Martin Shipton will launch his brand new title Poor Man’s Parliament at the Senedd (National Assembly building).
2011 is perhaps the most crucial year in the history of the National Assembly for Wales since the referendum to establish it in 1997 and the first elections in 1999. The timely publication of Poor Man’s Parliament provides through its record of the first ten years of the Assembly’s life and the issues that surface during that time. For author Martin Shipton, Chief Reporter at the Western Mail and a pro-devolutionist, the limited law-making powers and procedures of the original devolution settlement have been central. How could the Assembly work within these limitations? What tensions would result in between Cardiff and Westminster? Were all the political parties committed even to the powers available? Was democracy and government in Wales held back?
Shipton’s analysis is an eye-opening and informative exploration of what has been achieved and what might have been. And woven into the narrative of issues and government is a second, telling narrative of political machination and drama. The Assembly has had its fair share of eye-catching drama: the Alun Michael/Rhodri Morgan leadership election, the Mike German credit card incident, Ron Davies’s and Rod Richard’s private lives spilling into politics, the ongoing tensions at the top of Plaid Cymru, shock election results, Peter Law’s defection from Labour. And behind the scenes a reverse of Tory attitudes towards devolution, obstructiveness within the Labour Party in Wales and a Parliament in Westminster that either failed to understand Welsh devolution or tired to hang on to its powers despite the political settlement.
Those who think that nothing happens at the Assembly will read Poor Man’s Parliament and wonder how they could be so wrong.
Wednesday 16th Feb 6pm – Media Briefing Room, Senedd. Please email [email protected] for an invite.

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When Simon Hicks sent on to me an email from Karen McDowell in New Zealand I was intrigued. This is what Karen had written: “I wonder if you could pass on my address to Anne Cluysenaar. I believe my mother (Muriel Paxton) was her first children’s nurse in Belgium. I have a reference from Sybil Cluysenaar dated May 1938, 93 Groeselenberg, Uccle, Belgium.” As I was indeed born at that address in 1936 I emailed Karen. She sent a bunch of photos in reply. “Well the Internet is an amazing tool!”, she wrote, “ I have carried these bits and pieces around with me for years always thinking I must find out about these Cluysenaars! I have a few memories of mother talking about you and your family but of course as a child I didn’t listen properly! You probably won’t remember her – she was with you from January ’37 to May ’38.” It suddenly came to me that her mother Muriel Paxton might well be the nurse my mother had greatly admired and often in later years referred to as ‘Packy’. ‘Packy’ = Paxton? In subsequent exchanges we agreed this was likely. But why would my mother would have used a nick-name? I feel sure she must have known Muriel from the time when she herself trained in London as a nurse, but the details remain a mystery to both Karen and myself. And of course, Karen is right, I don’t remember her mother, and I’m struck by how the past may suddenly re-emerge, yet fail to re-emerge fully! and also by the thought that there must be images hidden in our brains to which we no longer have access. Most of the photos Karen sent were familiar from my own photo albums, but there was one I had never seen before – me, as a toddler, stepping out of a doorway:

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Did I never see this because it was taken with ‘Packy’s camera and kept by her?
 
Well, I am writing some diary-poems and this was my entry for January 5, addressed to Karen and trying to return some existence at least to the moment in the picture, a moment significant for us both:
 
She stands in a doorway, right knee raised
as if to step over an obstacle, up
an invisible stair…forward, anyway.
It must be Packy she’s looking at.
 
‘Packy’? A nick-name I still hear
in my mother’s voice, though I can’t see
what I saw then, as the nurse so admired
by my mother took this of the baby girl.
 
I wish I could pass to you, Karen, what must
still exist in my brain – your mother-to-be
a few feet away, crouching to catch
that moment of life, lost and forgotten.
 
Over seventy years since she straightened up
and I must have taken that step, but just now
the baby, me, grown up more or less,
at least takes this other, to meet you – her future.
 
