Laura Wainwright at the Green Room March 2022

Laura Wainwright reads at the Green Room 25th March 2022. Laura Wainwright is from Newport, South Wales. Her poems have been published and are forthcoming in a range of magazines, journals and anthologies. Laura was shortlisted in the Bridport Prize poetry competition in 2013 and 2019, and awarded a Literature Wales Writers' Bursary in 2020 to finish her first collection.

Read Laura Wainwright’s Newport Journal.

The Green Room Podcast Josephine's Rain (2018 remix)

‘Josephine’s Rain’ is a thirty minute evocation of a storm that damaged Porthcawl in 1995. Tropical storm ‘Josephine’ was close to hurricane status, sinking boats and destroying part of the seafront.

Performed and written by Robert Minhinnick, Richard Thomas & Peter Morgan.

Josephine’s Rain has been performed at many events over the years; some hosted by the Green Room.

A video version is available on our YouTube channel.

“In a recent film for ‘Sustainable Wales’ I say that Babylon fell because of social inequality and that our culture is threatened by the same thing. That’s not to mention ‘climate change’ at all. But I’ve written the words for ‘Josephine’s Rain’, a depiction of a storm that hit Porthcawl in the 1990s. It evokes a hurricane and is bloody loud, with guitar, keyboard, percussion. In the last performance we had an artist on stage creating a painting during the thirty minute performance. Very 1960s.”

Robert Minhinnick Wales Arts Review

The Green Room Podcast Launch event of Robert Minhinnick's Diary of the Last Man

Launch event from 2017 of Robert Minhinnick’s Diary of the Last Man https://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?product=9781784103484

Wales Book of the Year 2018
Winner of the 2018 Roland Mathias Poetry Award
Shortlisted for the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize

“The opening poem sequence, 'Diary of the Last Man', sets the tone for Robert Minhinnick's book, a celebration of the dwindling Earth, an elegy, a caution. His Wales is a touchstone; other landscapes and cityscapes are tried against it, with its erratic weather, its sudden changes of mood, 'a black tonic'. The sequence remembers all the geographies of his earlier work, old and new world, but now unpeopled and the lonely spirit free to go anywhere, do anything, but meaning with mankind has drained away. Yet still alive, and still with language, registering. The rest of the book is filled with voices: of children, of rivers, terrorists, magicians; and voices translated from the Welsh, and from Turkish and Arabic, shared, enriching with their difference, their other worlds. History washes over and washes up on the strand of this Welsh book. It is seen and recognised, it begins to be transformed. In the long concluding poem, 'The Sand Orchestra', the poet returns to his own voice, and to the voice of a Bechstein piano abandoned in the open air, played now by nature, its winds and sand. The last man, who has been looking for Ulysses, is the very man he has been looking for.”