Robert Minhinnick

“My Life and Times: Memories of Penyfai” is Ivor Thomas’s description of a tiny south Wales village.

Ivor was my grandfather, and his book, published by Culture & Democracy Press, is launched in the Garden Room, Court Colman Manor, Pen-y-fai, Bridgend CF31 4NG, 7.30pm, Wednesday, April 23rd 2025. 

Entry £5, which ensures a copy of this astonishing memoir. Otherwise £10. On sale in SUSSED.

Gardener, miner, rugby-player, Labour councilor, social activist, the centre of much of his life was ‘The Tavern’, the vanished village pub, where he was born. Ivor continues to be an enormous influence on my writing and environmental work.

This memoir, of a man who was born, died and buried in the same street, flares like a firework.

Readings by myself and others of Ivor’s family, with members of Bridgend Writers’ Circle, whose energy has created this event. Music and song from Laura Wainwright, in the gorgeous surroundings of the Garden Room.

EXCITING COLLABORATION -see blog for details

Natalie Ann Holborow is a winner of the Terry Hetherington Award and the Robin Reeves Prize and has been shortlisted and commended for the Bridport Prize, the National Poetry Competition, the Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine, and the Cursed Murphy Spoken Word Award among others.

Her writing residencies with the British Council, Literature Wales and Kultivera have seen her writing and performing poetry in Wales, Ireland, Sweden and India.

Little Universe is her third full poetry collection. Natalie lives in Swansea, is a proud patron of local charity The Leon Heart Fund, and runs marathons to raise funds.

https://natalieholborow.com/

https://www.instagram.com/natholborow/

The Greenbank, 57 Belle Vue Rd., Easton, BS5 6DP

Poster created by Robert Walton  for Gorwelion

Download the poster (pdf) for printing.

Sept 19th 2024

Beach Clean Group meet Jenipher Sambazi, East Ugandan Coffee producer https://jenipherscoffi.wales/  11.00 am start (meet at SUSSED) then afterwards at around 12.15 meet Jenipher upstairs in the Green Room above SUSSED, CF36 3BG Porthcawl. 

Zoë Brigley is the author of three books of poetry published by Bloodaxe: Hand & Skull (2019), Conquest (2012), and The Secret (2007). All three are UK Poetry Book Society Recommendations. Poems from the collections have won an Eric Gregory Award for the best British poets under 30, have been longlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize for the best international writers under 40, and were Forward Prize commended. She became editor for Wales’ leading poetry journal Poetry Wales in 2021, and she is now Poetry Editor for Seren Books jointly with the poet Rhian Edwards.

Kristian Evans is a founding editor of Modron Magazine, which publishes writing on the ecological crisis. He’s the author of pamphlets, Unleaving (2015), and Otherworlds (2021), and with Zoë Brigley edited 100 Poems to Save the Earth (2021), an anthology of contemporary poetry. He was a judge for the Wales Book of the Year Award 2023, and in the same year was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Environmental Poet of the Year Award. He lives in Bridgend, south Wales.

More information.

The Repair Café normally above SUSSED James St., Porthcawl moves to the Porthcawl Eco Day at Griffin Park for this event on Saturday 27th April 2024.

Gig 14+:

WIGWAM, ANHUNEDD, ECHDORIAD

CLWB Y BONT, Pontypridd, CF37 4SL

Fri 26th April 2024

Clwb y Bont yn cyflwyno/presents...
Gig 14+
mewn cydweithrediad

in association with Menter Iaith Rhondda Cynon Taf

WIGWAM, ANHUNEDD, ECHDORIAD
Noson i godi ymwybyddiaeth o newid hinsawdd.

Event to raise awareness of climate change issues.

Tickets:

https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/clwb-y-bont/gig-14-wigwam-anhunedd-echdoriad/e-qleoxb

Some of this work will be performed at 7.30 pm, Tuesday, April 16, 2024, at ‘Le Pub’, 19, High St., NEWPORT NP20 1FW. https://www.lepublicspace.co.uk/

This will be a live performance featuring spoken word, music and film.

