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Friday Poem – ‘On Suitors’ by Katrina Naomi

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘On Suitors’ by Katrina Naomi from her collection Wild Persistence.

This cover shows a black and white photo of three dancers in 1940s style dress jumping with toes pointed. They are facing each other in a circle with their arms stretched out. The text reads: Wild Persistence, Katrina Naomi

Katrina Naomi’s this collection Wild Persistence is a confident and persuasive collection of poems. From the first poem we are warned to be on guard for the off-guard, to suspend our expectations of pure realism and to stay awake for what comes next. Though never didactic, the poetic voice convinces us of the need to live well, to take time to celebrate, dance, make love, embrace the outdoors, muse over the biography of someone admirable, make a stand for feminism.

On Suitors
Emily Dickinson had the right idea
speaking with her suitors through a door
seeking to be swayed not by gifts or looks
but by the qualities of a voice –
what a person has to say, the essence
of intonation, distilled with wit and intelligence.
To listen, to listen only, and imagine
the kind of man or woman
outside. And I think of Skype, the similarities
of talking without pixilation’s dull entreaties
to see and be seen. I am freeing
myself in this lovely prison of my making.
I prefer isolation. And when they come,
I stay in my room, leave them
at the foot of the stairs; I stay alone,
I’m not being rude but I choose to listen
to the syntax, the accent, the colour
of a voice, not to be wooed by a suitor,
how they choose to show
themselves, how they modify or allow
their words to be uttered, whether they are found
worth listening to, whether they listen in return.
There are those who’ve tried thrusting
photos under doors, onto screens. The good looking
I won’t tolerate, let alone the rest. I do not discriminate.
I’ll allow a suitor to ruminate –
briefly. I want to fall in love with a voice
and then – only then – decide on a face.
You’re welcome to whisper at a keyhole,
to speak by the pale green wall.
Without mystery there can be no drunkenness
of love. And you may have guessed –
like Emily – I’ve no real interest in release.

Wild Persistence is available on the Seren website: £9.99

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Watch Katrina Naomi read ‘Poem in Which She Wears Her Favourite Wedding Dress’

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Friday Poem – ‘Politics of Water’ by Peter Finch

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Politics of Water’ by Peter Finch. Originally published in his 1996 collection Math, it now features in Volume One of his newly published Collected Poems.

This cover features a photo of a geometric concrete sculpture made up of hexagons. The text reads: Peter Finch Collected Poems One 1968-1997

Peter Finch’s remarkable career spans over fifty years. He has been taking poetry to places it didn’t know it wanted to go from the beginning; blending the avant-garde, concrete, visual, sound, performance and more conventional forms to create something unique. His new two-volume Collected Poems, edited by Andrew Taylor, cement his reputation as one of Britain’s leading poets.

This cover features a photo of a geometric concrete sculpture made up of hexagons. The text reads: Peter Finch Collected Poems Two 1997-2021

Volume One brings together work from long lost chapbooks, broadsheets and limited editions, as well as more conventionally published work. Volume Two focuses on the second half of Finch’s career with poems from later collections sitting alongside works from his prose books and those engraved in the public realm on sculptures, walls and buildings, particularly in his native Cardiff. Nerys Williams and Ian McMillan provide appreciative forewords to each volume.

POLITICS OF WATER
there (here) are (were) places (pimples) in (on)
Wales (wheels) I (we) don’t (can’t) go (gone)
reservoirs (places) that (this) are (will be) the (a)
subconscious (subterranean) (subtotal) (subliminal)
(superfluous) (serenity) of (in) (on) a (the)
people (people). Here (where) were (will be)
pimples (scars) (gouges) (savage stripes)
on (in) wheels (fields) (folds) I (you) (we)
can’t (can) (cannot) gone (grown) (green)
places (princes) (parsons) (people) this
(those) will be (will not) a (the)
subterranean (terminal) (termination) (treeless)
invasion (inversion) in (of) the (the) people
(person) (personal) (private) (so private)
(so personal) (only) it is (never) not (yours)
(mine) (moan) (theirs) (his) (hers) (ours) (whose)
dig (dirge) (deep) (down) (down) (down)

Order the Collected Poems Complete Set on the Seren website for £30.00, or buy them individually for £19.99 each.

We launched the Collected Poems at Jury’s Inn in Cardiff earlier this week. Watch the live stream recording on demand on our AM channel now amam.cymru/seren.

Photos by John Briggs.

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Friday Poem – ‘Rhys’ by Rhian Edwards

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Rhys’ by Rhian Edwards from her collection Clueless Dogs.

This cover shows a cartoon collage of a Dalmatian. The text reads Clueless Dogs Rhian Edwards.

