New Welsh Reader 128

This edition/anthology focuses on photography, commemoration and reinvention, with particular attention paid to the memories that pass from father to daughter. Photographer MR Thomas writes about the October 1999 day that he shot the iconic group portrait of cultural legends RS Thomas, Kyffin Williams and Emyr Humphreys, at RS Thomas' home in Pentrefelin, in Gwynedd. MR Thomas recreated the pose and attitude of an historical and historic photograph in the public domain that has come to be known as The Penyberth Three (of Lewis Valentine, Saunders Lewis and DJ Williams, the founders of the Welsh nationalist movement), transforming it into a new artefact, The Pentrefelin Three, which is published for the first time in these pages.


Yvonne Reddick drew on memories of the loss of her father in the mountains, in her debut poetry pamphlet, Translating Mountains. In her memoir published here, illustrated by her partner Jonny Kinnear's atmospheric black and white photographs, she further probes that loss. More than that, she pitches it into the public global arena by setting her true story on the Instagram mecca of the crash site of the Bleaklow Bomber in the Peak District, where the US reconnaissance plane 'Over Exposed' crashed in 1948, having previously photographed images of the nuclear blasts on Bikini Atoll. Meanwhile, exploring the father-daughter legacy in relation to the growth of rural rave culture in 1990s mid Wales, 'Bass in the Blood' by Jodie Bond recounts how she and her brother weathered parties marked by drugs, music, natural beauty and benign neglect, leaving her with magical and yet conflicted memories of her father's rediscovery of himself, post divorce.