Books Books
Category: Ebooks, Memoir, Non Fiction, Places, Travel
Number of pages: 220
ISBN: 9781854114969
Publication date: June 10, 2009
Price: £9.99
Out of stock
Category: Ebooks, Memoir, Non Fiction, Places, Travel
Number of pages: 220
ISBN: 9781854116376
Publication date: June 10, 2009
Price: £7.99
Out of stock
Once is the journey from boyhood to the threshold of manhood of poet Andrew McNeillie. From an aeroplane crossing north Wales the middle-aged writer looks down on the countryside of his childhood and recalls an almost fabulous world now lost to him.
Ordinary daily life and education in Llandudno shortly after the war are set against an extraordinary life lived close to nature in some of the wilder parts of Snowdonia. Continually crossing the border between town and country, a fly-fisherman by the age of ten, McNeillie relives his life in nature during a period of increasing urbanisation.
Once is a beautifully written eulogy for a retreating countryside now valued more for its leisure potential than as a repository of nature and source of human fullfilment. The narrative is underlain by a way of thinking informed by the natural world and by nature poetry, and is an evocative and memorable book about the nature of experience of memory and writing.
Andrew McNeillie
Andrew McNeillie was born in north Wales in 1946 and educated at John Bright Grammar School, Llandudno. He read English at Magdalen College, Oxford. He was the Literature Editor at Oxford University Press for five years until 2009 and established the Clutag Press in Oxfordshire in 2002 to publish poetry. He has published five collections of poetry: Nevermore (2000), which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, Now, Then (2002), Slower (2006), In Mortal Memory (2010) and Winter Moorings (2014). He also published the memoir An Aran Keening (2001), about his life in Ireland, to which Once (2009) is the prequel. McNeillie is now a Professor of English at the University of Exeter’s Penryn campus where he devised and co-convenes the MA Writing, Nature and Place. He is also a member of the Advisory Board of the T.S. Eliot Edition, serves on the Editorial Board of Princeton University Press and is an Honorary Professor of English at the University of Aberystwyth.
