Footfalls in the Silence – John Barnie
ISBN: 9781909077287
£9.99
John Barnie wrote of his Abergavenny childhood in the portrait of his father and his world, Tales of the Shopocracy. An altogether different style of memoir, Footfalls in Silence deals with his life up until 1969 when he moved to Denmark to teach. Different, both in form and purpose, it delineates the development of the critic and poet’s inner life, revealing how he became a writer and poet, or at least, as Barnie says, ‘how I became the poet that I am.’ Written with John Barnie’s characteristic unsentimental lyricism and sharp visual and linguistic acuity, the book is eminently readable and allows the reader to consider what it might mean to be human whilst immersed in a particular human and humane story that is compelling and reflective without any trace of egotism. This is a long awaited book that will be welcomed by John Barnie’s broad readership and find new readers.
Author biography
John Barnie is a poet and essayist from Abergavenny, Gwent. John lived in Denmark from 1969-1982 and was the editor of Planet, The Welsh Internationalist from 1990-2006. He has published several collections of poems, mixed poems and fiction, and two collections of essays, one of which, The King of Ashes, won a Welsh Arts Council Prize for Literature in 1990. His collection Trouble in Heaven (Gomer, 2007) was on the Wales Book of the Year 2008 Long List. Cinnamon Press has published several previous collections:The Forest Under the Sea, The Roaring Boys, Wind Playing with a Man’s Hat, Departure Lounge, and Sunglasses as well as his latest collections, the richly illustrated Afterlives and A Report to Alpha Centauri. Cinnamon also published the anthology of poetry and prose in honour of John Barnie, Wired to the Dynamo, edited by Matt Jarvis.
John plays guitar in the blues and poetry group Hollow Log. He is a Fellow of Yr Academi.