Poetry
Category: Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 76
ISBN: 9780907476580
Publication date: March 1, 1986
Price: £3.95
Out of stock
Invisible Times sees Mike Jenkins developing further the picture of working-class society in south Wales which he presented so forcefully in his previous book, Empire of Smoke. His use of language and dialect moves still closer to that of his subjects, and the business of their living is written about not from a point of literary detachment, but with gritty involvement.
The poems in this book mix tenderness towards people, particularly the poet’s family, with anger at a society which is at best uncaring and often hostile. The result is a series of almost surrealistic pictures culminating in the title poem, and contrasting intriguingly with the content and compassion of poems in the tradition of Idris Davies.
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.
