The Writers of Wales Database

McNEILLIE, ANDREW

Email: clutagpress@ukonline.co.uk
Website: www.clutagpress.com

Born in Hen Golwyn in 1946, Andrew McNeillie grew up in North Wales. His first job was based in Rhydamman, working on the South Wales Guardian, after which Andrew worked for BBC radio news in London. Between 1968-1969 he lived on Inis Mór, one of the Aran Islands at the mouth of Galway Bay. On his return, Andrew read English at Magdalen College, Oxford. Since then he has worked variously as an editor (of the works of Virginia Woolf) and a publisher. He was Literature Editor at Oxford University Press for five years, and is now a Professor of English at Exeter University's campus in Cornwall.

He has published three collections of poetry, including Nevermore (Carcanet, 2000) which was short-listed for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. He also published the memoir An Aran Keening (Lilliput Press, 2001), about his life in Ireland, to which Once (Serem, 2009), is the prequel.

In 2002 Andrew co-founded the Clutag Press, with a view to publishing poetry and memoir. In 2007 Clutag published the first issue of an occasional journal of verse and non-fictional prose called Archipelago. Andrew is a Fellow of The Welsh Academy.

Reviews:

“… it is with the twenty eight Glyn Dur sonnets that the big stone hits the pond and reverberations take on real power. Here at the real heart of the book is an ambitious sequence, political, fierce, making a brave connection between a mythic hero/terrorist at the turn of the fifteenth century - when Britain’s first colonial war was still burning - and one we fear now. …These poems give us a language to consider current troubles…”
Gillian Clarke, Poetry Matters  
 
“…even in the most autobiographical poems we don’t get a sense of reading someone’s recollections, but of watching a form of primary experience taking place. …Nevermore is a first collection full of energy and ideas; it also has the thoughtfulness and depth of a mature work…”
Patrick McGuinness, PNR

“…McNeillie is a poet, and a poetic exuberance and effulgence offset the meagreness of the island life he evokes. …An Aran Keening stands as a celebration of pungent wildness…”
Patricia Craig, TLS

“…McNeillie’s prose can be as pristine and effervescent as the sea’s edge on a summer beach… Aran is once again a larger place than it was...”
Tim Robinson, Irish Times

“...Andrew McNeillie’s poem... does show how, in what I’m calling an apotropaic process, an actual other (the wren) has not been homologised into one of us, rather a little work of art has been heterologised (by ‘charm’) out of one of us. ...Might there be here a clue to the substance of ‘lyric’? ...so dense and so intense that no degree of openness can let it out...”
Christopher Middleton, PNR

With respect to Once (Seren, 2009)

"...A beautiful memoir of a remarkable childhood. As McNeillie himself puts it, 'I lived in a poem as I grew up'..."
Robert Macfarlane


Selected Publications:
Nevermore (Oxford Poets: Carcanet, 2000)
An Aran Keening (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2001)
Now, Then (Oxford Poets: Carcanet, 2002)
Slower (Carcanet, 2006)
Ian Niall: Part of his Life (Clutag, 2007)
Once (Seren, 2009)
In Mortal Memory (Carcanet, 2010)



Nevermore (Carcanet, 2000)

Shortlisted for the Forward prize for best first collection, the poems in this volume traffic across borders, between the 1950s and 1960s and the present, between Wales, Scotland and Ireland, fish and fowl, coastal town and wilderness, material realities and transcendent dreams. It celebrates youth’s passions: for natural history (e.g. ‘Plato’s Aviary’) and for adventuresome escape (as in the rhapsodic ‘Lines from Aran Journal’ and the sequence ‘More’).

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An Aran Keening (Lilliput Press, 2001)

When the author was twenty-two he gave up his job and went, in November 1968 – the very worst time of year for it -to live on Inis Mór, one of the Aran Islands, at the mouth of Galway Bay. This is an account of the island at that time, the life of the people there at a point of pending change (before electricity, modern water-supply, and the airstrip) and of the author’s adventures, down to the following October.

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Now, Then (Carcanet, 2002)

These poems are about being and longing, belonging and not belonging in the world, past or present, now or then. ‘Then’ is portrayed – ‘Like a Dipper submerged in a rushing pool’ – as a time before the world caught up with the poet. There are more characteristic bird poems here and a sequence of poems based on the Irish tree-alphabet.

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Slower (Carcanet, 2006)

This volume meditates on personal and natural history, nation states and mental states, violence, religion and poetry. It includes a number of sonnet sequences: ‘Portrait of the Poet as a Young Dog’, ‘Glyn Dur Sonnets’ and ‘Arkwork’; and in mixed verse forms: ‘Homage to Patagonia’. There are tributes to Dylan Thomas and to Edward Thomas, and to Kyffin Williams.

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Ian Niall: Part of his Life (Clutag Press, 2007)

A biographical memoir of the author’s father who wrote more than forty books, beginning with two radical realist novels Wigtown Ploughman: Part of his Life (1939), published as by John McNeillie when its author was twenty-two. It caused a furore in Scotland – compared with that created in Wales by Caradoc Evans’s My People - but of a different order, and leading to housing reforms. Glasgow Keelie (1940) followed, a story of razor-gangs in Glasgow and the influence on them of Hollywood gangster movies. Under the name Ian Niall, he wrote many stories about Wales, where he lived for forty years, including the prize-winning The Village Policeman (1971).

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Once (Seren, 2009)

Once is the journey from boyhood to manhood of poet Andrew McNeillie. His story is triangulated between three locations: his birthplace, Coed Coch, a Snowdonian lake, Dulyn and his home in his teens, Tan yr Allt.

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