chris Moss talks to Dr Sioned Hâf, creator of Who Owns Wales/Pwy Bia Cymru, in this feature-length essay

PUBLISHED ON: 01/04/21

CATEGORY: Column, Essays, Opinion

Land is an enigma. It is soil, roads, houses and mountains, but more than any or all of those. It is, in a sense, all we have as humans. It is everywh …

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Lest We Forget

Wanda Zyborska writes about HM Stanley, Denbigh, memorialisation and art, asking, How can we have equality without diversity in our cultural representations?

PUBLISHED ON: 28/07/20

CATEGORY: Column, Opinion

The recent actions of Black Lives Matter (BLM) protesters tearing down statues of the slave owner Edward Colston in Bristol has drawn public attention …

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The Price of the Picturesque

The package tour was invented in Wales. In the week the ‘travel ban’ is likely to be lifted, Chris Moss calls for a reinvention of Welsh tourism after coronavirus

PUBLISHED ON: 30/06/20

CATEGORY: Opinion

The Emptying of Covid-19. It sounds like the title of a Thomas Pynchon novel. But for three long months, the skies cleared, the beaches were clean and …

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Shape-shifting and Skin-walking

Kaite O'Reilly on writers who are venturing out of their traditional form to experiment with prose, poetry, screenplays and drama

PUBLISHED ON: 11/02/20

CATEGORY: Opinion

Writers are shape-shifters and skin-walkers. We’re liars, able to take on stories, dialects, eras, perspectives, genders and species not our own and c …

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Pairing Wales and South America

Richard Gwyn

PUBLISHED ON: 11/02/20

CATEGORY: Opinion

Richard Gwyn on the central, serious, importance of make-believe to Latin American life and literature, and the gestation of his festival, Fiction Fie …

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Writing the Mother Tongue

Eluned Gramich

PUBLISHED ON: 11/02/20

CATEGORY: Column, Opinion

  aussenraum / outside area so many languages hide beneath your trees in the secret corners of your alleys and in the well which, in winter, is b …

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Swansea Automatic

Kieron Smith champions this poetry collection – part science-textbook pastiche, part local history, part guidebook – on a city that refuses to be pinned down

PUBLISHED ON: 29/01/20

CATEGORY: Opinion, Reviews

How does a colour become a symbolic colour? How does a place become a symbolic place? Why is this book about SWANSEA and not ABERYSTWYTH or LONDON? In …

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Come into the Pomegranate Garden

Caroline Stockford

PUBLISHED ON: 19/12/19

CATEGORY: Opinion

I first met Haydar Ergülen on the Turkish island of Cunda where we had gathered as twenty-plus translators to work on a novella and on Haydar’s poems. …

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Now I Become Myself: A Woman’s Voice in Music and Poetry, a Lecture by Rhian Samuel

Demi Roberts traces the career of a transatlantic classical composer from Aberdare, and the factors that helped and hindered her progression as a female professional artist

PUBLISHED ON: 10/12/19

CATEGORY: Opinion

This year’s annual Richard Burton lecture was delivered by Rhian Samuel in the Great Hall of Swansea University’s Bay Campus. Rhian, a widely successf …

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