Poetry
Category: Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 64
ISBN: 9781854115386
Publication date: March 23, 2011
Price: £8.99
Shortlisted for the Forward Prize (Best First Collection) 2011
Shortlisted for the Michael Murphy Prize 2011
Winner of the DLR Strong Award (in partnership with Shine) at Poetry Now / Mountains To Sea
Sound Archive is the strikingly original first collection of poems from Nerys Williams. Using formal strategies similar to modernist painting: abstraction, dislocation, surrealist juxtaposition, the poet conjures a complex music, intriguing narratives, and poems full of atmosphere that query identity, gender, and the dream of art as a vehicle for emotion and meaning. There is a playful lightness of touch and tone and for every serious inquisition like ‘An Anatomy of Arguments’ or ‘Conversations with Cocteau’, there is a poem that will muse on ‘Canter’s Starstruck Diner, L.A.’ or on the ‘artifacts’ left by Marilyn Monroe, in ‘Marilyn’s Auction House’. Williams confronts our preconceptions about what it might mean to be a woman writing against the background of two formidable traditions: that of Welsh-speaking Wales and of English literature. A thoughtful, subtle and fascinating first collection.
Nerys Williams
Nerys Williams’s first collection Sound Archive (Seren) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and won the Irish Strong First Collection Prize. In 2017 she was a Government of Wales-Literature Wales poet in residence at Passa Porta, Brussels as part of the Literature of Loss programme. That same year her second collection Cabaret was published by New Dublin Press. Her third collection Republic was published by Seren in 2023.
Nerys is an Associate Professor in poetry and poetics University College Dublin, a Fulbright alumnus and is originally from Carmarthenshire. She lives in Kells Co. Meath Ireland.
“I’ve long admired the poetry of Nerys Williams, which is both playful and sharply perceptive, drawing on a wide range of often unexpected influences… she brings a unique set of interests to bear not just on poetry in Wales, but on poetry generally.”
Zoë Skoulding
“Here’s a fine writer who is completely unique in Wales.”
Robert Minhinnick
“…fresh and original.”
Planet
“Williams has a talent for assembling compellingly strange and haunting linguistic collages, making Sound Archive an enjoyable debut”
Poetry London
“…a certain other-worldiness combines well with a vigorous realism to tease the reader into putting two and more than that together to perceive something rare and beautiful.”
Poetry Review
“Sound Archive is an innovative volume…”
Irish Times
