Nevermore
Nevermore is an elegy for lost times and threatened things. It celebrates recollection and the "immortality of youth", and youth's passions: for natural history (as in the group of bird poems entitled "Plato's Aviary"), for the naive curiosity and lust of adolescent "love", for adventuresome escape (as in the docu-poem rhapsody "Lines from an Aran Journal"), and for the elusive prize of poetry itself.
The poems traffic across borders, between the 1950s and 1960s and the present, between Wales, Scotland and Ireland, fish and fowl, coastal town and wilderness, material realities and
transcendent dreams, and confused claims of cultural identity, Welsh and Scottish and neither.
Nevermore speaks from a world where family as rural tribe, rooted in place, has given way to a rootless diaspora, its history at risk of erasure, for worse, and for better. It is post-United Kingdom, in a spirit that, if it could make anything happen, would will the good republic into being.
About the Author
Andrew McNeillie was born in North Wales and read English at Magdalen College, Oxford before becoming an editor and publisher. For many years he was literature editor at Oxford University Press. He has also held a chair in English at Exeter University where he is now Emeritus Professor. He is the founding editor of the magazine "Archipelago" and runs the Clutag Press. His memoir "Once" appeared in 2009 from Seren. His Carcanet poetry collections are "Nevermore" (Oxford Poets, 2000), "Now, Then" (2002), "Slower" (2006)", "In Mortal Memory" (2010) and "Winter Moorings" (2014). His memoir, "An Aran Keening", was published in 2001.
