List Of Writers

BARNIE, JOHN

Greenfields, Comins Coch, Aberystwyth, Ceredigion SY23 3BG
Tel: (01970) 611255 – day    (01970) 611377 – evening 
Email: john.barnie@googlemail.com   

Poet and essayist. From Abergavenny, Gwent. Lived in Denmark from 1969-1982. Editor of Planet, The Welsh Internationalist from 1990-2006. Has published several collections of poems, mixed poems and fiction, and two collections of essays, one of which, The King of Ashes, won a Welsh Arts Council Prize for Literature in 1990. John is a Fellow of Academi.

John Barnie also plays guitar in the bilingual blues and poetry group Llaeth Mwnci Madoc/Madoc’s Moonshine, with Nigel Jenkins (harmonica) and Iwan Llwyd (guitar). They perform an integrated programme of blues and poetry. In 1999-2000 the trio toured extensively in Wales and are available for bookings across the country.

Trouble in Heaven (Gomer, 2007) is on the Wales Book of the Year 2008 Long List. Click here for more information.


Reviews:

"…He is a poet honest enough to confront head-on the implications of the scientific world-picture and refuses to seek false comfort in discarded verities. For this alone he deserves respect. Yet he is a poet too of vision, a vision which finds all-but-flawless, if miniature, form in a number of these poems…" 
Roger Caldwell on Heroes in Poetry Wales 
 
"…John Barnie’s gloriously unclassifiable The Wine Bird demonstrates how prose can often beat poetry at its own game of metaphorical richness… There’s an oscillation between the particularised diurnal reality and the larger perspectives of nature and eternity and death. Altogether an intriguing and enjoyable read…"
Nicholas Murray in Poetry Wales
 
"...I think some of these poems [in At the Salt Hotel] are as interesting as anything being written now and it’s great to see a Selected Poems end with a sense of something really new and fresh taking shape..."
Lyndon Davies on Sea Lilies in The New Welsh Review


Selected Publications:
Lightning Country (Dangaroo Press, 1989)
The King of Ashes (Gomer, 1989)
The Confirmation (Gomer, 1992)
Y Felan a Finnau (Gwasg Prifysgol Cymru, 1992)
The City (Gomer, 1993)
No Hiding Place: Essays on the New Nature and Poetry (University of Wales Press, 1996)
Heroes (Gomer, 1996)
Clay (Headland Publishers, 1997)
Abergavenny (Gregynog Press, 1997)
The Wine Bird (Gomer, 1998)
Ice (Gomer, 2001)
At The Salt Hotel (Headland, 2003)
The Green Buoy (Rack Press, 2006)
Sea Lillies: Selected Poems 1984-2003 (Seren, 2006)
Trouble in Heaven (Gomer, 2007)
 


Trouble in Heaven (Gomer, 2007)
 
There is trouble in heaven. There is trouble on earth. But poet John Barnie refuses - intellectually and spiritually - to tire of creation’s capacity for glory and joy.

In the face of corporate exploitation of man and the planet, and in spite of political cynicism and commonplace materialism, he continues to allow himself to muse on and to marvel at the immutability of beauty. ’Believing in loveliness’, he searches for those dimensions beyond humanity’s inhumanity and beyond the confines of dogma and doubt.

Never trite, never contrived, always pithy and contemporary, Trouble in Heaven explores the age-old complexities of man’s relationship with the natural world and beyond..

To purchase this title from gwales.com, please click on its front cover
 

Eligible Writers on Tour subjects offered:
1. Read own poems/fiction
2. Poetry/blues performance with Llaeth Mwnci Madoc/Madoc’s Moonshine    
3. Talk on various aspects of modern poetry

AGE RANGE: 18 plus.