 

Seren’s poetry reading series ‘First Thursday’ is back.
Join us at Chapter Arts Centre this Thursday, 3rd Feb for a ‘Poetry Wales Special’. Winner of the Poetry Wales ‘Purple Moose’ Competition Graham Clifford, is reading from his recently published pamphlet Welcome Back to the Country. Poetry Wales editor and author Zoë Skoulding will also be reading along side Graham.
Thursday Feb 3rd, 7.30pm, £2 Media Point Room, Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff.
Peter Finch will be reading at Chapter Arts Centre, March 3rd – click here
 

Derek Walcott won the 2010 T S Eliot Prize for Poetry with White Egrets. The winner was chosen from a field of ten highly-regarded poets, two of which were Pascale Petit and John Haynes, both published by Seren (2010).
The judges of this year’s Prize, Chair Anne Stevenson, reached their decision after months of deliberation and debate.
Anne Stevenson said “This year’s exceptionally strong and varied shortlist made it difficult to choose the winner.”
The winner was announced at the T S Eliot Prize award ceremony at the Wallace Collection on Monday 24th January.
Mrs Valerie Eliot presented the winner with a cheque for £15,000 and shortlisted poets received a cheque for £1,000 in recognition of their achievement in winning a place on the most prestigious shortlist in UK poetry.
The award ceremony was precede by the T S Eliot Prize Readings on Sunday 23rd January, which moved this year to the Royal Festival Hall, achieving a spectacular 2000 strong audience, wth twice as many tickets sold as the previous year.
Seren’s shortlisted poets were:
Pascale Petit What the Water Gave Me
John Haynes You

This years Ted Slade Award goes to  Peter Finch, poet, critic and Chief  Executive of Academi, the Welsh National Literature Promotion.  The award is given annually to a person who is, in the opinion of the selection panel, has given unstintingly of their time and efforts over many years to promote poetry to a wider audience.  Nominations for the award are made by members of Poetry Kit, and  the selection is made from suitable short listed nominations, by an   appointed selection panel.
Jim Bennett, who is a poet and Chair of Selectors, said, “Peter Finch has had a long and distinguished career, not only as a poet,  but also as editor, critic and in recent years as Chief Executive  of Academi, promoting literature. Peter has been an inspiration for  many years and this award is given to acknowledge the tremendous  contribution he has made to poetry.

In the week of 17-24 January, the run-up to the TS Eliot Prize announcement at the award ceremony, BBC Radio 4’s Today programme will broadcast one poem read by each of the ten poets on the shortlist, including Seren poets Pascale Petit (on the 17th) and John Haynes (on the 24th). They will also have a feature on the BBC Radio 4 Today website, where two poems per poet can be listened to.
On Sunday 23 January 2011, the eve of the judges’ decision, the T S Eliot Prize Readings will be staged at the Southbank’s Royal Festival Hall, after a complete sell-out last year in the Queen Elizabeth Hall. This grand new venue will provide a fantastic setting as all ten poets are invited to read from their shortlisted collections, making the Readings a unique opportunity to hear the best contemporary poets reading their own work.
The judging panel this year, chaired by Anne Stevenson with Michael Symmons Roberts and Bernardine Evaristo, have a strong shortlist to choose from – collections by Simon Armitage (last year’s chair of the judges), Annie Freud, John Haynes, Seamus Heaney, Pascale Petit, Robin Robertson, Fiona Sampson, Brian Turner, Derek Walcott and Sam Willetts.
Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road, London SE1 8XXwww.southbankcentre.co.uk/find/literature-spoken-word/tickets/ts-eliot-prize-readings-55582
Box office 0844 875 0073 or go to www.southbankcentre.co.uk to book online
Prices: £15 Concs 50% off

 

