Winner of the Wales Book of the Year Award 2006
Join Robert Minhinnick on a journey across a radioactive planet.
Researching the use of depleted uranium in modern weapons, the writer
follows a deadly trail from the uranium mines of the USA into Saddam
Hussein's Iraq. Here, he is led into the temples of a deserted Babylon
and to what his guides insist is the site of the Tower of Babel.
Interspersed with these 'radioactive writings', which seem part
documentary, part dream, are essays on a host of different places.
Minhinnick pursues Dante through Florence, and searches for a poem given
to him by a murdered schoolgirl in south Wales.
Berlin, Prague, Buenos Aires, New York, Italy, England, Finland, Canada:
this globalised world is simultaneously familiar and bizarre, filled
with the background noise of contemporary society yet capable of
providing places and moments of utter silence. Jetlagged,
culture-lagged, Minhinnick returns to his native Wales, its coastline
and valleys as extraordinary as anything encountered in a Babel that
might be myth or alarmingly real.
"a gallery of snapshots; a series of lightening impressions from all
corners of the world... Minhinnick's writing is quirky, sometimes
untidy, often lyrical, packed with glancing references to literary
figures (Dylan Thomas makes an appearance, reminding us that the author
edits Poetry Wales) and contemporary events... Not easy to read, but
highly interesting to untangle"
The Times
"On the strength of this book alone, Minhinnick stakes his claim to be
regarded as the finest writer working in any genre in Wales today."
The Guardian
"Minhinnick's eye for beauty and his light touch for description in To
Babel and Back are a delight"
South Wales Evening Post
"... this uncategorisable book by the outstanding English-language poet
of present-day Wales... To Babel and Back is an extraordinary
achievement."
New Welsh Review
"Robert Minhinnick is an accomplished poet and his beautiful language
shines throughout his work"
Tribune
"... the result is a white-lightening cocktail that both dizzies and
thrills by blending motion and contemplation, beauty and horror, minutes
ticking us through our brief lives and eons compressed in Welsh
limestone, all topped by the paranoiac unease of a sane man tripping
across a suicidal plant... always agile and metaphorically vivid"
Planet
Robert Minhinnick is an acclaimed poet and editor of Poetry Wales
magazine. He is a freelance writer and also works for the environmental
organisation, Sustainable Wales.
