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: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Feb 25, 2021
• 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).

Book preview

ROBERT MINHINNICK

DIARY OF THE

LAST MAN

For Margaret

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Versions of some of these poems have appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation, PN Review, Poetry Ireland, Poetry Wales, New Welsh Review, Guardian, Pivot (USA), Cordite (Australia), Jubilee Lines: Sixty Poets for Sixty Years (Faber).

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Diary of the Last Man

1. Prophecy 

2. Snipe 

3. Slugs

4. Oyster Shells 

5. The Nettle Picker

6. Anglers

7. Nocturne

8. The New World

9. How it goes

10. Moraine

11. The Future

12. Plastic

13. Home

14. Summer

15. London Eye

16. Nostalgia

17. High Life

18. At The Grand Pavilion, Brighton

19. Cross Country

20. And the morning after…

21. Isopod

22. Pontlotyn

23. Sandwort

Suite for Children’s Voices and Moog Theremin

1. Song of Sleet

2. What the Rain Said

3. Dark One

Lines for Steve Harris

Mouth to Mouth: A Recitation between Two Rivers

The Body

1. With the Body Piercers

2. The Penis

3. Upstairs at The Beast Within Tattoo Studio

Morphine

Amiriya Suite

1. After the Stealth Bomber: Umm Ghada at the Amiriya Bunker

2. WMD

3. Side Effects

4. At a Dictator’s Grave

The Mongoose

The Magician

Leyshon

1. When the Brandy came Ashore

2. Mymryn

3. On the Midnight Full

4. What Leyshon said he heard at the Prince of Wales

Aversions

From the Welsh of Karen Owen

‘THPW 1921’

Iwan

Salt

From the Turkish of Nese Yasin

Poisoned Apple

Aleysha

From the Arabic of Marwan Makhoul

Jerusalem

From the Turkish of Erozcelick Seyhan (1962–2011)

Coffee Readings 1

Coffee Readings 2

Coffee Readings 3

The Sand Orchestra

About the Author

Other Carcanet books by Robert Minhinnick include

Copyright

DIARY OF THE LAST MAN

1. Prophecy

       Perhaps

I am the last man.

Perhaps I deserve to be.

So in this driftwood church

I hum my hymn of sand.

       Yet any god

would be welcome here.

       Any god at all.

2. Snipe

Come out of the frozen cress.

Two of them, two lines of barbed wire

across the sky, two voices

with snapped-off vowels, electrical and mad.

Such sneerers, snipe, sulky that I could come

so close to their ruined aristocracy,

rank in its rags. But if I called

I know they would turn back.

3. Slugs

I awoke in the dark.

Perhaps I was delirious, but I had dreamed

all the sunflowers were eaten

by enormous mouths. A hundred, I’d say,

gone overnight, and the seeds hardly split.

Yes, I am coming to realise

that the only horrors

are in my head.

4. Oyster Shells

Sleet off the sea

blinds the right eye.

Under my boots these faces

of old men at their gruel,

their blue craniums.

Meanwhile the wind is blowing everything backwards

and flaying the duneskins into the sky.

5. The Nettle Picker

The next day my fingers throb

pale and purple, the poisoned nerves

at least alive. I took the crowns

with the pollen on them through a mist of webs.

Now, here’s a black tonic I stir from a half-remembered spell.

6. Anglers

How tedious were the fishermen.

Always the same enticement:

log on, log on, the wonders await.

But I prefer the midnight swell

and the moon that dips its sickle in the surf.

7. Nocturne

The clouds flaked with gold leaf,

the sea burning. And I wonder

why I am writing this down,

knowing what I know, dreading what I dread.

Perhaps I should call a truce with myself.

8. The New World

This castaway’s life? I curse it:

scoffing scurvygrass, burying my scat.

I thought when the smoke cleared

there would be a different world.

But though my driftwood fires

are blue as Sirius

each brings a new apostasy.

9. How it goes

Evolution theory suggested we

were once the colour of the sea.

But now we match, it’s true,

ash from a disposable barbecue.

10. Moraine

A barricade the sea

builds against