Clueless Dogs is the multi-award-winning debut collection by Rhian Edwards. Full of verve and humour, Rhian Edwards’ language has a winning honesty and intensity. 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’. Later poems explore 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 to this remarkable collection.

Rhys
Like the time you invited me inside
the ottoman on the landing
and sat on the lid laughing
while I scratched and screamed at the wood.
Or when the babysitter wasn’t looking,
you taught me the quickest way to add nine,
showed me to tie my laces with the tale
of two rabbits disappearing down a hole.
Like the day you caught the slow-worm
that tried to whip away the sun,
letting it loose into the folds
of the blanket that I held like a lover.
Not to mention the crimes I invented
for which I never knew you were beaten,
or that summer you took away the stabilisers
to be the sole witness to me riding away.
Like the times I spied in your bedroom,
played your records and fanned open your books,
only to slip between the sheets
with a nakedness meant only for bath time.

Clueless Dogs is available on the Seren website: £9.99

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Michael O’Brien featured in new TV documentary British Injustice with Raphael Rowe

Colour photo of Michael O'Brien. He is wearing a white shirt and glasses.

Michael O’Brien was notoriously falsely imprisoned for the murder of a Cardiff newsagent in 1988. His sentence was overturned in 1999 and he successfully sued South Wales Police, eventually receiving a large financial compensation in 2006.
On 23rd May, Crime + Investigation airs a new two-part crime documentary called British Injustice with Raphael Rowe. Episode one examines O’Brien’s case, that of the so-called ‘Cardiff Newsagent Three’, taking an in depth look at the investigation that led to the conviction, and wrongful imprisonment, of O’Brien and his co-defendants Ellis Sherwood and Darren Hall.
O’Brien has previously written extensively about his case, most recently in his book The Dossier. He is also a campaigner against miscarriages of justice and The Dossier also details nine other miscarriages of justice in South Wales between 1988 and 2016. 
British Injustice will premier exclusively on Crime + Investigation at 9pm on Monday 23rd May. The episode reveals shocking police threats and coercion that led to the arrest and incarceration of the three men accused. Plus, for the first time ever, the victim’s sister and nephew break a 35-year silence and reveal exclusive insights into the case.
The presenter Raphael Rowe also spent 12 years in prison for a crime he did not commit, and fronts the popular Netflix series Inside the World’s Toughest Prisons. Episode two of the show looks at the unjust conviction of John Kamara who spent 19 years in prison for the shocking killing of Liverpool betting shop manager John Suffield.
In each episode, Rowe unveils the investigations that shattered the lives of the wrongfully accused and unveils the repeated failures within the British criminal justice system.
British Injustice with Raphael Rowe will premiere on Crime+Investigation on 23rd May at 9pm and will be available to stream on C+I PLAY from the 24th May crimeandinvestigation.co.uk/play

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Friday Poem – ‘Samuel Taylor Colderidge Walking from the Queen’s Head…’ by Jonathan Edwards

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Samuel Taylor Coleridge Walking from The Queen’s Head…’ by Jonathan Edwards from his collection Gen.

This cover shows a colourful painting of a street scene croweded with people. The text reads: Gen, Jonathan Edwards

Gen is a book of lions and rock stars, street parties and servants, postmen and voices. In the opening sequence’s exploration of youth and young manhood, the author sets his own Valleys upbringing against the 50s youth of his parents and the experience of a range of pop culture icons, including Kurt Cobain and Harry Houdini. These poems give way to a sequence of monologues and character sketches, giving us the lives of crocodiles and food testers, pianists and retail park trees.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge Walking
from The Queen’s Head, Gray’s Inn,
to Hornsby’s and Co., Cornhill, to Buy
an Irish Lottery Ticket, November 1793
At twenty-one, he needs something big to happen
to cover his bar tab, run up trying to escape
thought of his debts. What his life is going like
is this: the blown scholarship
nothing that can’t be dealt with
by opium; ladies with abracadabra
clothes to make the girl who will not love
disappear. A night
of weighing up options: on one hand,
the army, in the other,
a pistol. Then drunken inspiration, a solution
to his life and here he is, on his way,
inventing a new walk –
the wobble-stride. He’s walking, walking,
writing in his head To Fortune, a poem
to read whose rhyming couplets
is to hear him walking
now. A month or two and his brother
will clear his debts,
a day or so and his lottery ticket
will lie in a ditch, a couple of weeks
and To Fortune will appear in The Morning Chronicle,
his first published poem, and they’ll pay a guinea,
which he’ll try – and find it good –
against his teeth.

Gen is available on the Seren website: £9.99

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