InIP Times sees Mike Jenkins developing further the picture of working-class society in south Wales which he presented so forcefully in his previous book, Empire of Smoke. His use of language and dialect moves still closer to that of his subjects, and the business of their living is written about not from a point of literary detachment, but with gritty involvement. The poems in this book mix tenderness towards people, particularly the poet's family, with anger at a society which is at best uncaring and often hostile. The result is a series of almost surrealistic pictures culminating in the title poem, and contrasting intriguingly with the content and compassion of poems in the tradition of Idris Davies."… one of the wild men of poetry - a plugger, a pusher, a protester, a consummate rhymester, an agit-prop politiciser, a self-proclaimed Mr Oblong in a square hole"Peter Finch A humorous and impassioned reader of his work, Mike Jenkins has performed at numerous and diverse venues, read on radio and TV, and is a previous winner of the John Tripp Award for Spoken Poetry. He is a former editor of Poetry Wales, and a founder of the Red Poets Society, which organises regular performances and publishes an annual magazine of radical poetry. Wanting to Belong, his collection of interlinked short stories about teenagers in a south Wales valley, was Arts Council of Wales Book of the Year 1998, and has been filmed by the BBC.
