Parthian Press 2015

Living in the Delta, Landeg White’s Collected and New Poems, brings together work from nine previous collections. Welsh by birth, White is a citizen of the world, having lived and written and taught on three continents. It is a Welsh tradition of course to be a traveller, voyager and settler in all parts of the planet, and White’s poetry embodies this. It also reflects the ancient Welsh tradition of the poet-scholar; he is a noted academic editor, translator and historian – an authority on Africa and Portuguese literature.

Fortunately for us he is a poet too, talented and dedicated. The experience of reading his writing make you want to read more – it is warm, humane, intelligent and immensely readable. Commentators on his work are apt to use politically incorrect words and phrases such as ‘masterpiece’ and ‘major poet’. He is a brilliant comic writer for instance, and can move in an instant from sly wit to laugh-out-loud funny. Yet suddenly with a poem like ‘African Incident’ you are in the midst of tragedy. He is a moving celebrant of love and family and community; a passionate, meticulous observer of the natural world – it is difficult to think of a living writer who is a more complete poet.

Reviews

“White addresses fundamental human issues unflinchingly.”

Big Issue

by Landeg White
Kondwani Publications

Letters from Portugal, Landeg White’s latest collection, illustrated by António Bandeira Araújo, makes free use of the epistolary form to range widely in subject matter and style. The letters are interspersed with shorter poems, equally broad thematically, while demonstrating his mastery of lyric forms.

by Landeg White
Parthian Press 2009

Containing selections from the poet’s previous five publications, as well as new poetry.

This volume is a comprehensive introduction to a poet who writes with humor, pathos, and a gift for observation.

Reviews

“The expatriate poet can easily become a lotus-eater, but Landeg White (though clearly partial to the fruit) prefers living to dreaming. It is not always clear where his poems are located, but in all other respects they are securely earthed, as accessible as any prose travel writing, richly evocative of place. The poet writes sympathetically of people too, although there is much grim colonial history recalled, and one or two chilling personal anecdotes. White retains his sense of humour and that love of game-playing essential to the poet. His poems are finely crafted though not restrictingly formal. He demonstrates a convincing public manner. He often uses voices, Captain Stedman or the blind fiddler in Bounty, and even, when back in Britain, his eye made alert by his travels to what is primitive in the so-called developed world, adopting tones of Dante.”

Times Literary Supplement

by Landeg White
Kondwani Publications 2017

A second edition, “Pruned and Re-invigorated”.

Traveller’s Palm is a celebration of the journey of Landeg White’s life, of the alliances formed and the battles fought and the “spots of time” that define them.

Reviews

“Seven chapters contain sixty-nine quartets of quatrains, in largely unrhymed pentameter, though the form forces ear and eye to notice half-rhymes and assonance, to give attention to a language which is being paid out measure by exact measure. This is dense, ambitious writing, a poetry of witness and strict fact”

Poetry Wales

by Landeg White
DANGAROO Press 1991

Now out of print, this title shall soon be available as a PDF e-Book.

The View From the Stockade begins and ends with poets who are threatened with political violence for being poets. The stockades, in southern Africa or York, are places of safety where poetry like private life may flourish. But they are also places of sadness, or anguish over cruelty and injustice and of regret for vanished pastoral. This is an accomplished but embattled book with a strong sense of places and of divided peoples, in which poetry fights back with tenderness and lyricism, with celebrations of family love and the ramshackle heroism or ordinary people.

Reviews

“The View from the Stockade provides an advance on the already considerable achievement of White’s earlier collection For Captain Stedman. The wit, irony and strong sense of history are still there, but mellowed by a more compassionate perspective and domestic tenderness.”

London Magazine

by Landeg White
Cemar 1999

South, the setting of Landeg White’s fourth book of poems, is contested territory, its ‘dangerous currents’ home to a poet who ‘will always marvel at precisely where I am living’. The West Indies, Africa and Portugal have gone into its making, but there are no stockade walls here protecting ‘us’ from ‘them’. This is a book over-shadowed by violence, but trusting in the power of speech ‘to keep us human’, in poems driven by lyricism, humour and a strong historical awareness.

Reviews

“The West Indies, Africa and Portugal have gone into making South, a book overshadowed by violence but trusting in the power of speech ‘to keep us human’ in poems driven by lyricism, humour and a strong historical awareness.”

Wasafiri