Books Books Books
Category: Bestsellers, Ebooks, Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 72
ISBN: 9781854115737
Publication date: May 7, 2012
Price: £9.99
Category: Bestsellers, Ebooks, Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 72
ISBN: 9781854115959
Publication date: May 7, 2012
Price: £7.99
Out of stock
Winner of Wales Book of the Year 2013,
Winner of the Roland Mathias Prize for Poetry 2013
Winner of Wales Book of the Year People’s Choice 2013
Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2012.
Clueless Dogs is the first collection of poetry by Rhian Edwards. Already a noted performer of both her songs and poetry, this book confirms her startling talent.
Poems like ‘The Welshman Who Couldn’t Sing’ chronicle a fraught childhood in Bridgend, south Wales, where the sensitive child escapes through imaginative games of ‘Playing Dead’ and ‘Broken Lifeboat’. Full of verve and humour, with a spiky syntax featuring hard-edged consonants, her language has a winning honesty and intensity. Later poems chronicle teenage lusts, student rivalries, damaged peers and tense situations. Although the author doesn’t flinch from ruthless depictions in which we are often implicated by her use of the second person ‘You’, there is an underlying sweetness, an elegiac thread most evident in the poems of maturity, like ‘Back to Bed’ ,’Safe’ ,’The Wrong Season’ full of both the sensual rapture of love and a clear-eyed realization of its inevitable disappointments. Witness the poet in performance and it is impossible not to hear her distinctive tones when reading her work. Clueless Dogs is a brave and beautiful first book.
A video of Rhian Edwards performing one of her poems ‘Tiptoe’ at a venue in New York City
Video Source: ”Somewhere in the Dark’ directed by Mads Jeppesen.
Rhian Edwards
Rhian is a multi-award winning poet. Her first collection of poems Clueless Dogs (Seren) won Wales Book of the Year 2013, the Roland Mathias Prize for Poetry 2013 and Wales Book of the Year People’s Choice 2013. It was also shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2012.
Her pamphlet of poems, Parade the Fib (Tall-Lighthouse), was awarded the Poetry Book Society Choice for autumn 2008 and her most recent pamphlet Brood (Seren) 2017, was illustrated by Paul Edwards.
Rhian is also a winner of the John Tripp Award for Spoken Poetry, having won both the Judges and Audience award. She was also the first Writer in Residence at Aberystwyth Arts Centre from March to June 2013.
Rhian’s poems have appeared in The Guardian, Times Literary Supplement, Poetry Review, New Statesman, Spectator, Poetry London, Poetry Wales, Arete, Prague Revue, the London Magazine, Stand and Planet Magazine amongst others.
Rhian is a poet and musician and has delivered over 400 stage, radio and festival performances world-wide. She lives in South Wales with her daughter.
Her eagerly awaited second collection The Estate Agent’s Daughter was a National Poetry Day Recommended Read in 2020.
“…she is a dazzling performer, at ease with the language, sometimes slangy, sometimes lyrical, with undertones of South Welsh speech. Her warmth and humour will make her a popular reader”
Gillian Clarke
“Rhian Edwards makes the language sing and dance. Join her campaign for the liberation of poetry from all that is dry, stuffy, insincere and boring…”
Christopher Reid
“The Unique voice lies in the music of the language, a distinctly un-English sound, often in a minor key, elegiac but with unexpected leaps of the imagination. Against a Celtic bass-line, she sets her own modern turn of phrase and sense of humour”
Hugo Williams
Although her poems are accessible – and I would strongly recommend them to anyone who thinks they don’t like poetry – and supremely crafted they are also inhabited by something far rarer, an unerring ability to find the extraordinary in the ordinary.
Time Out Magazine
“One of her greatest abilities is her verb choice; a rarer gift these days than, perhaps, it should be.”
Planet Magazine
“Poetry has never sounded so alive”
Cerys Matthews
“It’s an extremely interesting collection…”
New Welsh Review
“An astounding Welsh poet with performances that get you in the emotional gut…”
Ian McMillan on The Verb, Radio 3
“…Edwards is a strikingly confident new voice.”
Poetry Wales
