He scans the frames but doesn't stop,
the fox who has come to the museum today,
his eye in the renaissance
and his brush in the baroque

Between dynasties his footprints
have still to fade, between the Shan and the Yung,
the porcelain atoms shivering at his touch, drinking rice wine from the bowl,
daintier than the eunuch pouring wine.

from 'The Fox in the National Museum in Wales'

King Driftwood teems with characters and narratives: treasure hunters, drug dealers, small-town eccentrics – blue-rinsed Mrs Dawes-Llewellyn, John the Song and Mothman, George Bush and Saddam Hussein glimpsed at a phantasmagoric funfair; the mourning women of Baghdad. Driven by a vigorous rhythmic energy, Robert Minhinnick’s poems evoke the dense and different realities of communities, the cadences of voices and weather, shared maps of streets and cafés, custom and memory, that define life in Wales, Iraq and Argentina. To a vivid sense of the textures of place, Minhinnick brings the internationalism of twenty-five years’ work in the environmental movement, an awareness of the dramas of the natural and human world that is profoundly political but never polemical. 


Cover painting Franz Marc (1880-1916), The Fox, 1913. Kunstmuseum, Dusseldorf, Germany/ The Bridgeman Art Library. Cover design by StephenRaw.com.