New Welsh Review 78, Winter 2007

Editorial:

Free For All (Francesca Rhydderch)

The e-book reader has arrived. Somewhere between the size of a BlackBerry and a laptop, it imitates the look and feel of an open book. With it comes a minefield of copyright issues that will take far too long to resolve. In the meantime, gadgets such as the Sony Reader and Amazon’s much talked about Kindle may in their turn have been replaced by ever more advanced versions of other systems – the iPhone, for example – that will bring literature to the reader more quickly and cheaply, and copyright law, it seems, will always be caught on its back foot.
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Features

• Stories to Make the Grown-Ups Scream by Jeni Williams
  Jeni Williams explores depictions of childhood innocence in fiction: ‘Literary text, pulp fiction, thriller and tabloid: right accross these media we are confronted with multiple constructions on the innocent child’.
  
  
• The Foreign-ness Within by Mary B. Valencia
  Mary B. Valencia interviews the writer and performer Fflur Dafydd, and asks how growing up in a bi-cultural and bilingual environment has influenced her work.
  
  
• The Poet and the Photographer by John Briggs
  John Briggs recounts meeting and photographing the poet John Berryman in his youth. Not simply a straight-forward photo-assignment, the encounter was an experience ‘satisfying beyond expectation’.
  
  
• A Message from the Masons by John Barnie
  An extract from a memoir-in-progress by poet, critic and former editor of Planet, John Barnie.
  
  
• Photo / Poem Collaboration by David Hurn and Paul Henry
  
  
  
• A Writer's Writer by Catherine Fisher
  The influences of Lewis Carroll, Robert Louis Stevenson and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
  
  
• Photo Essay by Betina Talvan Skovbro
  Mum Said You Were Dead!
  
  
• Roland Mathias 1915-2007 by M. Wynn Thomas
  An obituary for the poet, editor and critic who died earlier this year.
  
  

Fiction

• Growing Up by Jasmine Donahaye
  
• Rape by Gerard Woodward
  

Poems

Poems by :
Stevie Davies
Paul Groves
Kelly Grovier
Paul Henry
Oliver Reynolds
Zoë Skoulding.

Reviews

The majority of books reviewed in New Welsh Review can be bought online from gwales.com, the Welsh Books Council's online bookshop, by simply clicking on the 'buy now' icon. For any that are unavailable, please contact the publishers or ask in your local bookshop. All details were correct at the time of publication.

• The Presence by Dannie Abse
  Published by Hutchinson
  ISBN 9780091796334  hb £16.99
  Reviewed by Jim Perrin
  
  
• Face On: Disability Arts in Ireland and Beyond by Ed. Kaite O'Reilly
  Published by Arts and Disability Ireland
  ISBN 9780955474903  pb £10.00
  Reviewed by Chris Tally Evans
  
  
• Real Newport by Ann Drysdale
  Published by Seren
  ISBN 9781854114327  pb £9.99
  Reviewed by Tom Cheesman
  
  
• A Swansea Anthology (2nd edn.) by Ed. James A. Davies
  Published by Seren
  ISBN 9781854114488  pb £8.99
  Reviewed by Tom Cheesman
  
  
• STAR: a psychotopography of place by Jenny Savage
  Published by CBAT
  ISBN 0952780291  pb £12.99
  Reviewed by Tom Cheesman
  
  
• Incarceron by Catherine Fisher
  Published by Hodder
  ISBN 9780340893609  pb £5.99
  Reviewed by Richard Poole
  
  
• The Storm Garden by Philip Gross
  Published by Oxford University Press
  ISBN 9780192754645  pb £5.99
  Reviewed by Richard Poole
  
  
• The Woman who Loved an Octopus and other Saint's Tales by Imogen Rhia Herrad
  Published by Seren
  ISBN 9781854114426  pb £6.99
  Reviewed by Susie Wild
  
  
• Welsh Writing in English: A Yearbook of Critical Essays Vol. 11 2006-2007 by Ed. Tony Brown
  Published by University of Wales Press
  ISBN 978070832109  pb £12.95
  Reviewed by Meriel Owen Griffiths
  
  
• The Valleys by Anthony Stokes with an introduction by Iain Sinclair
  Published by Seren
  ISBN 9781854114440  hb £25.00
  Reviewed by Ceri Thomas
  
  
• The New Poetry in Wales by Ian Gregson
  Published by University of Wales Press
  ISBN 9780708319956  pb £16.99
  Reviewed by Matthew Jarvis
  
  
• Deep Hanging Out by Richard Gwyn
  Published by Snowbooks
  ISBN 9781905005567  pb £7.99
  Reviewed by Garan Holcombe
  
  

Letters

• Where and when - Amy Wack
• Vanity Publishing - Hugh Adams
• New Welsh Review - a journal of review? - Tony Curtis
• Dead Poets' Society - Huw Lawrence; Lewis Davies