McNeillie, Andrew 1946-

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McNeillie, Andrew 1946-

PERSONAL:

Born 1946, in Wales. Education: Graduated from Magdalen College, Oxford.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Oxford, England. Office—Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon St., Oxford OX2 6DP, England.

CAREER:

Oxford University Press, Oxford, England, senior editor; Archipelago, Thame, England, founder and editor, 2007—. Has worked as a news reporter.

MEMBER:

English Association (fellow); Welsh Academy.

WRITINGS:

POETRY, EXCEPT AS NOTED

Nevermore, Carcanet (Manchester, England), 2000.

An Aran Keening, Lilliput Press (Dublin, Ireland), 2001, University of Wisconsin Press (Madison, WI), 2002.

Now, Then, Carcanet (Manchester, England), 2002.

Slower, Carcanet (Manchester, England), 2006.

Ian Niall: Part of His Life (biography), Clutag Press (Thame, England), 2007.

SIDELIGHTS:

By profession Andrew McNeillie is an editor for Oxford University Press, and by avocation he is the author of several well-received volumes of poetry. His first publication, Nevermore, was nominated for the Forward Prize for best first collection in 2000. His second collection, An Aran Keening, records his impressions of his stay on the rustic Irish island of Inis Mor, where he spent a portion of the years 1968 and 1969. His third book of poetry, Slower, juxtaposes historical and personal topics.

McNeillie grew up in North Wales and graduated from Oxford, factors that translate into a poetry infused with erudite language and an appreciation for nature's harsh beauty. Snippets of Latin are found in the poems of Slower, which convey a sense of McNeillie as "the awkward Welsh boy he was, [who] metamorphosed into the young student in love with poetry," wrote Gil- lian Clarke in a review for the online magazine Tower Poetry. Topics in Slower include the death of the author's father, the nineteenth-century migration of Welsh citizens to South America, and a cycle of sonnets that compares the fifteenth-century Welsh insurgency against London with the twenty-first century war on terror (likening Owain Glyn Dwr to Osama bin Laden). Clarke called the latter "an ambitious sequence, political, fierce, making a brave connection between a mythic hero/terrorist … and one we fear now."