Signed Copies exclusive to Seren – Buy all four books for £30 (£24, if you join our online bookclub)
A woman made of flowers, secrets, murder and revenge, spaceships, giants, war games, romance, surfing and horse-riding home down the M4.
This autumn saw Seren launch two new titles in its much-praised New Stories from the Mabinogion series. Now we are offering readers the chance to buy a limited edition set of signed copies of all the four novellas in the series to date, at a specially reduced price of £30.00.
The series launched last year with The Ninth Wave by Russell Celyn Jones and White Ravens by Owen Sheers, and continued in 2010 with two excellent new titles: The Meat Tree by Gwyneth Lewis and The Dreams of Max and Ronnie by Niall Griffiths.
New Stories from the Mabinogion gives leading Welsh authors the chance to retell these medieval stories of Celtic mythology and Arthurian Britain in entirely their own way, creating fresh, contemporary novellas while keeping the old tales at the heart of the new. The results so far have been an excellent collection of diverse and dynamic stories from writers at the height of their powers.
The Ninth Wave by Russell Celyn Jones takes the story of young Welsh ruler ‘Pwyll, Lord of Dyfed’ and mixes it with elements of our own Prince Harry, to come up with this meditation on leadership and loss. Set in a bizarre, post-oil world of the near future the story swops the magical for the psychological and the courtly for the post-feminist to create a fascinating retelling of this first branch of the Mabinogion in which Pwll has to swop beds with the Lord of the Underworld, kill his future wife’s fiancé and deal with the loss of his own child.
Based on the second branch of the Mabinogion, ‘Branwen, daughter of Llyr’, Owen Sheers’ White Ravens offers the reader two stories across two different times, with the thread of an ancient tale running through the lives of twenty-first century farmer’s daughter Rhian and the mysterious Branwen…
Wounded in Italy, Matthew O’Connell is seeing out WWII in a secret government department. But then he’s given the bizarre task of escorting a box containing six raven chicks from a remote hill farm in Wales to the Tower of London and he becomes part of a story over which he seems to have no control.
Desire, DNA, incest, bestiality, revenge, shape-shifting and flowers – Gwyneth Lewis’ The Meat Tree, based on the story of ‘Blodeuwedd’ in the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogion, could be said to have it all. In Lewis’ hands this tale becomes a thrilling and subtle whodunit set on board an ancient spaceship. For the first time in centuries readers get Blodeuwedd’s take on the story as she becomes human at the whim of two male magicians. And after all… what man has any idea how sap burns in the veins of a woman?
There’s war and carnage in The Dreams of Max and Ronnie, and Iraq-bound squaddie Ronnie is out with his mates ‘forgetting what has yet to happen’. Their revelries take them to the ‘filthy hovel’ of Red Helen, where Ronnie takes something dodgy and falls asleep to dream of the tattooed tribes of modern Britain surrounding a grinning man playing war games.
This radical retelling of ‘Rhonabwy’s Dream’, is combined with an equally lively account of ‘The Dream of Maxen Wledig’, set in a Cardiff nightclub called Rome. Told with his customary skill and vigour, Griffiths’ retellings revitalise ancient satire into a biting commentary on leadership, conflict and the divisions in British society.

John Barnie will launch his latest title Fire Drill: Notes on the Twenty-First Century, published by Seren. Hot off the press, it is sure to attract attention because of its hard hitting style.
 
Based in Cardiff, Steve Garrett has been involved in many musical collaborations. Now, he returns to his guitar roots, creating songs for our challenging times, whilst paying homage to musicians such as Mose Allison, Dan Hick and Richard Thompson.
But the whole point of the Green Room is collaboration and stimulation. So expect John Barnie, who plays in a blues band called, ‘The Delta Planes’, to also pick up a guitar. And it won’t be a surprise to hear Steve Garrett give voice to his own trenchant political and environmental opinions.
Both Barnie and Garrett are blesses with things to say. What’s certain is they won’t hold back from sharing them.
Sustainable Wales is delighted to welcome both performers to Porthcawl. For a stimulating evening, come along!
Entrance £3 on the door! 
The ‘Green Room’, 41 John Street  Porthcawl – Sustainable Wales office. 3 December 8pm £3

 ‘When I asked my dad about Warrenpoint’ from Siobhan Campbell’s book Cross-Talk, has been chosen by the Forward judges for inclusion in The Forward Book of Poetry 2011 just out from Faber. This poem was first published by Bernard O’Donoghue in Oxford Magazine. Siobhan is giving a Christmas reading from her work on December 16th at Galway City Library, 7.30pm, as part of Galway’s Over the Edge Reading Series

Join Mike Jenkins and Paul Henry at our final First Thursday poetry session of 2010, on 2nd December.
Mike will be reading from his latest collection Moor Music and Paul Henry will read from The Brittle Sea, his recently published collection of new and selected poems.

Followed by an Open Mic session for all poetry enthusiasts to showcase their work.
2nd December, 7.30pm. Media Point, Chapter Arts Centre, Canton Cardiff. £2 entry.
First Thursday is supported by Academi.