The bibliographies presented here are intended to be a resource that will develop over the lifetime of the Devolved Voices project: they are emphatically not static and will continue to be updated until the conclusion of the project itself. As such, we particularly welcome suggestions concerning material which readers feel may have been left out of any individual list. Comments should be sent to: dvrstaff [@] aber.ac.uk
Each individual bibliography is constructed on somewhat different terms (as detailed at the head of the relevant page). However, the overall focus of our bibliographic work reflects the focus of the project as a whole – which is to detail the life of Wales’s English-language poetry since the devolution ‘yes’ vote of 1997, particularly concentrating on the work of poets who have come to prominence since that date. This latter point is especially important for the ‘Collections’ and ‘Reviews’ lists, which are both concerned with poets who had no more than one full collection published prior to 1997. (An exception to this general rule concerns established poets who have come to live in Wales in the post-1997 period: we view such figures as ‘new arrivals’ in a post-1997 Welsh context and the work they have published since coming to Wales is thus cited here.)
Finally, it is of fundamental importance to note that the poets with whom we are concerned all have some Welsh connection: they are, in the terms of the project, ‘Wales associated’. Such an association may be through birth, place of upbringing, heritage, or residence. This final category is actually very important. Ron Davies has suggested that post-devolution Wales needs to think of itself primarily in terms of ‘civic values not ethnic criteria’,* in order to make participation in and identification with a devolved Wales open to all. Consequently, we identify poets who are resident in Wales and thus writing from within the country as being part of its literary-civic life – irrespective of birth, upbringing, or heritage. In short, poets whose association with Wales is purely through residence are as much a part of our study as those who were (for example) born here.
* Ron Davies, ‘Preface’, in Bridget Taylor and Katarina Thomson, eds, Scotland and Wales: Nations Again? (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1999), p. xix.
