Welsh Journals

Take our laughter on your consenting altars, and to the centuries borne up by your broken pillars, add the light weight of an hour at the end of summer. [At Strata Florida] It is the same frontier that she crosses, if on a more private level, by means of photographs in 'Colour-Slide' and in a fine new poem 'Bookmark'. Many of these poems have themselves a monumental quality, as though they were carved in stone, celebrating moments in time and place against a wider back-drop of history and landscape. This is a careful and well-balanced selection of Bidgood's work over 20 years and is generous in including 26 new poems. Apart from a couple of unfortunate misprints, the book is well-produced and I would recommend it to anyone who wishes to have closer acquaintance with one of the most substantial poets working in Wales today. John Mason Knill Nicholas Murray, Bruce Chatwin, Seren Books. Bruce Chatwin's death in January 1989, sent a shock-wave across the literary world. Here was a writer who after only ten years had snatched the limelight, challenging established genres, baffling and dazzling both with his style and with his persona. There were many who would have found themselves rereading with a new meaning Chatwin' s own words on the ex-Chamberlain of King Zog of Albania: 'People of his kind will never come again. What a voice we lost when his fell silent! How much he still had to say!' Given that the Chatwin legend was already proliferating during his lifetime, it was to be expected that after his death he would provide irresistible grist to the biographer's mill. Nicholas Murray has blazed the trail with this concise and well-balanced account of Chatwin's life and work. He himself seems happy to concede that he aims to do little more than give a 'useful introductory account'. Indeed, given the way in which Chatwin's agent, Gillon Aitken, appears to have cordoned off his subject, he could have done little else. The Independent of March 27th 1993 quotes Aitken as saying, 'Nicholas Shakespeare is doing the authorised life. A book of collected memories is being written by Susannah Clapp. That's it. His friends will talk to no one else.' It is doubtful whether Chatwin himself, with his love of the mercurial, the interpretative, would have approved of being placed out of bounds in this manner, for all the world as though he were the piece of brontosaurus hide in a glass-fronted cabinet that awoke his fascination for Patagonia. Small wonder that Murray has had to rely heavily on printed and broadcast sources and that his book is thereby necessarily limited.