Three New Reviews

Three new reviews have recently appeared on the 'Reviews' section of the CREW website:
http://www.swansea.ac.uk/CREW/CREWReviews/

Eminent historian Prys Morgan reviews
Gower, by Nigel Jenkins

It isn’t easy to capture the essence of a region between the covers of a book, even one as compact as Gower, a kind of micro-Cornwall stretching west of Swansea, a peninsula about fifteen miles long and about five miles across. There have been several ‘Gower books’ over the years and the annual volumes of the journal Gower have been, for over fifty years, combining essays with photographs. This handsomely-produced volume consists of ten essays (one of them introductory) and ten poems by Nigel Jenkins, and about eighty seven colour photographs by David Pearl. This is not a topographical or antiquarian travelogue, and the pictures entirely avoid picture-postcard or calendar views. This is simply (or not so simply) two artistic reactions to Gower....
http://www.swansea.ac.uk/CREW/CREWReviews/Gower/#d.en.46003


Sarah Coles, PhD studnet in Creative Writing at Swansea University reviews
Self-Portrait as Ruth, by Jasmine Donahaye

Jasmine Donahaye’s second poetry collection is a confrontation that leaves the reader bruised, exhausted and yet subtly seduced by the strong, female voice that sings here of the poet’s relationship with the Israel-Palestine conflict. It has been described as ‘erotic’ and yet the Eros that haunts each meticulously constructed poem is not one of pleasure, but of the cold mechanics of the genital... http://www.swansea.ac.uk/CREW/CREWReviews/SelfPortraitasRuth/#d.en.45983


CREW's M. Wynn Thomas reviews
Dannie Abse: A Sourcebook, ed. Cary Archard

Not all writers, it seems to me, lend themselves to the ‘Sourcebook,’ or ‘Reader’ format. Dannie Abse, on the other hand, is a natural candidate for this kind of treatment. Over his long and distinguished career he has excelled in a variety of different forms (including plays), in most of which his writing has tended to be episodic in nature. Indeed it might even be argued that he is particularly well served by the ‘Sourcebook’ approach, because otherwise he would be liable to pay a high price for his fluent, subtle, quietly insinuating diversity: few would otherwise be sufficiently inward with his work as a whole to be able to appreciate the distinctively inflected yet faithfully integrated character of his multifaceted and variegated vision...
http://www.swansea.ac.uk/CREW/CREWReviews/AbseSourcebook/#d.en.46453