Overview

Words will go their own way, and carry the poet with them, on many a wild goose chase, in and out of the past, haunted by and revisiting the island where he came of age. In the new collection from the Welsh Forward Prize-shortlisted poet, nature writer and editor of the eco-literary magazine Archipelago, McNeillie explores his deep sense, in his older age, of not belonging anywhere other than in mind and in the wild. McNeillie recovers and renews Pytheas the Greek’s exploration of fourth century BC Britain and Thomas Pennant’s account of Wales, but A Wild Goose Chase lays these historical accounts of the natural world beside the author’s own experiences. The poems’ moving and not unmelancholy late recollections blur temporal and spatial boundaries as they stay alive to the impacts of climate change and globalization.

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9781800175099

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Author Information

Andrew McNeillie was born in 1946 in North Wales and brought up there, a son of the Scottish writer Ian Niall. After an unconventional start, he read English at Magdalen College, Oxford, before becoming a publisher and editor. For a key period in his life, he was literature editor at Oxford University Press. He is the founding editor of the magazine Archipelago (2007-) and runs the Clutag Press (now in its twenty-sixth year). His memoir An Aran Keening was published by the Lilliput Press, Dublin, in 2001 and reissued in 2025. Once: A Memoir came out from Seren in 2009. Striking a Match in a Storm: New & Collected Poems was published by Carcanet in 2022. A prequel to his Aran memoir, News of the World: from Rhydamman to Inishmore appeared from Lilliput in 2025.

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