The event is organized by Sustainable Wales Cymru Gynaliadwy.

Details for those who wish to perform or attend, from: <robert.minhinnick@sustainablewales.org.uk>

GWENT LEVELS CAMPAIGN

Ten days before Christmas, 2023, I went with writer and artist Laura Wainwright to explore parts of the ‘Gwent Levels’, at Uskmouth. It was my first visit, although Laura is familiar with the area, sometimes taking her children walking there.

We went because the area is increasingly threatened by various developments. Only in the last four years has the Welsh government rejected plans for a new extension of the M4 motorway through parts of these wetlands.

The weather proved raw and blustery, but we were both delighted to encounter immediately some of the very particular wildlife that inhabits the area.

I saw my first ever reed bunting, and keen-eyed Laura identified a heron on the Severn mudflats, and thus we are writing, painting and sketching our expedition highlights.

This exploration occurred at the same time as the ongoing struggle between Israelis and Palestinians, especially in Gaza. Personally I found combining in my writing the situations in both Gwent Levels and Gaza, quite natural.

THE REEN

a poem for two voices

Or rhyne or rhewyn

or simply ditch but even

the word itself disappearing

but nothing to be done, nothing to be done

like the creatures

we might have discovered there

yet nothing can be done

nothing can be done

and I turn on the radio

and over the ghettoes of Gaza

in the ruined boulevards

another child is weeping

but nothing will be done

nothing will be done

 - ah, the petrol-coloured dragonfly,

the chevron of the demoiselle,

this one red, this one emerald -

or an exhibit in the museum

of barbed wire

with which we encircle the world,

no nothing to be done

nothing to be done

voice of the reaper, song of the drone

while the children must cry all night

in the rhyne  and the rhewyn in the ditch in the reen

but even the word itself disappearing

like the creatures we might

have discovered there 

 - ghost of a yellowhammer

glimpsed  though gorse,

grass snake aswim

in sedge beside the solar farm,

heron, a hermit holding on

beside its JCB scrape  -

but nothing can be done

nothing can be done

so once again I turn on the radio

and over the ghettoes of Gaza

comes the harpies’ music,

the predator’s sigh

when even the words are disappearing,

rhyne or rhewyn or ditch or reen

because it is somebody else’s language

loved and lost

but nothing can be done

nothing can be done

and then I am reminded

that language is my own

but there’s nothing to be done

nothing to be done

but how memory maims

and how all grief is someone else’s guilt

while somebody else’s country

is vanishing like pixels on a screen

yet there’s nothing to be done 

nothing to be done

in the ditch and the rhewyn and the rhyne and the reen

but nothing will be done nothing will be done

and now I am reminded by the same radio

that the country is my own,

and the voice of the reaper, the song of the drone:

they too are mine.

Yet there’s nothing will be done,

nothing will be done…

(With thanks to  Marwan Makhoul, poet born to a Palestinian father and a Lebanese mother in 1979 in the village of Boquai'a in the Upper Galilee region of Palestine).

EVENT CANCELLED

Further events are planned

Aberystwyth Arts Centre/Theatr Gron/Round Theatre,

https://aberystwythartscentre.co.uk/

Darlleniadau am yr Hinsawdd /Climate readings 

with Robert Minhinnick, John Barnie, Katie Gramich, Samantha Wynne Rhydderch, Laura Wainwright, Matthew Francis. 

Event free/Rhad ac Am Ddim but discretionary. Croeso cynnes i bawb.

free public film launch

‘Sleepwalking Into Climate Change?’

Hi Tide Inn, Porthcawl Mackworth Road, CF36 5BT. All Welcome.

Monday, Jan 29th 2024, 7pm

Three x 12 min. Films, Each Followed By Debate and Discussion

Guests include BCBC Leader Huw David

(Filmed in Porthcawl. Join our climate conversation. This event supported by Welsh Government)

See the blog for more information on the three films