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Pascale Petit Exciting US Book Tour

Seren is proud to announce that Pascale Petit is touring What the Water Gave Me: Poems After Frida Kahlo in the US!
Petit’s collection of poetry was shortlisted for the T.S Eliot Prize 2010 and long listed for Wales Book of the Year 2011.

Petit’s itinerary is;

Saturday 30 April, 6.00pm.  Cornelia St Café, NYC.
Mark Doty & Pascale Petit
29 Cornelia Street, New York, NY 10014
Phone: 212 989 9319. Email: [email protected] Website: www.corneliastreetcafe.com

Thursday 5 May (tbc). Metta Theatre, Taos, New Mexico.
Veronica Golos, Andrea Watson and Pascale Petit reading for Cinco de Mayo
1470 Paseo Del Pueblo Sur, El Prado, New Mexico 87529

Monday 9 May, 7.30pm. Moonday Poetry at Village Books, LA.
Lois P. Jones & Pascale Petit (illustrated reading)
1049 Swarthmore Ave., Pacific Palisades, California
Phone: (310) 454 4063 Email: [email protected] Website: www.moondaypoetry.com

Tuesday 10 May, 7.30pm. Poetry Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, California.
Rebecca Forest and Pascale Petit
Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Ave., Santa Cruz
Phone: (831) 464-8983 Email: [email protected] Website: www.baymoon.com/~poetrysantacruz

For more information on Pascale Petit and her poetry collection click the tag ‘Pascale Petit’ or read more on our website www.serenbooks.com

Good luck and congratulations to Pascale Petit!

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Ronnie Wood writes a foreword for ‘The Captain’s Tower: Seventy Poets Celebrate Bob Dylan at Seventy’

Ronnie Wood has added a touch of rock ‘n’ roll to a future Seren publication, by writing a foreword for the eagerly awaited book The Captain’s Tower: Seventy Poets Celebrate Bob Dylan at Seventy.
Unbelievably, Bob Dylan is 70 in May. The Captain’s Tower is a birthday present anthology of poems concerned with Dylan’s life, his work, and his cultural impact. One of the most distinguished lyricists of the post-war period, Dylan has entertained and inspired poets, writers generally and millions of ordinary fans with the imagery, wit and technique of his writing, be it in songs of love, protest, faith or pure Dylan-ness.
In this book the poets answer back in a response to Dylan’s creativity, capacity to inspire and his enormous influence on culture and writing. Here are poems by Allen Ginsberg, Lachlan Mackinnon, Glyn Maxwell, Matthew Sweeney, Jeremy Reed, Linda Chase, Linda France, Mark Ford, Roger McGough, Roddy Lumsden, Paul Muldoon, Simon Armitage, Caroline Bird. Peter Finch, Luke Wright.
There is bound to be a huge media response to Dylan’s birthday and this will be part of it – a must for Dylan fans and poetry readers alike.

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Ruth Bidgood wins the Roland Mathias Prize 2011

Ruth Bidgood wins the Roland Mathias Prize 2011 with her collection of poetry Time Being, published by Seren (2009).

The £3,000 prize was awarded to Ruth Bidgood at ceremony in Roland Mathias’ home town of Brecon, supported by BBC Wales and hosted by Nicola Heywood Thomas, presenter of Radio Wales’ Arts Show.

In future years, it is to be incorporated into the Wales Book of the Year.

Congratulations Ruth!

Ruth Bidgood with editor Amy Wack at the prize giving event in Brecon.


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Pascale Petit Published in the US

Pascale Petit’s latest collection of poetry What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo has now been published by Black Lawrence Press in the US (April, 2011). Pascale Petit is currently touring the US, she is reading at the Bowery Poetry Club, New York City – Saturday 16th April 6pm. Pascale’s collection is still available to buy in the UK.

For more information about Petit’s poetry collection and Petit the author, read ‘Seren Authors’ on our blog or  check out the Seren website.

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‘What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Khalo’

Author: Pascale Petit

SHORTLISTED FOR THE T.S ELIOT PRIZE 2010

LONG LISTED FOR WALES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2011

“Pascale’s poems are as fresh as paint, and make you look all over again at Frida and her brilliant and tragic life.” Jackie Kay,  The Observer

“Poems about paintings rarely set off fireworks, but this is ekphrasis with a difference: Petit speaks in Kahlo’s voice with eerie believability, animating her paintings with a behind-the-scenes narrative of romantic and reproductive woes, chronic pain after a bus crash, and the occasional moment of joy. ‘Whenever we make love, you say/it’s like fucking a crash –/I bring the bus with me into the bedroom’ (‘Remembrance of an Open Wound’)” Time Out London

What the Water Gave Me contains fifty-two poems in the voice of the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. Some of the poems are close interpretations of Kahlo’s work, while others are parallels or version homages where Petit draws on her experience as a visual artist to create alternative ‘paintings’ with words. More than just a verse biography, this collection explores how Kahlo transformed trauma into art after the artist’s near-fatal bus accident. Petit, with her vivid style, her feel for nature and her understanding of pain and redemption, fully inhabits Kahlo’s world. Each poem is an evocation of “how art works on the pain spectrum”, laced with splashes of ferocious colour.

