Our guest speaker in March was poet, Professor John Goodby, Professor of Arts and Culture at Sheffield Hallam University and formerly a lecturer in creative writing at Swansea University.
He describes himself as a persona non grata from Birmingham, who is both an expert in Irish poetry and Dylan Thomas. He is the author of The Poetry of Dylan Thomas: Under the Spelling Wall (2013) and editor of the centenary edition of Dylan Thomas’s Collected Poems (2014).
A winner of many poetry prizes, his work has been described as “mischievous” and “faithfully subversive”.
He asked the members to chose one of five poems for him to read at the meeting. Members chose ‘The Uncles’, which John said was by far his most successful poem, winning the Cardiff International poetry competition in 2006, being featured in many anthologies and becoming a set text for AS level English Literature.