This is the first full-length scholarly study of the prize-winning poet Ruth Bidgood, a writer who is best known for her long-term literary engagement with the landscape and communities of the mid-Wales region she has made her home.

This book analyses how contemporary Welsh poetry, in both Welsh and English, constructs Wales as both human and physical space, within the context of 'ecocriticism', a literary critical practice that emerges out of environmentalist concern. It is one of the most recent interdisciplinary fields to have emerged in literary and cultural studies.

Poetry, Geography, Gender explores literary and geographical analysis, cultural criticism and gender politics in the work of such well-known literary figures as Gwyneth Lewis, Menna Elfyn, Christine Evans and Gillian Clarke, alongside newer names like Zoë Skoulding and Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch. Drawing on her unpublished interviews with many of the featured poets, Alice Entwistle examines how and why their various senses of affiliation with a shared cultural hinterland should encourage us to rethink the relationship between nation, identity and literary aesthetics in post-devolution Wales. This series of lively and detailed close readings reveals how writers use the textual terrain of the poem, both literally and metaphorically, to register and script aesthetic as well as geo-political and cultural-historical change. As an innovative critical study, this volume thus takes particular interest in the ways in which author, text and territory help to inform and produce each other in the culturally complex and confident small nation that is twenty-first-century Wales.

Collected critical essays examine contemporary poetry in terms of cultural geography. Key themes are place and identity; literary cartographies; walking as trope and spatial practice; the poetics of edges, margins, and peripheries; landscape, language, and form.

This book is a comprehensive single-volume history of literature in the two major languages of Wales from post-Roman to post-devolution Britain.

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Wales may be small, but culturally it is richly varied. The aim in this collection of essays on a number of English-language authors from Wales is to offer a sample of the country’s internal diversity. To that end, the author’s examined range – from the exotic Lynette Roberts (Argentinean by birth, but of Welsh descent) and the English-born Peggy Ann Whistler who opted for new, Welsh identity as ‘Margiad Evans’, to Nigel Heseltine, whose bizarre stories of the antics of the decaying squierarchy of the Welsh border country remain largely unknown, and the Utah-based poet Leslie Norris, who brings out the bicultural character of Wales in his Welsh-English translations. The result is a portrait of Wales as a ‘micro-cosmopolitan country’, and the volume is prefaced with an autobiographical essay by one of the leading specialists in the field, authoritatively tracing the steady growth over recent decades of serious, informed and sustained study of what is a major achievement of Welsh culture.

Esther de Waal draws on the ancient traditions of Celtic and monastic spirituality to explore thresholds between people, between cultures, between the human and the divine. Ancient spiritual wisdom teaches that thresholds are sacred places and Esther encourages readers to become more receptive to their surroundings and to learn to pause, reflect and meet God at the places of encounter and change in our lives.

"A threshold is a sacred thing," goes the traditional saying of ancient wisdom. In some corners of the earth, in some traditional cultures, and in monastic life, this is still remembered. But in our fast-paced modern world, this wisdom is often lost on us. It is important for us to remember the significance of the threshold. While it is certainly true that thresholds mark the end of one thing and the beginning of another, they also act as borders-the places in between, the points of transition. These can be physical, such as the geographical borders of a country; others, such as the spiritual border between the inner and outer world-between ourselves and others-are intangible. In To Pause at the Threshold, Esther de Waal looks at what it is like to live in actual "border country," the Welsh countryside with its "slower rhythms" and "earth-linked textures," and explores the importance of opening up and being receptive to one's surroundings, whatever they may be.

In Brigid’s Footsteps: The Return of the Divine Feminine focuses on the Celtic goddess and Christian saint Brigid as an archetype of the Divine Feminine. Drawing on mythology, history, and transpersonal psychology, the author traces the iconic Brigid’s evolution from incarnation as goddess of wisdom, craft, and healing to embodiment as a saint of Celtic Christianity who served as midwife to Mary at the birth of Jesus. Part Two explores the suppression of feminine energies in mainstream western culture and the damaging consequences of living in our masculine-biased civilization. The final essays speculate on how the Divine Feminine may influence our masculine-leaning culture during the shift in consciousness Jung referred to as a “changing of the gods,” a time in which Brigid re-emerges as the spirit of liminal times and midwife to the Holy.