>Home         >Links       >Membership       Bookshop         >Archive

hafan

Contact

Tom Cheesman t.cheesman@swan.ac.uk

The Sand Garden / El Jardin de Arena by Humberto Gatica

Poems and photographs.   With an Afterword by Nigel Jenkins

Published in June 2008.      ISBN 978-0-9545147-5-4.     £9.99 direct from Hafan Books: click here for the order form

Can also be bought as a download or print on demand copy from Lulu.com, where you can view the book

Review by David Constantine, in 'Modern Poetry in Translation' (Third Series, Number Ten, 2008, p185):

Humberto Gatica is a poet and photographer who, after ten months in a brutal jail, got out of Pinochet's Chile, finally settling with his wife in Swansea. His poems face one another in two thin columns, Spanish and English, across the opening pages, black and white photographs interleaving them. Stark, exact, unsentimental. A cold wind whistles through them: breath nevertheless.

edited by Jeni Williams and Latéfa Guémar

Review by David Constantine, in 'Modern Poetry in Translation' (Third Series, Number Ten, 2008, p185-6):

Fragments from the Dark is a crowded book, dozens of voices, some speaking their own languages – Welsh, English, French, Arabic – some translated, all women and girls, prose and poems, interviews, fragments.  Also there are pictures, by two little sisters, for example, who look after their mother and their younger sister.  Picture of a house ‘The place where I would like to live’, picture of the ailing mother.  The total suffering here is great.  But the refuge, this book, certainly a very haunted place, contradicts by its variety, energy and solidarity the misfortune and injustice that collectively it remembers and makes known.  If Brecht’s three gods still trail the earth looking for reasons why they should not obliterate mankind, they will surely spare us a while longer should they light on Swansea Bay Asylum Seekers Support Group and the fortifying sanctuary of Hafan Books.

hafan: Welsh for haven, refuge, sanctuary (the f is spoken like an English v)

Swansea, Hafan Books, 2003               ISBN 0–9545147–0–X               96 pages               £5.00

Editors: Eric Ngalle Charles, Tom Cheesman and Sylvie Hoffmann (who are we?)

Poetry, fiction, drama and testimony, featuring the voices of two dozen asylum seekers and refugees, and half a dozen other writers of Wales, including Menna Elfyn, Nigel Jenkins, Moira Andrew, Isabel Adonis and more.