154 contemporary poetry
TRAVELOGUE FROM THE REGIONAL TO THE GLOBAL:
ROBERT MINHINNICK AND LORNA GOODISON
Travel and mobility are important features in contemporary poets’
negotiation of space as well as their representation of the global
and the local. In ‘Return of the Natives’ from Robert Minhinnick’s
latest volume King Driftwood ( 2008 ), the speaker suggests wryly
that ‘could be I’m / back could be supplementary information /
exists could be I never / left’.^47 Minhinnick’s poetry is frequently
cited as incorporating elements of travel writing as his poems often
seek linkages between his native Wales and a global community.
This claim is supplemented by his collections of prose essays that
include meditations on travel, ecology, war and politics: Watching
the Fire Eater ( 1992 ), Badlands ( 1996 ) and the more recent To Babel
and Back ( 2005 ). Minhinnick states in an early essay that ‘Living
without nature is our last art, and we are bringing it to a state of
perfection’.^48 Of his own seaside resort town, Porthcawl in South
Wales, he remarks on the problems of consumption that tourism
brings: ‘Our town would die without tourists. And tourists are
killing our town’.^49 Ian Gregson discerns not only the impact of the
travelogue on the poet’s work, but also how travel impacts upon
the texture of Minhinnick’s poetry. Gregson claims that the poet
has invented ‘a kind of travel poem which is distinctively his own’
and even more importantly states ‘his environmental anxieties
have contributed to this because they lead to a sense of how local
problems are also global problems – that, environmentally, there
is one, shared planet which is being endangered everywhere’.^50
Minhinnick admits that ‘North American landscapes made me
want to write longer poems, but I also wished to write in a more
variegated way’.^51
In ‘An Isotope, Dreaming’ the poet combines the language
of science with meditations on Porthcawl, as well as narratives
highlighting the human impact of the war in Iraq. Minhinnick has
already addressed some of his experiences of travelling to Baghdad
following the fi rst Iraq war, researching the use of depleted
uranium in American weapons.^52 Nuclear waste and its radioactiv-
ity become both a benign and malign vehicle in the poem to illus-
trate the dissemination of ideas, birth of languages, acts of mobility