Republic

Nerys Williams’ new collection questions what makes a Republic. Machinations of power? The speeches of politicians? The broad sweep of official histories? This sequence of 80 prose-poems, each constructed in 20 sentences, has arisen from the author’s need to tell a more intimate history, to commit an untold oral history to paper. Williams returns to the meaning of ‘republic’ in its Latin origins which meant ‘wealth of the people’. The poems tell the story of a young Welsh woman growing up and coming of age in the 1980s and 90s, a time that culminated with new devolutionary powers in Wales.