Occasionally, glancing idly at books on shelves, we are shaken by sombre reflections. In this way, and with just such a jolt, I recently came across a collection of poems entitled 3 Young Anglo-Welsh Poets, published by the Welsh Arts Council in January 1974. It would have been remarkable at the time if only because grants from the Council’s Literature Committee for the making and selling of books were intended to be handed out to established Welsh publishers. I can imagine Meic Stephens, then WAC Literature Director, arguing forcibly, from his great height, that since the book was the outcome of the Council’s 1973 ‘Young Poets Competition’ it was entirely appropriate the Council should publish it. There were probably protests from the publishing sector, but I don’t recall them now. What I do remember is that judging the competition was difficult. Of course, the intention had been to select an outright winner, but when that proved impossible, the only solution was to share the prize. So it came about that this slim volume (thirty poems in all) launched three new, distinctive poetic voices: Duncan Bush, Tony Curtis and Nigel Jenkins. Looking back, I would still argue that the tripartite division of the prize was a good decision. All three subsequently gained distinction, and further Arts Council prizes, as writers of both poetry and prose, and in December 1998, there was a late celebration of sorts, when they were brought together again for a reading at Blackwood Miners’ Institute in the Gwent valleys. It was a splendid, well-attended evening, and as we wrapped things up the poets signed my copy of the book they share, one with a note saying, ‘thanks, twenty-five years later, for the prize. Dymuniadau cynnes’. With the added Welsh warmth of good wishes, that was, typically, Nigel Jenkins. Now, another twenty-five years down the line, we can celebrate the publication of Wild Cherry (Parthian), his selected poems, edited by Patrick McGuinness, whose introductory essay praises the  poetry as essentially public utterance, quoting from a talk by the poet in 1995: ‘Poetry should be out and about, doing a job in the world, ambushing people, not hiding in classroom cupboards and magazines that nobody reads’. Nigel Jenkins practised what he preached.  

He had, for a Welshman, an unusual early life. Born in 1949 at Gorseinon in industrial south-west Wales and brought up on a farm on the Gower peninsula, he had a public school education, which, one might suppose, gave him both a desire to break away and the confidence to do so. He was at various times reporter for a newspaper in Leamington Spa, circus-hand in the USA and wanderer in Europe and North Africa, before taking up a place at Essex University to study comparative literature and film. We are told he returned to his home patch in 1976, having already committed himself to learning the Welsh language and writing. He married and settled in Mumbles, a village on the headland a few miles west of Swansea city centre, and close to his Gower roots.

He was sturdy, black-bearded, wore a broad-brimmed hat and boots – and, indeed, sat a horse well. There was something about the man, his easy manner and fine voice, that drew others to him. He was a genuinely popular writer, even among those who have little time for literature. Yet recognition might have been restricted to Wales and, curiously you may think, to people of the Khasi Hills in north-east India converted to Christianity by Welsh missionaries, about whom he wrote Gwalia in Khasia (Gomer, 1995, and Wales Book of the Year 1996), were it not for the notoriety of his ‘Execrably Tasteless Farewell  to Viscount No’. This was a poem on the death of Speaker George Thomas (who had said ‘No’ to Welsh devolution), that was published prominently in the Guardian in 1997. In poems like that and the anti-militarist ‘Warhead’ he upheld the ancient Welsh tradition of the poet as social commentator and, if he has his way, influencer. Nor did he stop at versifying: a CND activist and disarmament protester, he went to gaol rather than pay a fine.

Farming and the Gower inevitably find a place in earlier poems in this selection. The farmyard scene, rusting implements, thrashing, the slaughtering of a pig, the castrating of a bull calf, and the stallion in ‘Stud’, ‘addict, professional’, moving ‘stiff-legged’ to the waiting mare, all bear witness to hands-on familiarity with rural life. At home, too, with his grandmother, he encountered Welsh as a living language and laid the foundation of the facility he acquired later, along with the bitter irony of ‘Land of Song: i.m. 1.iii.79’ – the date of the first Welsh poll, which rejected devolution:

Sing with the blinding hwyl
Of it all: you are programmed
to sing: England expects –
my hen laid a haddock
and all that stuff.

‘Never Forget Your Welsh’ is a blistering collection of newspaper-style headlines on the manifold ills of Wales playing upon a familiar beer advertisement with a background threnody of lines from the sixth-century ‘Y Gododdin’, which tells of the disastrous defeat of the Welsh-speaking men of the north at the hands of the invading Angles.

Jenkins’s personality lives in the poems – robust, sure-footed, yet haunted by the vicissitudes and cruelties of life. His instinct is to see things as they are, tell truth. ‘Forty-Eight and a Half’, a poem about his father, begins ‘Here I am, Dad, this is the month / I overtake you…’,

Foxhunting Taff with a penchant for the shires,
you had your Scotch and Three Nuns, your loud afraid laughter
warmed a place you were public schooled not to understand...
                        … the dreamplate
departed Mum’s hand, missed your head and broke
a family’s heart: too much horseflesh, too little love.

The poetry shirks nothing and illuminates a great deal, from the essentially playful sequence of ‘Punctuation Poems’ to the intensely personal, and salvos inspired by contemporary public life. In the early ‘from the Triads’ he borrowed the medieval poetic formula to make caustic fun at the expense of contemporary figures and politics, and a good deal of his later poetry has the character of gnomic utterance, terse and sharp or concisely reflective, as in ‘A Body of Questions’:

Is happiness simply the absence of pain?

Is hell the pain
we know we cause others?

It was an inspired choice (by Meic) that Nigel was commissioned to write the volume on John Tripp in the Writers of Wales series, which turned out to be one of its highlights. Patrick McGuinness’s introduction notes his kinship with both Tripp and Harri Webb. He certainly shared with them elements of  a common outlook on politics and life, but was very much his own man in person and the range, nature and style of his writing.

The publication of Wild Cherry is a reminder of the range and quality of Nigel Jenkins’s poetic output. He was in addition a playwright, a psychogeographer and editor of the English-language version of the Encyclopaedia of Wales (2008). He died in 2014, with much more still to do and say. Duncan Bush, another of the ‘3 Young Anglo-Welsh Poets’, who won Wales Book of the Year in 1995 for his poetry collection Masks and was also novelist and translator, died in 2017.