Seren Books, Author at Seren

Posted on February 21, 2025February 14, 2025 by Seren Books

Friday Poem – ‘The Migration of Ghosts’ by Maggie Harris

Photo of a light house flashing across the rock in the night.

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘The Migration of Ghosts’ by Maggie Harris from her collection I Sing to the Greenhearts.

The Migration of Ghosts
In the country where I was born they said the dead couldn’t swim
and migration frees you from their ghosts, their constant whimpering
on what you should or shouldn’t have done. There in the land
of massacre there’s still a scramble to leave, body or no body and some
of them hitch rides on mobile phones or tankers while some try floating
as they heard it might help with questions of identification.
I saw them myself in the Azores, their bones granulated
to form coral and even undersea they gleam with what
one might describe as a wavering hue. But I was young then
and fanciful, and not everything I say is true.
Here in my final years I could live nowhere but the sea. I tried
the country once and all it did was eat me. So I’ve managed
to build a body without bones and these sea breezes are my constant,
dress me at their whim, disguise my intent. The jewellery I wear is free.
I walk these sands every Thursday and listen to the echoes
of my empty feet. The birds can hear it too, even the gulls avoid me.
The deafness of old age is misdiagnosed: what’s happening is
your hearing is actually sharper, just not the things you want to hear.
But you don’t have to believe me, not everything I say is true.
You don’t want to hear the desperate bitterness of crabs or imagine
the beautiful bones of the boy you loved sprinkled across
a foreign shore or incarcerated in some fancy casket his family insisted
he have. Still, I listen out for him every Thursday, watching the waves.
I sealed his death with a kiss, he has to find me. Sometimes I come
to see the lighthouse flash, it reminds me of voyages I wish I’d taken
or those I didn’t. In the end all we can do is walk and carry the sands
on our feet to leave at the doors of the lonely. But don’t
listen to me, I was always being accused of too much fancy.

Posted on February 19, 2025February 14, 2025 by Seren Books

Guest post: Emily Cotterill – Now That’s What I Call ‘Significant Wow’

Close up photo of cassette tapes laid out on a table.

In today’s guest post, Emily Cotterill shares her playlist ‘Now That’s What I Call Significant Wow’ and muses on the musical influences which have shaped her as a person and a poet.

Now That’s What I Call Significant Wow

‘Two lovers missing the tranquility of solitude’ in a lyric alongside ‘a pneumatic drill and ripped up concrete’ is almost exactly the energy I want from Significant Wow, it’s a shame Paul Weller came up with that before I was born.

It’s probably not the wisest thing to say, but I’ve deliberated more over the playlist to accompany this collection than some of the poems themselves. I’ve always hated answering the question ‘what kind of music do you like?’ partly because it’s so hard to answer, partly because of my lack of self-confidence, and partly because the only people who were happy about my answer were men at least a decade older than me in pubs. This playlist isn’t quite an answer to that question but it definitely gets into the ball-park of an answer. The fact that there’s a whole collection of poetry to sit alongside it makes it easier somehow, the book gives me something to back myself up with.

There’s music directly referenced in Significant Wow that isn’t on the playlist, partly because I don’t know how to reconcile ‘Come On Eileen’, ‘Mustang Sally’ and the ‘Grease Megamix’ and partly because the things that are more important are the things that are pointed at rather than named – Pulp’s kitchen sink lyrics, women in punk, David Bowie screaming ‘give me your hands ’cos you’re wonderful’. I set out to write a collection focused on celebrity and storytelling. In a lot of ways Significant Wow is that, but I also think it’s the evolution of my teenage scrapbook, I’m showing myself who I am and hopefully other people will see themselves in the poems and maybe in this playlist as well.

Other than children’s stuff (shout out to ‘Please Mrs Butler’) and the books for school, I didn’t really properly read poetry for a long time. I was a classic sixth form poet, guilty of writing without reading but I was definitely listening. Bits of lyrics always stuck in my head. From ‘Life On Mars?’ “girl with the mousey hair” to the unexpected “microwave ovens” and “colour TVs” in Dire Straits’ ‘Money for Nothing’ or the deeply unexpected use of the word “facsimile” in ‘Love Me For A Reason’ (the Boyzone version thank you, I was born in the 90s), I was always paying attention to lyrics in a way that I’ve relatively recently realised other people were not. There’s a broad musical theme running through this playlist but alongside that there are, I think, some really great words.

It’s a fundamental fact of my existence that I’m a Manics fan. I could have ripped up the whole playlist and given you a few hours of them. I think if you didn’t love something deeply and completely as a teenager you can never know what it was like, and if you did then you really don’t need telling that I am who I am because of them. Two Manics songs, and a bonus appearance of James Dean Bradfield alongside Public Service Broadcasting, made it onto this playlist because it was thematically sensible. Then there’s ‘So Dead’ which had to be there because of how it spoke to me as a sad, bookish, intellectually arrogant girl in a left behind town – “you’re going to pay for my intelligence”.

Emily Cotterill