Giraldus Redivivus

The Journey Through Wales by the medieval Norman-Welsh cleric Gerald of Wales is the first written account of Wales by one who was himself Welsh. Vigorous in style, colourful, full of incident, anecdote and curious lore, his work established Wales as a distinct and forceful entity. But as a servant of the Pope and Wales's Anglo-Norman overlords, Gerald's record of a month-long mission of 1188 in the company of the Archbishop of Canterbury to raise money and men for the Third Crusade might be said to have had mixed loyalties. In Giral Dus Redi Vivus, a radical re-versioning of The Journey (with a coda from Gerald's Description of Wales), David Annwn and John Goodby, two poets with strong Welsh affinities, probe Gerald's hybrid identity by subjecting his text to cut-up, vispo and Concrete procedures, yielding a multilingual, macaronic mash-up which sets it, alive and vivid, within the purview of twenty-first century poetry.