John Barnie – författare

Walking the razor edge between grim reality and stoicism, John Barnie once again brings his intelligence, wit and prescient anger to bear on the world we inhabit and the world we are making. In spine-chilling imagery and with a linguistic dexterity that makes words shine, we are taken to a landscape that is exquisite and familiar, yet simultaneously overwhelmed with wreckage and grief. Staring not only into time’s abyss, but into the carnage wrought by human desire for more and more.Prophetic in the tradition of Robinson Jeffers, but with the lyric compression of William Carlos Williams, whose words provide the epigraph for this collection, Barnie imagines his quiet rural homeland occupied and brutalised in the central sequence, ‘Occupied’: ‘the safety net / so full of holes you couldn’t catch a whale in it […]/ I knew the days of iridescence were lost for ever.’ (‘Iridescence’) While in ‘M.A.D.: The Sequel’ rhymes skip along with an irony reminiscent of William Blake’s use of nursery rhyme metre to convey horror. As the world is incinerated we hear: ‘cry if you must / there was no one to gather / the heart’s dust.’

In a tight sequence of 33 poems, In the Shadow of the Yew, John Barnie leads us through ‘the cemetery of hopes’ (Conrad). A layered monologue in a distinctive voice that is incisive and deeply questioning, Barnie asks whether the suffering of humanity and the suffering we inflict renders our species a curse. ‘...better than both / is the one who has never been born, / who has not seen the evil / that is done under the sun.’ says the writer of Ecclesiastes, and Barnie sits in a long line of writers who consider that the natural world would be better off without us. There’s a note of Leopardi, Hardy, Beckett, Cioran and, above all, Robinson Jeffers in this unflinching collection, with a tone that builds on Jeffers’s The Double Axe and its philosophy of inhumanism.And yet, at the heart of this collection, is tenderness and compassion. Woven through poems that refuse to turn away from war and torture, starvation, greed, injustice and suffering, there are glimpses of a childhood by the banks of the Usk, fragments of the stories of friends and loved ones and homage to writers who have come before the poet. And there is a litany of extinct flora and fauna interspersed through the sequence as well as lines mourning so much loss:six hundred million birds have disappeared from Europe what tonnage is that how many hearts pattering faster than rain on a canopy of leavesAt heart there is a delight in the world that humanity is laying waste to, a yearning for life that is otherwise and the repeated cry: What do we do now?

Poetry inspired by paintings from Welsh artists from 18th Century onwards.

Tsunami Days is a vital collection of essays for those prepared to engage with its unflinching observations.

This generous Selected Poems from John Barnie includes work from seven of his previous collections: Borderland (1984), Lightning Country (1987), Clay (1989), The Confirmation (1992), The City (1993), Heroes (1996) and At the Salt Hotel (2003). His poetry celebrates the natural world – its otherness from ourselves – whilst also tackling the increasingly destructive impact of humans on that world. A secondary theme running throughout the book is the manner in which small-town life, while undoubtedly secure, is also deeply confining. This ecological and sceptical outlook is aligned with a deep affinity with, and boundless curiosity about, nature and our precarious place in it.This Selected Poems is notable for both its breadth of form and its depth of thought. Those familiar with Barnie's work will enjoy having a selection from his varied output.Those unfamiliar will be pleasantly surprised at the range and quality of his poetry.John Barnie was born and raised in Abergavenny, and was a student in Birmingham in the 1960s. He has published work in a wide variety of journals and anthologies and has won a Welsh Arts Council Prize for Literature. He now lives in Aberystwyth and until recently was Editor of the influential magazine of diverse international writing, Planet.

Ambitious and prophetic, this new edition of John Barnie's verse novel, Ice, is increasingly urgent as scientist's debate the possible catastrophe that global warming and human intransigence threaten to unleash. Ice asks what it means to be human and how or whether we can retain humanity in the most extreme of circumstances.

This text explores the possible consequences for philosophy, religion and the humanities in general, arising out of the Neo-Darwinism synthesis of evolutionary theory with genetics - which has produced a new model of what nature is.