Description
These poems are political: they are angry, but not shouty. They get the point across but always with humour. So, she does cover the miners strikes, the closures, the retail decay, the social issues — but all in a new light which, for me, is what makes this pamphlet so special. – Jane Thomas, Sphinx (read full review here)
When a pamphlet wins a major competition adjudicated by such luminaries as Imtiaz Dharker and Ian McMillan – and when a number of the poems within that pamphlet have been placed in or won the Mslexia, Red Shed, Live Cannon International and Bread & Roses Poetry Competitions (and others: the acknowledgements page does some heavy lifting) – it’s a safe guess that the reader is in for some good poetry. The Last Dinosaur in Doncaster isn’t just good; it’s as good as it gets. As a second salvo following the Seren pamphlet Bloodlines (2019), which explored the poet’s Traveller heritage, it doubles down on that work’s statement of intent, that establishes Wimbush as a major new talent, a distinctive voice, in British poetry […]. This is muscular poetry, wrought with precision and loaded with experience. Mordant humour runs through it. Wimbush has a keen eye for human foibles, and heart and talent big enough to transform them into art. – Neil Fulwood, Everybody’s Reviewing (read full review here)
Sarah Wimbush’s refreshing take on a ruptured, but ineffably colourful, past bursts through conventional borders of definition to celebration, and is never derailed by the bittersweet, ‘kumquat’ irony of co-existent pain. Her documenting of memory dignifies the struggle with inventories of tangible detail, fixes in perpetuity the vision of a landscape at a time of cataclysmic change. Her observational powers are astonishingly acute, a sensual assault, leaving us breathless at the accumulative and repetitive weight of an imagery whose presence bespeaks a photographically authentic sense of a former life. – The Yorkshire Times (read full review here)
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Filmpoem of ‘Near Extinction, a poem about The Miners’ Strike 1984/5. Poem written and read by Sarah Wimbush.
Filmpoem of ‘The Pencil Sharpener’ from The Last Dinosaur in Doncaster, written and read by Sarah Wimbush.
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Sarah Wimbush is a winner of both the Mslexia Poetry Competition (2016) and the Mslexia Poetry Pamphlet Competition (2019). Her debut pamphlet Bloodlines (Seren) explores her Gypsy/Traveller heritage. In 2019 she received a Northern Writers’ Award and second prize in the Ledbury Poetry Competition. She comes from Doncaster and currently lives in Leeds.