The evening is being organised by Moira Welstead and the readers will be John Bond, Christine Jones, Ruth Nicholls, Richard Paramor, Bill Welstead and Richard Withers.  We look forward to seeing you there.

Cader Idris

  January 23rd at 7.30 pm.

The monthly evening of poetry and prose readings for January is on the theme: ‘The Landscapes of Wales’.  We live in a magical landscape that has inspired Ruskin and led to the National Trust acquiring Dinas Oleu, above Barmouth, as its first property.  One theme running through the evening is the way that the Welsh landscape is visualised in words and art.   From the end of the 18th century, the French revolutionary wars made the European Grand tour hazardous.  Romantic writers and artists turned their attention to the rugged landscapes of Wales.  A good summary of artistic interpretation is at www.dolgellau.net/paintings/index.html .

 The readings will cover writers of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, seeking the sublime and picturesque, for example: William Wordsworth, George Borrow and Gerard Manley Hopkins, and more recent Anglo-Welsh writers, with their different interpretations of the landscape.  These writers will include R. S. Thomas, Dylan Thomas, Robert Minhinnick and Tiffany Atkinson.  A slide show in the interval will show how art and literature have developed together.  It will also bring in the Welsh language story-telling tradition as the inspiration for Langadfan artist Eleri Mills, in her painting of ancestral and bardic landscapes.