NIgel Jenkins' poems are of the cosmos and they are of Wales, in turn, satirical, playful, internationalist, bitter, comic, dismissive, tragic. For him, poetry was a continuum, ranging across many genres and defying categorisation. There are poems to perform, playfully (winner of the1998 John Tripp Spoken Poetry Prize, Jenkins was a notable poetry performer); poems whose weight and wisdom arrest a reader; poems of praise and sometimes dispraise which add a certain notoriety; there are poems to make listeners feel part of the universe, not observers of it, as special and common as the stars.

Winner of the 1996 Welsh Book of the Year Award, he is known also for his travel writing, his co-editing of The Welsh Academy Encyclopaedia of Wales (University of Wales Press, 2008), and for his psychogeographies of his native Gower and Swansea. He lived in Mumbles, Swansea, and was director of Swansea Universitys creative writing programme.