Poetry
Category: Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 128
ISBN:
Publication date: May 18, 1999
Price: £
Out of stock
Red Landscapes collects together the two major strands of Mike Jenkins’ poetry: beautiful love lyrics to his wife and family, and the radical social and political poems which spring from his socialism. Although Jenkins has written some of the best love poems of recent decades he is best known for his biting satire on political subjects and his compassionate poems about the victims of politics. Those without a voice in literature – petrol pump attendants, over-the-hill footballers, beleaguered immigrants – find representation in today’s post-modern, post-industrial Britain, through poems in which humour can belie outrage, and poignancy be celebrated. Such concerns are unusual – extraordinary – for contemporary poetry.
Mike Jenkins
Mike Jenkins is now a full-time writer and teacher of Creative Writing, after spending over 30 years teaching in Secondary education.
He is former editor of Poetry Wales and is co-editor and founder of Red Poets magazine, which has been going for 15 years. He has won an Eric Gregory Award, Welsh Arts Council Young Writers’ Prize, John Tripp Award for Spoken Poetry and, in 1998, the Wales Book of the Year for Wanting to Belong ( Seren ), a book of interlinked stories which was subsequently made into a drama for BBC Wales and also dramatised for a Channel 4 education programme. His novella for teenagers The Climbing Tree was published by Pont in February 2010.
He has appeared at the Hay Festival and Aldeburgh Festivals, has had a BBC programme dedicated to his work, and has read many of his poems on TV and Radio. He has his own website and ‘blogs’ on a regular basis.
A number of his stories have been adapted for radio and he writes regularly for the Cardiff City FC fanzine Watch the Bluebirds Fly and the political magazine Celyn ( left-leaning) where he reviews music from Wales. He also organizes a monthly poetry event in Merthry which includes a guest reader and an ‘open mic’ element.
At present, he’s working on another novel for teenagers and a series of prose-poems based on Welsh idioms in collaboration with Merthyr artist Michael Gustavius Payne.
He lives in Merthyr with wife Marie , who is a teacher, and his younger daughter. His older daughter is a Plaid Cymru AM and his son a reporter on the Politics Show.
