The Writers of Wales Database

GRIFFITHS, STEVE

6 Cleeve Hill, London, SE23 3DD
Tel: 02086 997350   Mobile: 07773 571147
Email: stevegriffiths@clara.co.uk
Website: www.stevegriffithspoet.com  
For event booking details click here

Steve Griffiths was born in Trearddur Bay, Anglesey, 1949. He has published five collections of poems since 1980. His Selected Poems were published by Seren in 1993. There followed a hiatus of fifteen years, including a period of silence and disillusion. In 2008 Rack Press published a pamphlet (Landing) that described a movement towards optimism; and Cinnamon Press published An Elusive State: Entering al-Chwm (2008), which is a booklength investigation of an imaginary Utopia, with all the pitfalls and hard-won discoveries that such an elusive state can offer to someone who grew up with the idea of progress and still has a lot to learn. A new collection, Surfacing, is due from Cinnamon in 2011. Yet another book, 31 Late Love Poems and a Hole in the Head is ready to go off to publishers and is going down well at readings.

Surfacing (Cinnamon Press, 2011) explores some of the many routes from darkness into light. It begins underground, in an abandoned place. Even there, there are stirrings, occasional explosions into an inexplicably dazzling light, an insistence on shafts of optimism. The tone of the book shifts towards a recurrent note of affirmation among shadows. The poems look back, far back: ‘The Shelvean Event’ moves between the violence of shifting continents and the fossilised remains of individual raindrops: like many of these poems, it is a celebration of the creation that's worked for. Alongside this, there’s a vivid focus on  childhood. From all kinds of perspectives, Steve Griffiths is interested in how we came to be what we are. He shines occasional sharp lights on the contemporary: being rejected for a job and knowing why; injustice in the Middle East; the decimation of wild birds; a woman singing hymns loudly in a London park. The poems of Surfacing are engaged in a search for what we can credibly carry with us to comfort us, to strengthen us, and to celebrate.

A number of these poems have appeared in Poetry Wales. Others have appeared in The Rialto, Artesian, Brand, London Magazine, Pivot (USA), Planet, Red Poets, Scintilla, Smiths Knoll, and The Same (USA).

Steve has given many readings in Wales, England, USA, France, and Spain, and has broadcast on BBC Radio 3, Radio London and Radio 4 Cymru – most recently in December 2006 on Radio 3’s ‘The Verb’. He has appeared in a number of anthologies, including the Library of Wales' Poetry 1900-2000, featuring 100 twentieth century Welsh poets writing in English. He is keen to perform his new work more widely. Click here to read a response to a reading he gave for Wenlock Books in Shropshire in April 2007.

Steve spent his childhood on the beaches and cliffs around Trearddur Bay, not knowing that 35 years earlier one Ronald S.Thomas was getting his feet wet in the same pools. At the age of 11, he moved to Amlwch, the origin of al-Chwm in An Elusive State. After reading English at Cambridge at the end of the Sixties, he began a working life engaged with the consequences of, and some solutions to, poverty, inequality and poor health, first as a welfare rights worker in London, later as a researcher and consultant in social and health policy, in the last fifteen years working freelance all over Britain for local and national government, health bodies, and charities; and most recently in campaigning mode. This commitment has often squeezed out the poetry; but the quarrel between landscapes has created a defining tension in his work. He has constantly returned to the scene of his childhood for renewal. After forty years based in London, with his second wife Wendy he will be moving west to Ludlow this year. He was Vice-Chair of the Welsh Academy (English section) at the beginning of the Nineties, and is a Fellow of The Welsh Academy.

Reviews:
With respect to An Elusive State: Entering al–Chwm (Cinnamon Press, 2008)

“…An Elusive State is a poetic epic of time, place and language….both as invented as More’s original Utopia, and as real as the small town on Anglesey where Griffiths was born…… a distinctive, distinguished accomplishment….. truly a parable of many parallels, one for and beyond our times, and one where – most importantly – the poetry is all…”
Amanda Hopkinson, Planet

"…Challenging, refreshing…the tangential world we really inhabit…ambitious, demanding and should be seen…" 
Robert Minhinnick

“…A parallel universe, a magical epic, a comfort, a mystery…” 
Laura Thomas, Producer, BBC Radio

"…let me say how much I enjoyed the manuscript – it was a real breath of fresh air – genuinely individual…"
Don Paterson


With respect to Selected Poems (Seren, 1993)

"…(they) show him to possess that defining attribute of the important talent, the capacity for sustained development.   The continuity is felt, imparted by a pulse from the heart of books and poems, rather than residing in conveniently definable themes or motifs.  Griffiths’ achievement lies in the emergence in his writing of a mode in which social, ethical and personal elements undergo a deep fusion…"
Douglas Houston      


With respect to Civilised Airs (Seren, 1984)
"…another ghost can be sensed – the austere authority of Zbigniew Herbert – and when Griffiths hits this note he reminds us of a great lack in our poetry…"
Sean O’Brien, TLS 


Selected Publications:
Anglesey Material: Poems, 1975-78 (Rex Collings, 1980) 
Civilised Airs (Seren, 1984)
Uncontrollable Fields (Seren, 1990)
Selected Poems (Seren, 1993)
An Elusive State: Entering al–Chwm (Cinnamon Press, 2008)
Landing (Rack Press, 2008)
Surfacing (Cinnamon Press, 2011)




An Elusive State – Entering al-Chwm (Cinnamon, 2008)

Steve Griffiths’ An Elusive State – Entering al-Chwm gives an account of an imaginary civilisation called al-Chwm, with its own history, its values and customs, a fragmentary poetic story covering a vast, even geological timescale, always playing with the idea of Utopia (and Dystopia), and investigating some themes that confront us here and now. It is subject to transformations and shifts backward and forward in time.  

The book is conceived under the influence of the European flowering of fragmented, shifting narrative in prose, particularly Calvino.   

The book’s Utopian moments are inevitably shadowed by failure, which is evaded by creating an elastic timespan where fragmentary speculations range. This permits a great deal of shapeshifting, from a place which is fundamentally a rural civilisation, though it appears to have a shady imperial alter ego among other transformations. The narrative, if there is one, keeps coming back to a reference point at the beginning of the 21st century, mostly as a remembered time.   

It has a strong spiritual dimension which is shot through with scepticism, maybe arising out of the Sixties generation’s fantasies of progress, and the subsequent disappointments, cynicisms, the sometimes unexpected fulfilment, and the author’s own growing capacity for amusement. Steve Griffiths tries, though sometimes he fails, for a note of detachment which might suggest a fictional anthropology. Calvino’s Invisible Cities have been a guiding spirit, though Griffiths’ work is less static and less beautiful,  because there’s more that’s willed here, more of the politician than in Calvino’s Venice-centred masterpiece.   

It’s been a bit of an explosion for Steve. It began with a vision in the province of Granada which merged a twilight in the hill town of Montefrio with one in his home village in Anglesey, North Wales, as the lights came on one by one.  As al-Chwm begins to accumulate its own history and pathology in a transformed Anglesey landscape, it grows into a book about maturity, history, mistakes, places, death, democracy, power, laughter in the dark, science in the context of these matters, glasses half full or half empty, cups overflowing and the advantages and disadvantages of this.

To purchase this title from Cinnamon Press, please click on its front cover