Delirium

Robert Minhinnick’s square mile on the coast of south Wales is the starting point for a series of pieces which journey outwards to Sicily, Iraq and Burma among other places. They start too in the personal – hospital visiting, clearing a house, covid lockdown – and expand into the universal. And they begin in the everyday and take in life afflicted by the globalisation of society and of the mind. Minhinnick searches for meaning in a world of change, particularly of environmental change which is rushing towards an unpalatable future for the planet and its people.

Delirium is classic Minhinnick. Consumerism, poetry, the implacability of the algorithm, local history, nature and much else jostle with each other in this book. The writing is characteristically broad ranging in thought and style, with a poet’s eye for the telling image and ear for the lyrical. From the war diaries of his father and to the depleted uranium of the Gulf War, from the Ford dealership in Bridgend to the ancient dunes a few miles away, sunflowers to Emily Dickinson, this is a kaleidoscopic book which provokes and intrigues.