Poetry
Category: Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 64
ISBN: 9781854111487
Publication date: March 13, 1996
Price: £5.95
Out of stock
Private and public worlds collide in Paul Henry’s second collection. A cast that includes, amongst others, butchers, teachers, hairdressers, mechanics and town planners sustains this poet’s awareness of human strengths and frailties. Acutely portrayed in the moving middle sequence, where the fall from grace of an elderly father is charted, familial tensions occur throughout Captive Audience.
Fatherless friends, sisterly cousins, brothers who ‘clench their grins and pebbly fists’, the helplessly ‘saved and damned’ subjects of ‘The Breath of Sleeping Boys’, all convey Henry’s ability to simultaneously praise and elegise. Elsewhere, in poems such as ‘For X and Y’, ‘Love Birds’ and ‘Recital’, he skilfully ‘adjusts the volume’ of his work between music and silence. This book confirms Paul Henry’s position as an original voice in contemporary poetry.
Listen to Paul Henry read his poem, ‘Daylight Robbery’:
Paul Henry
Described by the late U.A. Fanthorpe as ‘a poet’s poet’ who combines ‘a sense of the music of words with an endlessly inventive imagination’, Paul Henry came to poetry through songwriting. Born in Aberystwyth and now based in Crickhowell, his work has been widely anthologised and regularly appears in journals as diverse as Poetry Wales and The TLS. A popular creative writing tutor, he ran Ledbury Festival’s Poetry Cafe at Hereford’s Courtyard theatre and is a regular tutor at writers’ centres. He’s also taught at the University of South Wales and has guest-edited Poetry Wales.
Mari d’Ingrid, a translation of his fifth book, Ingrid’s Husband (Seren), was published in France by L’Harmattan. His new and selected poems, The Brittle Sea, appeared in 2010. This was followed in 2012 by its Indian version, The Black Guitar. A regular reader and performer at festivals, he has recently written and presented arts programmes for BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4. His sixth, Boy Running, was published in February 2015 and was shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year in 2016, and in February 2018 his latest collection, The Glass Aisle, was added to the ranks and even lead to a performance version co-written with fellow musician and songwriter Brian Briggs. They performed it at festivals throughout the summer and there is now a CD available to purchase.
