Devolutionary Complexities: Reading Three New Poets

This chapter discusses the work of three recent arrivals on Wales’s Anglophone poetry scene: Jonathan Edwards (My Family and Other Superheroes, 2014), Dai George (The Claims Office, 2013) and Katherine Stansfield (Playing House, 2014). Drawing in particular on research in the field of political science about attitudes towards Welsh devolution, it argues that an understanding of post-devolution Wales as complex, multiple and even potentially contradictory is crucial to an analysis of Wales’s contemporary Anglophone poetic life. It suggests that, taken together, these three new writers encapsulate a range of subject positions and concerns that cannot easily be mapped onto any single headline trajectory of post-devolution Wales. Rather, this chapter seeks to claim that the relationship
between Wales’s devolutionary direction and Anglophone Welsh poetry remains, as yet, both ambiguous and very difficult to assess.