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"I am not making any particular claims (David K) for a Welsh poetic renaissance. I still don't know Welsh poetry well enough to be able to say one way or another. But I don't think it was fair to single Wales out (David B) as culture-starved and lacking in a sense of identity." I don't think there's a lack of identity but there is what one could politely call a different level of achievement in Welsh writing in English. Tony Conran wrote an article many years ago arguing that this was because poetry in Wales was dominated by school teachers - everyone got a bit miffed about it so I guess he struck a nerve. My own feeling is that Wales has forgotten its own modernist heritage - David Jones - and has also lacked a generation of writers comparable to the Dunn/Harrison generation in England. [Wales doesn't value its own interesting writers like John Davies and Tony Conran.] Welsh writing in English has not therefore responded to the same things that writing in English has elsewhere in the British Isles: class, modernist vs. anti-modernist. The Welsh seem to think that people like Catherine Fisher are important poets but I always want to ask things like *where's the Welsh Bill Herbert?*. And I can never work out whether the Seren list generally displays a failure of taste or a lack of courage. I tried to cover all this in more detail in a long review of the Oxygen antho in a recent issue of Poetry Wales where I draw on historians to argue that Wales has always lacked a distinctive and vibrant political culture that has driven the variety of writing elsewhere in the North Atlantic archipelago. cheers David