Publisher's Synopsis
Red Landscapes collects together the two major strands of Mike Jenkins' poetry: beautiful love lyrics to his wife and family, and the radical social and political poems which spring from his socialism.
Although Jenkins has written some of the best love poems of recent decades he is best known for his biting satire on political subjects and his compassionate poems about the victims of politics. Those without a voice in literature - petrol pump attendants, over-the-hill footballers, beleaguered immigrants - find representation in today's post-modern, post-industrial Britain, through poems in which humour can belie outrage, and poignancy be celebrated. Such concerns are unusual - extraordinary - for contemporary poetry.
"... 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.
