Diary of the Last Man

By Robert Minhinnick

Wales Book of the Year 2018

Winner of the 2018 Roland Mathias Poetry Award

Shortlisted for the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize

The opening poem sequence, 'Diary of the Last Man', sets the tone for Robert Minhinnick's book, a celebration of the dwindling Earth, an elegy, a caution. His Wales is a touchstone; other landscapes and cityscapes are tried against it, with its erratic weather, its sudden changes of mood, 'a black tonic'. The sequence remembers all the geographies of his earlier work, old and new world, but now unpeopled and the lonely spirit free to go anywhere, do anything, but meaning with mankind has drained away. Yet still alive, and still with language, registering. The rest of the book is filled with voices: of children, of rivers, terrorists, magicians; and voices translated from the Welsh, and from Turkish and Arabic, shared, enriching with their difference, their other worlds. History washes over and washes up on the strand of this Welsh book. It is seen and recognised, it begins to be transformed. In the long concluding poem, 'The Sand Orchestra', the poet returns to his own voice, and to the voice of a Bechstein piano abandoned in the open air, played now by nature, its winds and sand. The last man, who has been looking for Ulysses, is the very man he has been looking for.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Carcanet Poetry
• Release date: Apr 15, 2017
• ISBN: 9781784103491

Robert Minhinnick

Robert Minhinnick is a poet, novelist and essayist. His many books include the essay collections Watching the Fire Eater, winner of Wales Book of the Year in 1993, and To Babel and Back, Wales Book of the Year in 2006. In 2004, his translations of Menna Elfyn’s poems were included in his anthology The Adulterer’s Tongue: Six Welsh Poets from Carcanet. His latest poetry collection is Diary of the Last Man (Carcanet, 2017).