Simon appleby, Author at Seren

Posted on April 1, 2016 by Simon appleby

Enter our poetry books giveaway to win two new collections

We are celebrating the launch of two fantastic new books, Crowd Sensations by Judy Brown and Masculine Happiness by David Foster-Morgan, by giving you the chance to win a copy of each! All you have to do is sign up to our newsletter here before 1st May 2016 and you’ll be entered into the prize draw.

Read below to find out more about the book launch as well as the books themselves…

Join Judy Brown and David Foster-Morgan at The Yorkshire Grey for a dual poetry book launch, celebrating the release of both Judy’s Crowd Sensations and David’s Masculine Happiness. Both poets will be reading from their new collections, and there will be opportunities to ask questions and request signed copies of the books. The event will take place between 19:00 and 21:00 on Tuesday 19th April, 2016 at The Yorkshire Grey in London. You can find more details on our website.

Crowd Sensations, Judy Brown
Poet Judy Brown’s new collection is a worthy follow-up to her Forward Prize-nominated debut, Loudness. Brown is a poet of dazzling contrasts, of thoughtful paradox, intimate confidences and precise evocations.
Read more

Masculine Happiness, David Foster-Morgan
The provocative debut poetry collection this Cardiff-based poet. Born and based in Wales, Foster-Morgan has long been a presence in the poetry world, having had poems published widely in magazines and with appearances at workshops, festivals, and events.
Read more

One lucky winner will be chosen at random from all our subscribers on 1st May 2016, so if you would like a copy of each of these lovely poetry collections in your bookcase then hurry and sign up for our newsletter before the end of the month.

Posted on April 1, 2016 by Simon appleby

Friday Poem – Flamingos

Our Friday poem is from the Costa Award-winning book of poetry, My Family and Other Superheroes, by Jonathan Edwards. It is titled ‘Flamingos’ and is being turned into a dance! The humor of the poem makes for an ideal April Fools’ Day piece for all to enjoy.

My Family and Other Superheroes introduces a vibrant and unique new voice from Wales. The superheroes in question are a motley crew. Evel Knievel, Sophia Loren, Ian Rush, Marty McFly, a bicycling nun and a recalcitrant hippo – all leap from these pages and jostle for position, alongside valleys mams, dads and bamps, described with great warmth. Other poems focus on the crammed terraces and abandoned high streets where a working-class and Welsh nationalist politics is hammered out. This is a post-industrial valleys upbringing re-imagined through the prism of pop culture and surrealism.

Flamingos

Who spray-painted the swans? You dilly–dally, 
       shilly-shally in the shallow end
on Meccano legs, your day a foot massage, 
       curve your neck into a clothes hanger
            for your rose-hue tutu and your feather boa.

You’re every little girl’s dream, a shock, a flock 
       of neon signs, advertising candyfloss.
Why do you blush so much? Each time you eat,
       you have to kiss the you-shaped bird who floats
            in the lake surface, steal food from its throat.

February. Outside’s a place of grey
       line managers, timetabled rain, the bus.
But with your silly-billy,Vegas waitress, 
       camouflage-for-a-world-of-joy body,
            Fuck that, you say, let’s all be fabulous.


Buy your copy now.

Posted on April 1, 2016 by Simon appleby

Rhian Elizabeth wins Second Prize Story Award in Terry Hetherington Young Writers Award 2016

Rhian Elizabeth has won the Second Prize Story Award in the Terry Hetherington Young Writers Award 2016, for her short story ‘The Runners’.
The Terry Hetherington Young Writers Award celebrates the talent of young writers of poetry and prose.
There will be an awards ceremony on Friday 24th June at the Dylan Thomas Centre, Swansea, 7:00 pm. There will be a selection of young writers from past winners, and 2016 entries. Last year’s winner Natalie Ann Holborow will present this year’s winners with their cheques. Everyone is welcome to attend.

Posted on March 25, 2016 by Simon appleby

Friday Poem – Denominations

As we are now approaching Easter, our Friday poem this week will be from Damian Walford-Davies’ Judas.

In short-lined, intensely suggestive dramatic monologues, Damian Walford-Davies vividly summons moments of fear and swagger, doubt and passion, despair and nonchalance as an outlaw Judas finds himself haunted by his chequered and extraordinary past. Familiar stories are rendered strange and uncanny as the reader is caught in multiple ironies. As striking as the unnerving images on the news loops of our TV and computer screens, these poems locate us on the hazardous streets of a divided city with a companion-guide who shares with us his own troubling and troubled version of history.

