The Green Room Podcast Josephine's Rain (2018 remix)

‘Josephine’s Rain’ is a thirty minute evocation of a storm that damaged Porthcawl in 1995. Tropical storm ‘Josephine’ was close to hurricane status, sinking boats and destroying part of the seafront.

Performed and written by Robert Minhinnick, Richard Thomas & Peter Morgan.

Josephine’s Rain has been performed at many events over the years; some hosted by the Green Room.

A video version is available on our YouTube channel.

“In a recent film for ‘Sustainable Wales’ I say that Babylon fell because of social inequality and that our culture is threatened by the same thing. That’s not to mention ‘climate change’ at all. But I’ve written the words for ‘Josephine’s Rain’, a depiction of a storm that hit Porthcawl in the 1990s. It evokes a hurricane and is bloody loud, with guitar, keyboard, percussion. In the last performance we had an artist on stage creating a painting during the thirty minute performance. Very 1960s.”

Robert Minhinnick Wales Arts Review

The Green Room Podcast Launch event of Robert Minhinnick's Diary of the Last Man

Launch event from 2017 of Robert Minhinnick’s Diary of the Last Man https://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?product=9781784103484

Wales Book of the Year 2018
Winner of the 2018 Roland Mathias Poetry Award
Shortlisted for the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize

“The opening poem sequence, 'Diary of the Last Man', sets the tone for Robert Minhinnick's book, a celebration of the dwindling Earth, an elegy, a caution. His Wales is a touchstone; other landscapes and cityscapes are tried against it, with its erratic weather, its sudden changes of mood, 'a black tonic'. The sequence remembers all the geographies of his earlier work, old and new world, but now unpeopled and the lonely spirit free to go anywhere, do anything, but meaning with mankind has drained away. Yet still alive, and still with language, registering. The rest of the book is filled with voices: of children, of rivers, terrorists, magicians; and voices translated from the Welsh, and from Turkish and Arabic, shared, enriching with their difference, their other worlds. History washes over and washes up on the strand of this Welsh book. It is seen and recognised, it begins to be transformed. In the long concluding poem, 'The Sand Orchestra', the poet returns to his own voice, and to the voice of a Bechstein piano abandoned in the open air, played now by nature, its winds and sand. The last man, who has been looking for Ulysses, is the very man he has been looking for.”

The Green Room Podcast Helena Nelson 2014

Helena Nelson (Nell Nelson) is the originator and editor of HappenStance Press as well as a poet in her own right. Her first Rialto collection Starlight on Water was a Jerwood/Aldeburgh First Collection winner. Her second was Plot and Counterplot from Shoestring Press. She also writes and publishes light verse - Down With Poetry! Wikipedia article. Happenstance press site. Soundcloud recordings.

Recorded May 2014.

The Green Room Podcast Rhian Edwards 2014

Rhian Edwards reads at the Green Room March 2014. Rhian is a multi-award winning poet. Her first collection of poems Clueless Dogs (Seren 2012) won Wales Book of the Year 2013, the Roland Mathias Prize for Poetry 2013 and Wales Book of the Year People’s Choice 2013. It was also shortlisted for the  Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2012.

Rhian’s second full collection The Estate Agent’s Daughter (Seren 2020) is due for publication in June 2020 and can be pre-ordered now.

Rhian also has two pamphlets of poems Parade the Fib, (Tall-Lighthouse 2008), which was awarded the Poetry Book Society Choice for autumn 2008. Brood (Seren 2017) is an illustrated pamphlet of bird poems, containing beautiful and original charcoal magpie drawings by artist Paul Edwards.

Rhian is also the current winner of the John Tripp Award for Spoken Poetry, winning both the Judges and Audience award. She was also the first Writer in Residence at Aberystwyth Arts Centre from March to June 2013.

Rhian’s poems have appeared in the Guardian, Times Literary Supplement, Poetry Review, New Statesman, Spectator, Poetry London, Poetry Wales, Arete, Prague Revue, the London Magazine, Stand, Planet Magazine, the New Welsh Review and the Lampeter Review.

Rhian is a poet and musician and has delivered over 400 stage, radio and festival performances world-wide. She lives in South Wales with her daughter Megan.