Andrew McNeillie – författare

Words will go their own way, and carry the poet with them, on many a wild goose chase, in and out of the past, haunted by and revisiting the island where he came of age. In the new collection from the Welsh Forward Prize-shortlisted poet, nature writer and editor of the eco-literary magazine Archipelago, McNeillie explores his deep sense, in his older age, of not belonging anywhere other than in mind and in the wild.McNeillie recovers and renews Pytheas the Greek’s exploration of fourth century BC Britain and Thomas Pennant’s account of Wales, but A Wild Goose Chase lays these historical accounts of the natural world beside the author’s own experiences. The poems’ moving and not unmelancholy late recollections blur temporal and spatial boundaries as they stay alive to the impacts of climate change and globalization.

Andrew McNeillie's sixth collection returns to the sea and its immensity as a metaphor for fate. It also revisits the British and Irish archipelago ('For which read a figure for my heart. / For which read too a figure for time's hurt'), following a north-western trajectory from the Aran Islands to the Hebrides. The natural world is seen here in both its beauty and its indifference to human beings ('There's many a thing more lasting than a person'). From a version of 'The Seafarer' to an elegiac play 'for sounds and voices' retelling the story of an English airman drowned off Aran in World War II, these poems speak of lives and deaths across the reaches of history.

Once is the journey from boyhood to the threshold of manhood of poet Andrew McNeillie. From an aeroplane crossing north Wales the middle-aged writer looks down on the countryside of his childhood and recalls an almost fabulous world now lost to him. Ordinary daily life and education in Llandudno shortly after the war are set against an extraordinary life lived close to nature in some of the wilder parts of Snowdonia. Continually crossing the border between town and country, a fly-fisherman by the age of ten, McNeillie relives his life in nature during a period of increasing urbanisation.Once is a beautifully written eulogy for a retreating countryside now valued more for its leisure potential than as a repository of nature and source of human fullfilment. The narrative is underlain by a way of thinking informed by the natural world and by nature poetry, and is an evocative and memorable book about the nature of experience of memory and writing.Andrew McNeillie was born in north Wales in 1946 and read English at Magdalen College, Oxford. He is the Literature Editor at Oxford University Press; in 2002 he established the Clutag Press to publish poetry. He has published three collections of poetry, Nevermore (2000) which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, Now, Then (2002) and Slower (2006). He also published the memoir An Aran Keening (2001), about his life in Ireland, to which Once is the prequel.