Drawing on conflicting representations of Judas spanning twenty centuries, this chain of poems sets out to challenge orthodoxies and easy pieties. Judas offers an imaginative map of ancient enmities – and dares to hint at resolutions – in the form of a dramatic autobiography of the man whose most famous act (they say) was a kiss in the dark.

Denominations

You’ll paint me gross – 
gripping my shins, 
retching silver coins.

Let me put you straight. 
All I’ve got’s loose change 
for late-night kofta stands

outside the Lions’ Gate, 
where tote-bag tourists 
sip tart tamarind

from paper cups.
On Friday night I saw the city 
wane and wax to pixels

on the screens of untold 
mobile phones. From unbuilt 
minarets, muezzins hoist

the pale Passover moon 
above the gospel
 of the Separation Wall.

Buy your copy now.

Posted on March 24, 2016 by Simon appleby

An Easter Egg from Seren

Happy Easter everyone! We have a special Easter egg on the website for you: 30% off books across the Seren store.

The Easter holiday carries with it the message of new beginnings, so why not begin a new book? Our 30% offer includes our gorgeous poetry, fiction and non-fiction titles, so there is something for everyone.

We hope you find something new to bury your nose in this Easter.

Offer ends midnight, Monday 28th March.

Shop now

Posted on March 24, 2016 by Simon appleby

Your Easter egg from Seren: 30% off books

Happy Easter everyone! We have a special Easter egg on the website for you: 30% off books across the Seren store.
The Easter holiday carries with it the message of new beginnings, so why not begin a new book? Our 30% offer includes our gorgeous poetry, fiction and non-fiction titles, so there is something for everyone.
We hope you find something new to bury your nose in this Easter.
Offer ends midnight, Monday 28th March.

Posted on March 18, 2016 by Simon appleby

Friday Poem – ‘Campbell’ by Siobhán Campbell

St Patrick’s Day has just passed and fittingly, our Friday Poem this week comes from Irish poet Siobhán Campbell’s collection, Cross-Talk.

Acerbic, cool, controlled, this is poetry with attitude. Many of the stories in this collection start in Ireland and although the cadences are sweetly lyrical, the narratives are otherwise. Politics here is intrinsic to the tales of the sly, the warped, the landlady “Mean as Ireland in the 50’s”. Nature is deftly invoked as a counterpoint to human illusions. The apparently personal poems here are cast in a more tender, yet characteristically unsentimental light. Campbell brings the lyric close to the conflicts that spur our passions, both personal and political. While full of wit, this collection challenges the reader by dealing with fundamental questions of borders, identity, violence and responsibility.

Siobhán’s poem ‘Framed’ has just won the Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition 2016, and ‘The same people living in the same place’ was just the featured reading at the launch of The Stinging Fly’s In the Wake of the Rising edition, edited by Sean O’Reilly.

Campbell

“I shall never deny those who came to this gnarled coast
with a skinful of sopped hope and started with their brood
this trail that would become the family you call yours.

You know in Ulster Scots they don’t use the word ‘lane’
but have to say ‘wee road’. The laming of a tongue
will map it out of mind unless it has a name.

Raymond, Ursula, the two Hughs, who laid on betting sheets,
knew when to settle odds and how to be discreet,
paid blind to the sidelong flutter of small groups.

They each made one more shift from anything that marked,
though wondered through two wars what way to stream a lay
for those who come home in droves from fights that were not ours.

I am the last.

Though you are from the south, you need to find the will
to hold a vowel too long. Tell people by their heed
and know who must be paid. Keep always your own name.
It takes a softened tongue to fill a twisted mouth.”

Buy your copy now.

Posted on March 17, 2016 by Simon appleby

Happy St Patrick’s Day 2016

Happy St Patrick’s Day to every one of you, far and wide.

And here’s our bookish Irish flag in honour of the day, pieced together using just a few of our green, white and orange books.

