Mineral Wealth by Mel Perry excavates a matrilineal history embedded in the slate and coal landscapes of Wales, tracing the life of a grandmother the poet never met through photographs, objects, letters, and long-guarded silences. Geology becomes the collection's governing grammar: seams, strata, and overburden carry the weight of industrial labour, of quarrymen's dust-thickened lungs, and of family stories compacted under shame and left unspoken. Poems sit alongside woven photographs and watercolours, and move between English and Welsh, where the language itself is a site of loss and tentative reclamation. Formally varied, spanning prose poems, dialogues across decades, and concrete arrangements, the collection asks what is inherited, what is buried, and what can be brought carefully to the surface.
 
PRAISE for Mineral Wealth:
Mineral Wealth, Mel Perry’s new collection of poetry enhanced by original artwork, is infused with the enigma of quarried rock and overturned soil: it is piercingly fresh and deeply ancient all at once. Perry uses her poems like a spade, excavating the life of the grandmother she never knew, a woman intimate with Welsh landscapes of coal and slate, and in the process uncovers family secrets while weaving her own child and adulthood into the larger familial pattern. The resulting poems glint with the brilliance of gems and sear with the unfathomable weight of planetary pressure, not to mention the more familiar heft of human memory.
— Pamela Petro
 
Mel Perry’s is a voice that has steadfastly developed to a point of near excellence. Indelibly Welsh, body and language, stoic and elegiac, tightly layered, strata on strata of resonance through landscape and memory. At times restrained and precise, yet emotionally haunting, possessing a volcanic energy mirroring women’s lives, suppressed and raging, her poetry breaking out into imaginative structure and form, boundless as the language and landscape of quarry.
— Maggie Harris
 
In Mineral Wealth, Mel Perry excavates memory with a geologist’s precision and a poet’s instinct for pressure, fracture and revelation. These poems move through slate, coal and dust to uncover a layered inheritance of women’s lives—lives shaped by labour, silence and resilience. What emerges is a deeply textured exploration of family, language and place, where the personal is inseparable from the geological, and grief is held in the strata of both body and land. Perry’s work is attentive, inventive and quietly devastating—a collection that lingers, like fine dust in the lungs, long after reading.
— Peter Nyberg-Mollung
 
Mineral Wealth plunges the reader into the language of quarry, excavating both the forgotten industrial landscapes of Cymru and the neglected lives of the women and mothers of Wales. it’s all about dust – like the wonderful watercolours and collages that appear throughout the book, the poems thread together to create an almost image, a near memory, a poetic weaving of conversations running from the past to the now of the page. This is a formally inventive collection of poems that gives the reader achingly beautiful glimpses into the lives of the poet’s grandmother and wider family. This is a collection of deeply personal and carefully researched work rooted in Wales that also speaks to the universal desire to know our ancestors and through them to try and understand ourselves. 
— Jeremy Dixon
 
So many strands are compressed in Mel Perry’s collection: Welsh women’s history, a   Welsh woman’s history, the history of families, and a family’s history, and they are all excavated alongside the visceral bodily experience of Welsh mining. Welsh place names dazzle alongside words specific to the mines. Perry’s poetic forms are consistently inventive as she stretches the poetry to reach into and around dark corners. Yet her tone remains celebratory throughout, where the pleasure of finally finding the words is palpable, the pleasure of capturing something vital. And then we have the images, beautifully reproduced, from the poet’s own hand, and from artists as diverse as Osi Osmond, Fred Uhlman, Kyffin Williams. I really enjoyed this book. Never has the metaphor of a Welsh mine seemed so inventive and enthralling.
— Dr Derek Coyle
 
A captivating collection of works that delve into landscapes of mind, memory and places – and into the materiality of our being. Blending poetry, prose and art Mineral Wealth invites us to gaze “away and out and back” as the author weaves connections across generations and shuttles between rural west Wales, Eryri’s slate landscape and the south Wales coalfield to illuminate how we live with, and through our stories and secrets. 
Playing with shards of language, the musicality of words, with whispering fragments from family archives and with the pigments and history of places, Mineral Wealth is a moving exploration of the overburden, gashes, folds, seams and sediments that are part of our identity as people as much as the places we inhabit.
— Elinor Gwynn
 
Mel Perry goes deep and earthy in this remarkable collection. The tender, strong presence of her dead grandmother Phene emerges through the slate and sediment of land that forged both women. Separate in time and unknown to each other, they are closely entwined. Coal mines, rivers, rocks infuse the poet’s agile, textured language. Men’s work in the mines drives narratives of the land and history, but it is women’s hidden stories that explode into the foreground. The poet invites us to travel with her as she feels her way across moss and mulch, peering into adits, listening to each heartbeat, daring to see a frond of fern embedded in coal as a sign of new life unfurling out of fragments and silences.
— Fiona Hamilton
 
This intimate collection is a reaching out of memory to life’s pulsing minutiae – seams both  familiar and complex—renaming worlds beyond, retrieving love and language ever present, lingering...or/to linger here memory is a  balancing act between being and  what is beyond with language  that illuminates, circumnavigating  the vividness of the past.
— Menna Elfyn
 
Mineral Wealth connects with the country-shaping extractive industries of Wales –the hewing of coal, the splitting of slate – but also with another source of ready wealth, that of memory and memories. We were fortunate enough to publish a series of these as they evolved on Nation.Cymru which gave me the pleasure of being an early reader but also of seeing themes gently emerge and see subtle connections between one week’s offerings and another. It is rewarding to see them now settled into their new home, nestling in these pages.
— Jon Gower
 
ABOUT Mel Perry:
Mel Perry is a poet, spoken word performer and therapeutic writing facilitator from Wales. She is Co-Director of write4word CIC. She was longlisted for Poetry Wales Summer 2024 and shortlisted for Arachne Press Afonydd/Rivers collection.  Mel is a contributor to Literature Wales’ Chronic Women project. Mel has worked alongside women survivors of domestic abuse, people living with the impact of Stroke, and those seeking to address their mental health through creative activities. She is a  former chair of Lapidus International and a worship leader with the Church in Wales.