Category: Reviews

The late Jan Morris’ pre-eminence as a travel writer might lead some to imagine that Wales’ voice is strident and well-represented in that genre. But, if Google (Scholar or Dumbo-version) is anything to go by, very few Welsh authors have made their name through travelogues.
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Edging the City

Unpretentious, chatty and clubbable, Chris Moss writes, Wales’ veteran psychogeographer makes quite the schlep around Cardiff in this home-based travel guidebook

PUBLISHED ON: 28/02/23

CATEGORY: Reviews

The book is offered as a series of day walks or bedtime reads: virtual hikes to continue in dreams. He peppers the sections with random history nugget …

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Scar Tissue

Solly Hardwick is intrigued by these lyrical short stories which talk about how the process of healing can be as painful as the original split-up

PUBLISHED ON: 28/02/23

CATEGORY: Reviews

People in these stories try to patch up their wounds, seeking solace through the certainties of remembered places, or the stability of home…. Scar T …

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Real Hay-on-Wye

Rhiannon Hooson finds this latest in Seren’s Real series both a comprehensive and delightfully serendipitous guidebook to a town at odds with itself, like any small Welsh town subject to numerous incomers

PUBLISHED ON: 28/02/23

CATEGORY: Reviews

It is a town at times at odds with itself, like so many small Welsh towns that attract a lot of incomers, and so, it seems, like Richard Booth himself …

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Portraits of Tibet

Chris Moss on a photography book that captures the way in which one’s most important travels can have an epiphanic, life-enhancing quality

PUBLISHED ON: 28/02/23

CATEGORY: Reviews

All worlds are disappearing worlds, but the nomadic life of Tibetans is particularly vulnerable in a society that only values economic progress

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A Voice Coming from Then, Rhondda Burning: Paintings and Poems, Grief Dialogue

Liza Penn-Thomas reviews three poetry titles, among them a book about homophobic bullying which she judges timely and necessary art

PUBLISHED ON: 28/02/23

CATEGORY: Reviews

There is nothing graphic in this exploration of queer identity and homophobic bullying, but stark suicide data coupled with the poet’s lived experienc …

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Goliat

Garry MacKenzie is highly impressed by this assured poetry collection, sweet, steely, and at times on a par with the best of Michael Longley

PUBLISHED ON: 28/02/23

CATEGORY: Reviews

If there’s a more apt word than ‘assured’ for this collection then I can’t think of it. There is poise to the writing, the sensation of encountering a …

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Delicacy: A Memoir about Cake and Death

Ed Garland gobbles up this rigorous, crafted and very funny exploration of the links between cake and human distress by the Welsh comedian and Ghosts actor

PUBLISHED ON: 28/02/23

CATEGORY: Reviews

[Katy Wix’s] positivity is convincing because it is thoroughly rooted in experience. Her writing in Delicacy is not painful or raw or brutal. It is ca …

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Voyager: Constellations of Memory

Elaine Margolin is startled by this author’s ability to meld past and present, the personal and the political, but above all her concern with comprehending the mindset of perpetrator-turned-confessor

PUBLISHED ON: 01/02/23

CATEGORY: Reviews

Elaine Margolin is startled by this author’s ability to meld past and present, the personal and the political, but above all her concern with comprehe …

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The Otter Book

Hitherto the provider of pelts for gloves, and the bane of fishers, now a bellweather for river water quality, these shortlived, blubberless, territorial mammals continue to fascinate, as Vicky Mackenzie writes of this accessible monograph of the Eurasian otter

PUBLISHED ON: 31/01/23

CATEGORY: Reviews

Hitherto the provider of pelts for gloves, and the bane of fishers, now a bellweather for river water quality, these shortlived, blubberless, territor …

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