Poetry
Category: Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 86
ISBN: 9781854110251
Publication date: February 23, 1995
Price: £4.95
Out of stock
In his fourth collection of poems Mike Jenkins addresses issues of the greatest concern to us in the nineties. His subjects include South Africa, Chile, the Falklands War, Northern Ireland, economic dereliction, the environment and sexual oppression. The ‘dissident voice’ of the title belongs to anti-nuclear campaigner Hilda Murrell, who died in such mysterious circumstances.
Mike Jenkins’s poetry of issues is also a poetry of ordinary people. Often writing in character, he brings vividly to life the problems and dilemmas which face us daily. Through the rich imagery of these poems we come to see the human values and rights which we must exercise and defend in a civilised society.
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.
