Diolch to Nation.Cymru for publishing Patrick McGuinness's introduction to WILD CHERRY, the selected poems of Nigel Jenkins.
'Jenkins had a clear understanding of what it meant to be a Welsh poet writing in English in the 20th and 21st centuries. That understanding was informed and energised by its attentiveness to Welsh-language culture, and from its sense that the English-language tradition of Wales could learn from the centrality of poetry in Welsh-speaking society ... A sense of history underpins Nigel Jenkins’s writing, but it is the present that propels it. In that sense, his poetry and prose are part of a single, albeit various, oeuvre. They are the work of a writer who believed that poetry has a duty to engage with the world as it is, while holding out the imaginative possibilities of what it can be.'
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