Oliver Reynolds Biography

Anglo-Welsh poet, born in Cardiff, educated at the University of Hull. In his first collection of poetry, Skevington's Daughter (1985), the cultural concerns of his native South Wales were clearly apparent in the final section; the book's verbal ingenuity and visually codified imagery identified it, however, as Martian poetry rather than Anglo-Welsh literature. The Player Queen's Wife (1987) extended the emotional and imaginative range of his elegantly accessible though often complex style. The highly economical narrative developments characteristic of much of Reynolds's writing are exemplified by the treatment of events and atmospheres in a psychiatric hospital in ‘Rorschach Writing’. A later collection is The Oslo Tram (1991).