This is a straight reprint of a book first published in 1988. Fifteen years of water under the green bridge of Anglo-Welsh short fiction is a lot, and Seren has resisted the temptation to ask John Davies to bring the book up to date. This could be construed as a missed opportunity. Many writers, and different kinds of writers, have emerged in Wales in recent decades. Women writers (who account for seven out of the twenty-five inclusions in this anthology) have been encouraged into print by a series of lively collections from Honno, and John Sam Jones has produced Wales's first books of short queer fiction. Certain older excluded writers, too, might have merited reappraisal. I'm thinking particularly of Roland Mathias, whose Collected Short Stories are now available. Those fifteen years should at the very least have prompted an updating of the authors' profiles that end the book.

When all that is said, one must salute the virtues of the book as it stands. The Green Bridge is not only a strong anthology but a cohesive one. It has a particularly intelligent introduction. Here, rather than succumbing to the temptation of justifying his selections one by one, the editor gives us, in a mere two and a half pages, a distillation of his thoughts on a century-long tradition. It isn't, he says, "social realism that has stimulated the best Anglo-Welsh short stories"; rather, "they have invariably been mythopoetic, lighting our dream-life, its longings, fears". Mythopoetic, says my dictionary, is an alternative to mythopoeic, and means "myth-making". But John Davies is a poet, and his preference for the longer word directs us to the fact that more than half of the writers represented here also wrote - or write - poetry. The first piece in the book, by the pseudonymous Ifan Pughe, is a prose poem, and so is John Davies's selection from Richard Hughes.

The thinnest stories here are those for which "social realism" seems an adequate descriptor. The strongest are those that gather resonance as one reads and seem to vibrate with significance incommensurate with their length. It's no surprise that in a number of stories mysticism should rear its head (Ifan Pughe, Jaci Stephen), and that memory, incompletion and loss should haunt many others (Dorothy Edwards, Geraint Goodwin, Brenda Chamberlain, Leslie Norris). John Davies goes on to suggest that "a certain period of romanticism is over". Romanticism is a word that cries out for definition. One might argue that the vein of satire, typically enriched with elements of the grotesque or macabre, that the tradition has to offer has always been anti-romantic. This vein is well represented here by Caradoc Evans, Rhys Davies, Glyn Jones and Gwyn Thomas. Even so, the stories by, for example, Emyr Humphreys, Alun Richards, Glenda Beagan, Duncan Bush and Clare Morgan all supply ammunition for the editor's case.

Richard PooleIt is possible to use this review for promotional purposes, but the following acknowledgement should be included: A review from www.gwales.com , with the permission of the Welsh Books Council. Gellir defnyddio'r adolygiad hwn at bwrpas hybu, ond gofynnir i chi gynnwys y gydnabyddiaeth ganlynol: Adolygiad oddi ar www.gwales.com , trwy ganiat'd Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru.