Poetry
Category: Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 64
ISBN: 9781854111401
Publication date: July 5, 1995
Price: £5.95
Out of stock
In This House, My Ghetto Mike Jenkins makes room for eccentric petrol pump attendants, beleaguered immigrants, odd lodgers, famous footballers and ghosts. This is not the Wales of postcards, but a very different post-modern, post-industrial landscape subject to the whims of petty bureaucrats lampooned in poems like ‘Talking Shop’, ‘Anti-resort’ and ‘Psychodahlia’ (a metal bloom that skewers a local councillor on the way to a spaghetti). Jenkins doesn’t flinch from the bleak streets of ‘Gurnos Shops’ where the local ‘takes his beer gut for a walk’, and even a mountain has its say about pesky tourists in ‘Yr Wyddfa Speaks Out’, yet his ascerbic humour and energy frame the outrage and there are plenty of poems that, in contrast, praise and celebrate. In ‘Blackberrying’ and the long love poem ‘A Strange Recognition’ there is still room for the surprises of beauty and romance.
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.
