‘After Before’: Finding Welsh War Poetry

This essay considers works by Robert Minhinnick and Owen Sheers. Concentrating on Minhinnick’s 2008 volume King Driftwood, I examine his response to the Iraq War and how this connects with his earlier experience of visiting Baghdad following the Gulf War. Minhinnick’s travelogues attempt to suture the geographic distance between Iraq and south Wales. Owen Sheers’s verse drama Pink Mist was commissioned by BBC Radio 4 and was published by Faber in 2013. This work offers perspectives upon the impact of the Afghanistan War on veterans and their families. Sheers has also worked with the testimonies and memories of British veterans. For both poets, I consider how the role of the poem as a social document is navigated in their poetics, and whether the poem functions as a transformative site for trauma. I also propose that both poets, in different ways, reflect upon the cultural complexities of Welsh militarism, post-devolution.