Pascale Petit will be reading from What the Water Gave Me, at the Cheltenham Poetry Festival. A poetry collection containing fifty-two poems in the voice of the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. Some of the poems are close interpretations of Kahlo’s work, others are parallels or version homages where Petit draws on her experience as a visual artist to create alternative ‘paintings’ with words.
Saturday 2nd April 1.30-2.30pm YMCA, Swindon Road, Cheltenham GL50 4AZ. Please visit Cheltenham Poetry Festival for more information.
Also Pascale Petit will read at Bath Spa University Stand Up Poetry Series Reading Monday 11th April 8pm. Want to know more? Click here
Bruce Cardwell
Bruce Cardwell’s connection with horses goes back to his childhood in Ireland. A long career in the world of the horse includes work with organisations as various as William Hill and the National Trust, a stud farm in the Cotswolds, a millionaire’s stables in Greece and a rest home for horses in Buckinghamshire. He has also trained show-jumpers and owned horses to ride and drive. He has lived in West Wales for many years and is now resident in Aberystwyth
Books by Bruce Cardwell
‘Noteworthy’
Noteworthy
Author:
Music makers are the focus of Bruce Cardwell latest book of black and white reportage and portrait photography. Practitioners of acoustic and vocal music – folk, gospel, opera, choral, classical and ethnic – in Wales as the start of the twenty first century make a rich and diverse gallery of talent. Cardwell’s subjects range from harpists Catrin Finch and Elinor Bennett, through Bryn Terfel, conductor Owain Arwel Hughes and Incredible String Band songwriter Robin Williamson to Welsh bagpipers, hurdy gurdy players, harpmakers, and African drummers in Newbridge and steel bands in Carmarthen.
Due for release on 4th April 2011.
Bruce Cardwell Launches Noteworthy – Machynlleth
Bruce Cardwell will exhibit a selection of pictures from the Noteworthy: Images of Welsh Music project at Moma Wales. Mavis Nicholson will open the exhibition at 12pm Saturday 2nd April 2011.
Bruce Cardwell will then celebrate the publication of Noteworthy at 1pm at Y Tabernacl auditorium and will be signing books early afternoon. Robin Huw Bowen will be playing the triple harp, Bowen’s influence on the worlds of Welsh folk music and harping has been far-reaching.
For more information please visit www.momawales.org.uk or call 01654 703355
Bruce Cardwell author of Hoofpicks: Photographs of Horse in Wales, is also celebrating a birthday concert at Y Tabernaci, 8th April which includes an excellent programme of Celtic Music.
Grahame Davies
Grahame Davies is a poet and a critic in Welsh and English, and is a winner of the Wales Book of the Year Award. His work includes the novel, Everything Must Change, and The Chosen People, an anthology about Wales and Judaism. He has a PhD from Cardiff University, where he is an Honorary Research Fellow, and has been awarded an Hon. DLitt from Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge. His next book of poetry, The Complete Ind Grahame ex of Welsh Emotion, is forthcoming from Seren. Grahame was born in Wrexham but lives now in Cardiff.
Books by Grahame Davies
‘The Dragon and the Crescent’
The Dragon and the Crescent
Nerys Williams debut poetry collection ‘Sound Archive’
Sound Archive by Nerys Williams has arrived into the Seren office this morning.
A striking 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, andpoems 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’.
Available now at www.serenbooks.com – Join our online book club and get 20% off every purchase, including Sound Archive.
WIN a proof copy of Tony Bianchi’s latest novel ‘Daniel’s Beetles’
We are giving away 5 proof copies of Tony Bianchi’s latest novel Daniel’s Beetles, 10 weeks before official publication. Daniel’s Beetles is the author’s translation of his prizewinning Welsh novel, Pryfeta. Daniel’s Beetles is an absorbing, unnerving novel about memory and forgetting, stories and lies. It describes our attempts to recreate ourselves in ways we can never fully control.
All you have to do is write Daniel’s Beetles in the subject line of an email and send to [email protected]
Closing date is 4th April 2011. See Terms & Conditions
Ruth Bidgood
Ruth Bidgood was born in Blaendulais, near Neath, educated at Oxford, and worked as a coder in Alexandria, Egypt in World War Two. She has lived in mid-Wales since the mid-sixties. The author of several prize-winning volumes of poetry, she also writes local history.
Books by Ruth Bidgood
New and Selected Poems
Selected Poems
Singing to Wolves
The Fluent Moment
Time Being
The Roland Mathias Prize 2011
SHORTLISTED FOR THE ROLAND MATHIAS PRIZE
Seren author Ruth Bidgood has been shortlisted for the Roland Mathias Prize 2011.
The event which will take place 7.oopm Friday 8th April, The Guildhall Brecon, recognises works published in the fields of poetry, short stories, literary criticism and Welsh history.
The event hosted by BBC Cymru/Wales will include readings by the shortlisted authors.
A Poetry Book Society Recommendation.
Time Being is Ruth Bidgood’s 10th collection in a career that spans almost 40 years. It has been said, rightly, that Bidgood’s work is ‘emphatically a poetry of location’ and it is the history and nature of her particular region of mid-Wales that most inspire the author. Her narratives are often literally exploratory and discursive as in ‘Viewpoint’ where a walk in the countryside revives both personal memories and knowledge of the stories associated with a place. Her distinctive voice has a quiet authority but also a subtle, conspiratory edge, as if she is letting one in on a secret, unveiling a hidden fact, or making a discovery. She avoids sentimentality, but – unfashionably – not sentiment; an observation can engender joy or sorrow or fear uncluttered by irony. Her descriptions are sharp and memorable, tending to a cool accuracy. Nature is not always a benign presence but also often inescapably dark and mysterious as in’ Illusion’ where “A goshawk climbs a tower of air and is gone”. Also notable here are several substantial sequences: ‘Gaps’, ‘Time Being’, ‘Reading a Landscape’. These are ambitious attempts to transcend the lyric and move towards a more epic, multi-faceted form equal to the many experiences of her long life.
