Introducing the authors and speakers of the Llandeilo Christmas Book Fair Dec 9th: "Sax Burglar Blues" by Robert Walton

This year's Christmas Book Fair will be just like a Mini-Literature-Festival all over Llandeilo. 

It gives me great pleasure  to introduce one of our authors and speakers: Robert Walton and his selection of poems: "Sax Burglar Blues"

On the day of the Book Fair, Dec 9th, Robert Walton will be showcasing his work at the Horeb Chapel  and at 1pm, he'll read a selection of poems at the Fountain Fine Art Gallery. His poems are about music, street life, family and natural creatures with strong feeling, wry humour and sharp observation. He'll also provide some soft acoustic musical accompaniment for one poem on thumb-piano and, naturally, a gentle blues on sax for the title poem.

BLURB

Packed with memory, incident, observation, opinion, humour, outrage and elegy, Sax Burglar Blues is the new collection of poetry by Robert Walton. Winner of a Welsh Arts Council New Poet prize for his first book in 1978, a teaching career interrupted his true vocation, poetry. He resumed writing in the late 90s and initially worked with artists in other media: music, dance, storytelling, film and installation. 

Walton’s poetry has appeared widely in magazines and he has published a pamphlet, Waiting for the Wave. He is a founding member of the Bristol-based poetry performance group, The Spoke, who have appeared at festivals and events all over the South West. He has a PhD from Cardiff University where he also teaches Creative Writing to undergraduates.

“Bob Walton’s poems are lithe and limber, with touches of humour and wry internal rhymes. This is a world teeming with animals and plants and cars and jazz, be-bopping easily across the Severn from Bristol to Cardiff and back. It’s an upbeat collection, a celebration of being in the world, but there are plangent undertones, too, of loss and oblivion. These are poems which are accessible and fun, but which also demand to be returned to, re-read, and pondered over.”  – Professor Katie Gramich

“When you read Robert Walton’s poems you hear music! He delivers familiar moments sometimes in an unsettling rock’n’roll, sometimes in a reassuring steady beat – always with surprise, full of stabs and riffs, the froth of your Guinness, the drag on the fag of stories past played out with skill and exciting detail you can almost sing along to – dancing into pubs, forests, rivers, and even the mite’s eye view of a woodlouse.”  - Hilda Sheehan, Creative Director, Poetry Swindon

“A volume both elegiac and wry, lyrical and ironic, in which summoned presences and cryptic traces share space with life’s glut, plump in the palm – all conducted to the changing rhythms of jazz, blues and our precarious human pulse. “ – Damian Walford Davies

BIO

Robert Walton’s first collection, Workings (Gomer), won the Welsh Arts Council’s New Poet Award back in 1978. He stopped writing for twenty years but resumed in the late 90s, working with artists in music, dance, film and storytelling, recording a cd, Nomad ’64, with cult band Mopti. His chapbook, Waiting for the Wave (Pighog), appeared in 2012 and his long-awaited second collection, Sax Burglar Blues (Seren) has just been published. He recently completed his PhD, is a member of Bristol-based poetry workshop and performance group The Spoke, and teaches Creative Writing at Cardiff University.