I picked this up from the bookshelf on a visit to my parents and moved on to 'The Dust Diaries' and 'Resistance' - both very poetic. I also caught a BBC4 poetry series which Owen Sheers wrote and presented. He certainly has a passion and that truely comes across in his writings. . . not just a pretty face!

In the recent Next Generation list released by the Poetry Book Society as a counterpart to the 1994 New Generation poets, Owen Sheers features as one of the youngest poets included on the list. Born in Fiji and brought up in London and Abergavenny, Sheers is sometimes thought of as the ‘pretty boy’ of Welsh poetry, which is probably encouraged by his strong media presence. Sheers is the sometime presenter of arts programmes for BBC Wales and he has also appeared in glossy print promotions. David Bailey was commissioned by The Times in 2000 to photograph the foremost practitioners in the arts and sciences along with an up-and-coming peer of their choice. Andrew Motion, the poet laureate, was featured alongside Owen Sheers; Motion described Sheers as the poet most likely to create new advances in the field of poetry.

Sheers’ credentials are impeccable. He has been included in The Independent on Sunday’s list of best British writers and has won an Eric Gregory Award. Sheers also boasts considerable support from poets of the Welsh bastion such as Robert Minhinnick. The Blue Book, initially published in 2000, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize and it is easy to see why. The easy eloquence of Sheer’s observations creates an alternative selfhood for Welsh writers which is urbane, cosmopolitan and well-travelled. The title poem of the collection refers to a report published by the government in 1847 on the state of education in Wales. As Sheer’s epigraph reminds us, the report concludes that the Welsh are ‘dirty, lazy. ignorant, superstitious, deceitful, promiscuous and immoral’ as a direct result of ‘Nonconformity and the Welsh language’.

The Blue Book takes this as the starting point for a meditation on the history and future of the Welsh language. The poem begins with the view of an outsider looking in on Welsh culture: ‘Rather silence than these corrupt tongues, / the words of the father shall not be passed on to the sons’. The biblical language reflects the chapel culture inherent in Welsh culture and language, yet it also encourages the reader to think of English interventions in Wales as interruptions to a kind of holy order between the Father, the Son and Holy Ghost or the father, the son and the Welsh language. Sheers is adamant that the control over language is part of a colonialist project.

More at this webslink: http://www.readysteadybook.com/BookReview.aspx?isbn=1854112775 ( )