Here is the full list of titles featured in our St Patrick’s Day ‘flag’:

Poetry and Privacy: Questioning Public Interpretations of Contemporary British and Irish Poetry;
The Ivy Hides the Fig-Ripe Duchess;
The Scattering;
The Dragon and the Crescent;
Crossing Over;
Masculine Happiness;
Bilbao – New York – Bilbao;
The Woman at the Window;
All the Souls;
The Hitting Game;
Dirt Roads;
Big Low Tide;
Zen-Cymru;
Christmas in Wales;
The Shop;
If You Fall I Will Catch You;
Midas’ Daughter;
Eros Proposes a Toast;
The Visitations;
Playing House;
Midnight, Dhaka;
Daniel’s Beetles.

We have been lucky enough to add some great Irish and Ireland-based authors to our list over the years who have written some gorgeous books.

Of special mention (and visible in the ‘flag’, above) is Jaki McCarrick’s The Scattering, a collection of nineteen stories, many of which are set on the Irish border. One of the stories ‘The Visit’ won the Wasafiri Prize for new fiction, and many have been published to much acclaim in literary magazines.

Another Irish voice that has recently appeared is Helen Blackhurst. Her debut novel Swimming on Dry Land, which follows a family’s quest for a new life in the Australian outback (as well as their search for missing 4-year-old daughter Georgie), was released just before Christmas.

In Liam Carson’s family memoir Call Mother a Lonely Field, the author’s Irish-speaking, West Belfast childhood is described through still-present echoes of the Second World War, dystopian science fiction, American comic books and punk rock. The memoir was shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2013.

We hope you enjoy St Patrick’s Day!

Posted on March 14, 2016 by Simon appleby

Owen Sheers wins Culture Award, St David Awards

Owen Sheers has won the 2016 Culture Award in the St David Awards, which annually recognise and celebrate the exceptional achievements of people in Wales.
The First Minister said:
“What a fantastic group of winners – congratulations to everyone who’s won an award this evening.“I know there are fantastic people doing exceptional things here in Wales. I’m lucky as I travel across the country, to see first hand the efforts people make, day in day out to make Wales as great as it is.“I’d also like to congratulate all of the Finalists, who made the award’s shortlist, you also should be extremely proud of your achievements.”
The awards are great marks of distinction and the highest accolades that Welsh Government confers on its citizens nationally.

Posted on March 11, 2016 by Simon appleby

Friday Poem | My Father’s Wardrobe

This week, our Friday Poem is ‘My Father’s Wardrobe’, from Pascale Petit’s Fauverie, which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2014.

The Fauverie of this book is the big-cat house in the Jardin des Plantes zoo. But the word also evokes the Fauves, ‘primitive’ painters who used raw colour straight from the tube. Like The Zoo Father, Petit’s acclaimed second collection, this volume has childhood trauma and a dying father at its heart, while Paris takes centre stage – a city savage as the Amazon, haunted by Aramis the black jaguar and a menagerie of wild animals. Transforming childhood horrors to ultimately mourn a lost parent, Fauverie redeems the darker forces of human nature while celebrating the ferocity and grace of endangered species. Five poems from Fauverie won the 2013 Manchester Poetry Prize and the manuscript in progress was awarded an Arts Council England Grant for the Arts.

My Father’s Wardrobe
after Peter Redgrove

In the late afternoon he begins his toilette –
he has limestone pyjamas threaded with fossils,
a nightshirt of catacombs through which his dreams drip.
He has a dressing gown woven with petrol fumes, between its folds
echo car-horns and the murmur of tourists.
He tries on the long rail of awakening suits.
He dresses from the quarries that built Paris.
He wears a cathedral cloak with chimera eyes.
His raincoat is stuccoed with spouting gargoyles.
He has trousers that are stained-glass windows,
casting shadows like candied fruit as he walks.
His cravat is a knotted métro train,
one tie is an escalator, another a fountain
with Saint-Michel fighting Satan.
A carousel turns silently between his knees
and in it a boy is singing on a lacquered foal.
He has a shirt of hotel fronts
and a waistcoat of bridges under which bateaux mouches glide.
He emerges from the trapdoors of nightclubs
in a wedding suit of pavements that steam in the sun
and in it he marries the dawn.
He has a jacket made of wind-blown newspapers
and a cocktail suit of cigarette smoke
with balconies for pockets. Sometimes
he wears a suit of ash that scatters when he moves.

Buy your copy now.

Pascale Petit will be at Tŷ Newydd Writing Centre, March 14-19, along with Robert Minhinnick for Writing the Wild: A Poetry Course. To book tickets, visit the Tŷ Newydd website.

Denominations

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