Heartlands

In these poems, Steve celebrates the landscape, culture and people involved in the education of his heart. He evokes a Wales of the imagination, as real as any scene of post-industrial decline.

The poems in Heartlands follow Steve from the South Wales valleys, to a boarding school in Berkshire, The Working Men’s College In London and then to teaching jobs in Oxford, Cardiff and Cambridge. They study in an intimate personal way the effects of cultural displacement.

Sidestepping some of the dominant trends in postmodernist writing, Heartlands is written in an vulnerable, open and accessible style. This its a deliberate act of homage to people whose eloquence was as much beyond words as in them.