In what sense is “Toast” a poem about Wales and are the street names real?
The street names are real; they were just the ones where the brickies sunbathed at lunchtime. The abandoned auction house was real too, but now it’s had a new lease of life as a Wetherspoons pub. In a way that’s quite appropriate because the mood in Cardiff that summer was quite vibrant and optimistic. We’d just got a Welsh assembly parliament, we were getting a new stadium which was a landmark building, and 1999 was a hot summer too. The poem is very much about Cardiff specifically, rather than Wales as a whole; if it’s about Wales at all it’s the urban, modern side of Wales. Also of course it’s about celebrating the physical beauty of young men, which in my opinion not enough poems do.
