#TPQ5: ROB CULLEN

Gerald Manley Hopkins – Collected Work

His poem The Windhover and his adoption of early Welsh the strict metrical poetic form cynghanedd and his use of assonance which has deeply influenced my writing.

Pablo Neruda – Residence on Earth

The Poem “Burial in the East” is so evocative … my daughter visited his former home in Rangoon sending fotos and the smell of incense of the peom came alive.

R.H Blyth Haiku -Vol 2 Spring

“Someone is there, smoke from a boat, in the summer rain” – the brief, almost cursory line form sums is just rich.

Seamus Heaney – Wintering out.

His poem “Gifts of Rain” was like a godsend when I read in 1974 in Manhattan after so many rejections…he offered a welcoming reassurance and word sound.

W G Sebald

W G Sebald is one of the greatest juju writers of the 20th Century who died befoe he could recieve the Nobel Prize. His writing is deep, rich and complex and of a kind one rarely meets.


Rob Cullen grew up on a council estate in the Rhondda, trained as an artist, art teacher, social worker. Rob worked in steel works, construction sites, railways and psychiatric hospitals. Rob worked for forty years with damaged and severely damaging people. Rob is a gardener, environmentalist, poet, writer, artist.

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