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.