Andrew McNeillie was born in north Wales in 1946 and read English at Magdalen College, Oxford. He is the Literature Editor at Oxford University Press; in 2002 he established the Clutag Press to publish poetry. He has published three collections of poetry, Nevermore (2000) which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and Now, Then (2002) and Slower (2006). He also published the memoir An Aran Keening (2001), about his life in Ireland, to which Once is the prequel.

Once is the journey from boyhood to manhood of poet Andrew McNeillie. From an aeroplane crossing north Wales the middle-aged writer looks down on the countryside of his childhood and recalls an almost fabulous world now lost to him. Ordinary daily life and education in Llandudno shortly after the war are set against an extraordinary life lived close to nature in some of the wilder parts of Snowdonia. Continually crossing the border between town and country, a fly-fisherman by the age of ten, McNeillie relives his life in nature during a period of increasing urbanisation. There is an almost Lawrentian aspect to his intense relationship with the natural world, and the place of man within it. Similarly Lawrentian is the acute and powerful exploration of McNeillie’s relationship with his father, his discovery of literature and the development of his own poetic sensibility, and his growing awareness of the opposite sex.

His story is triangulated between three locations: his birthplace, Coed Coch, a Snowdonian lake, Dulyn and his home in his teens, Tan yr Allt. They transmute into the three sections of the book: The Red Wood, The Black Lake, and The Wooded Hill and constitute ‘The Known World’. Beyond this small, beautifully invoked patch of Wales lay the rest of the earth, ‘The Unknown World’, which seems of little consequence to the young, entranced Andrew.

Once is a beautifully written eulogy for a retreating countryside now valued more for its leisure potential than as a repository of nature and source of human fullfilment. The narrative is underlain by a way of thinking informed by the natural world and by nature poetry, and is an evocative and memorable book about the nature of experience of memory and writing.

“[McNeillie’s writing] strikes off at bold and sparkling tangents. His prose is rhythmic, humorous, contagiously energetic with underlying melancholic strains of loss and longing.”
New Welsh Review