“Their apparent shared sensibility makes the ventriloquism of these poems entirely unforced, and while Kahlo’s voice is subtly distinguished from Petit’s own, both women have a way of taking painful, private experiences and transmuting them, through imagery, into something that has the power of folklore. They capture the unsettling spirit of Frida Kahlo and her work perfectly.”Poetry London

“No other British poet I am aware of can match the powerful mythic imagination of Pascale Petit.” Les Murray, Times Literary Supplement

Pascale Petit’s latest collection of poetry ‘What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo’ has now been published by Black Lawrence Press in the US (April, 2011). 

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Petit Long Listed for Wales Book of the Year 2011

Pascale Petit’s collection of poetry What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo has been long listed for the Wales Book of the Year 2011.

What the Water Gave Me contains fifty-two poems in the voice of the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. Some of the poems are close interpretations of Kahlo’s work, while others are parallels or version homages where Petit draws on her experience as a visual artist to create alternative ‘paintings’ with words.

To view all long listed titles click here

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‘Understudies: New and Selected Poems’

Anne-Marie Fyfe – as is apparent in her Understudies: New and Selected Poems – is a subtle and engaging poet. She has developed much like a painter, spare themes moving towards a deeper complexity. Her earlier work includes quite a few domestic interiors; rooms recalled from an Irish childhood and stories told by parents and grandparents. Later poems often feature crucial or pitvotal moments in her life and the imagined lives of others: a significant conversation, the look a woman gives herself in the mirror when she’s about to leave her husband, the odour left in the air by a certain perfume. All this eventually evolves into her characteristic poem, a cityscape wrought with careful observation and melded with flashbacks of memory, both her own and including her family, and others, beautifully imagined. Her voice is direct, with a conversational tone that invites you into the narrative. This volume includes selections from her previous books:Late Crossing (1999), Tickets from a Blank Window (2002) – both from Rockingham Press, and The Ghost Twin (Peterloo, 2005).

Published by Seren in September 2010.

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‘Interstate’ Poem of the Week by Guardian Books

Author Anne-Marie Fyfe has had her poem ‘Interstate’ elected as poem of the week by Guardian Books Blog!

‘Interstate’ is taken from Fyfe’s 2010 collection Understudies: New and Selected Poems (available from Seren).

Carol Rumens, from the Guardian, says about Fyfe’s collection, “Set variously in London, the US and her native Northern Ireland, Fyfe’s poems have a certain ease and elasticity, even when their structure is regular, as here. The tone is cool, the language plain and unclassifiable. It’s as if travel between places had made it natural to combine associated poetic styles – lyric compression with a certain freedom of line and movement.”

Seren is delighted to have one of our poet’s recognised and congratulations to Anne-Marie Fyfe!

To read the ‘Poem of the Week’ article posted on Guardian Books Blog follow this link http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2011/apr/11/anne-marie-fyfe-interstate

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Anne-Marie Fyfe

Anne-Marie Fyfe was born in Ireland and now lives in West London. A poet,  creative-writing tutor, arts organiser (of the well-known Troubadour club events in London), she was recently Chair of the Poetry Society. She has read throughout the world at festivals and events and on BBC radio and television.

Anne-Marie Fyfe’s poems have a lyric clarity, an ontological accuracy and unflinching vigilance that is both spiritual and revelatory – Tom Paulin

Time, witness, flesh and remembrance – these poems play In the deep end of the pools of image and imagination A rich humanity informs Anne-Marie Fyfe’s new work. The vision is detailed, the voice rings true. – Thomas Lynch

Anne-Marie Fyfe reminds us of the skins we inhabit and shed – TLS (John Greening)

Books by Anne-Marie Fyfe
Understudies: New and Selected Poems


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Pascale Petit longlisted for Wales Book of the Year 2011

Pascale Petit’s collection of poetry What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo has been long listed for the Wales Book of the Year 2011.
What the Water Gave Me contains fifty-two poems in the voice of the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. Some of the poems are close interpretations of Kahlo’s work, while others are parallels or version homages where Petit draws on her experience as a visual artist to create alternative ‘paintings’ with words.
To view all log listed titles click here