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Friday Poem – ‘The Park in the Afternoon’ by Dai George

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘The Park in the Afternoon’ by Dai George from his collection Karaoke King.

The cover of Karaoke King shows a drawing of a teenage boy wearing a red and brown stripped vest and white shirt. His glasses are crooked and he is wearing a crumpled yellow crown.

Dai George’s confident second collection Karaoke King, addresses the contentious nature of the times. Always deeply thoughtful but also alternately ebullient, angry, curious, ashamed, the poet moves through urban and digital spaces feeling both uneasy and exhilarated. There is a feeling of history shifting, as a younger generation confronts its ethical obligations, its sense of complicity and disappointment. Ecological crisis hovers in the background. Karaoke King also contains numerous reflections on popular culture, culminating in ‘A History of Jamaican Music’, a sequence at the heart of the volume speaking to urgent contemporary questions of ownership and privilege, pain and celebration. 

The Park in the Afternoon By the goats, a high-vis warden tweezers litter with glacial care. Men bear tins of Scrumpy Jack aloft to salute Ol’ Blue Eyes as he spreads the news from a battered tape machine. Their conductor lies down in the grass crafting languorous signals from a spliff. On the lunchtime news, a minister reviled my productivity: sleepwalking into a crisis is how he described the nation’s plight when output fails to tack with growth. Watching a duckling wobble afloat as sun glints, useless, on the pond, I see his point. Diverse and splendid things have brought us here, we heathens in the Christendom to come. The drunk, the retired, the roistering lads bunking off early with blazer sleeves riding up their arms – each of us truant, and gentle for an hour, our output no more than what we can make of the angle of hurried daylight before a shower.

Karaoke King is available on the Seren website: £9.99

Create your free Seren account and enjoy 20% off every book you buy direct from us.

Catch Dai George reading from Karaoke King alongside Ilse Pedler, Sarona Abuaker & Jeremy Dixon at Seren Cardiff Poetry Festival on Friday 29th July in Published During the Pandemic. Tickets are on sale here www.cardiffpoetryfestival.com/tickets-22.

Earlier this year, Dai George put together a playlist of songs that tie in with poems from Karaoke King. Take a look here.

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Friday Poem – Page 35 from ‘Witch’ by Damian Walford Davies

This week’s Friday Poem is taken from Witch by Damian Walford Davies. This continuous narrative poem conjures a thrilling portrait of a Suffolk village in the throes of the witchcraft hunts of the mid-seventeenth century.

This cover shows a red sketchy print of a monkey sitting on a table beside a lamp. The text reads: Damian Walford Davies Witch.

With the narrative pull of a novel and the vibrancy of a play for voices, the poems in this collection are dark spells, compact and moving: seven sections, each of seven poems, each of seven couplets, are delivered by those most closely involved in the ‘making’ of a witch. The speakers authentically conjure a war-torn society in which religious paranoia amplifies local grievances to fever pitch. Damian Walford Davies’s Witch is a damning parable that chimes with the terror and anxieties of our own haunted age.

We were eeling in the fingers of the creek, drawing knots of muscle from the rushwork creels, a silty tidemark just above the knees. We watched him loll along the boards, lank sprays of loosestrife in his hands. Clem dropped her trussed skirt on the tide, two eels flailing round her wrists, quickening water lapping at our legs. He saw us, held his poor posy out. Love! he said. I couldn’t say to which.

Witch is available on the Seren website: £8.99

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Friday Poem – ‘Still’ by Christopher Meredith

This week’s Friday Poem is the title poem ‘Still’ from Christopher Meredith’s collection of the same name. Christopher was recently interviewed by Nawr magazine about his poetry and fiction. You can read the issue online via their website.

This cover shows a painting of a winter landscape looked on from far away, the tiny trees visible in the fields. The black branches of a tree are visible in the foreground with a single black crow amongst the branches. The text reads: Still Christopher Meredith.

Christopher Meredith’s new poetry collection Still, uses the title word as a fulcrum to balance various paradoxical concerns: stillness and motion, memory and forgetting, sanity and madness, survival and extinction. Lively and thought-provoking, this is a beautifully crafted, humane and intelligent collection.

“Lyrical, always surprising… His perfect ear tunes in so precisely” – Paul Henry

Still At the banister above you an old man stands in long johns like you’ll never see again except in films, backlit by an open door smiling and lifting a slow hand and you are forever in slow motion sailing down the narrow stairs. Your eyes are rolling up to watch his head inclining gently as you go. That’s all. Rerun it. Look again. He lifts a hand that’s bossed and broad. He smiles and pinpoints of white stubble light the folding cheek. The moustache shifts. No no, they say. You never saw him. He couldn’t stand, and you were far too young. But you did. He could. And were you cradled down the darkening drift, a babe in arms? Again. That backlight is the sun. Same hand slowly raised, same slow-inclining head, same kind smile, his shape at the handrail this time hunched like a passenger who’s slipping from the quay too courteous yet to turn back to the glare of the final room, though he hungers to, and will. Memory is the still of slow forgetting, the black and aching decades boiled to air, cooled to this crawling droplet in the pipe moving still and still in this suspension rolling on its empty convolutions to catch and lose a world in hard white light.

Still is available on the Seren website: £9.99

Still was published simultaneously with Christopher’s latest novel Please. You can buy them as a set on our website for £15.00.

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Friday Poem – ‘Iraqi Bride in Transit’ by Abeer Ameer

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Iraqi Bride in Transit’ by Abeer Ameer from her debut collection Inhale/Exile which has just been shortlisted for the Wales Book of the Year!

Cardiff-based poet Abeer Ameer writes of her forebears in her first collection, Inhale/Exile. Dedicated to the “holders of these stories”, the book begins with a poem about a storyteller on a rooftop in Najaf, Iraq, follows tales of courage and survival, and ends with a woman cooking food for neighbours on the anniversary of her son’s death.

Iraqi Bride in Transit She’s nineteen, waits in Charles de Gaulle airport unsure where to go. She hopes that Groom comes for her soon. Her first experience of a plane journey hasn’t been Oh là là. Far from her Baghdad home, her white suit is not so white now. It’s the first time she wears high heels; she has blisters, struggles to balance. She wears her mother’s fur coat, a white headscarf, white clutch bag holds her green passport. Feels bare without her abaya. Groom waits in Heathrow arrivals. It’s 23rd December 1974. Three flights have arrived from Paris in the last eight hours. No sign of her. Iraqi Christians who boarded the same plane from Baghdad waiting for their New York flight recognise she’s the bride, take her to the gate. Last flight before Christmas. He is pupil. He do drugs. She rolls her Rs. Groom’s lost hope. It’s late. He gets up, ready to leave Heathrow, gathers coins to make the international call. What will he tell her father? Announcement. Groom is summoned to Immigration. Your wife says you do drugs. He realises at that moment he should have taught his bride the correct English term for pharmacy student.

Inhale/Exile is available on the Seren website: £9.99

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Voting is now open for the Wales Book of the Year People’s Choice Award. Head to the Wales Arts Review website to vote for your favorite www.walesartsreview.org.