Books Books
Category: Ebooks, Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 70
ISBN: 9781781726945
Publication date: February 27, 2023
Price: £9.99
Category: Ebooks, Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 59
ISBN: 9781781726952
Price: £7.99
Out of stock
Winner of the Nation.Cymru People’s Choice Award, Wales Book of the Year 2024
“…a vulnerable and luminous sequence of elegies, drawn on a canvas dark and wide as the heavens. At once intimate and cosmic, epiphanies quietly explode along the lines, as each poem attempts to make sense of death, drawing on science and astronomy, in fearlessly personal and numinous poems.” – Wales Book of the Year judges
“A fusion of love, grief and wonder at the beauty and complexity of the universe. Its an ‘In Memoriam’ for our time.” – Matthew Francis
On receiving news of a beloved teacher’s death, a man struggles with the loss of a relationship sustained by deep admiration and unrequited love. Memories of their shared journey are separated in three orbits where the man’s past, present, and future are punctuated by intense grief.
In Orbit uses a variety of innovative forms to explore loss, from traditional stanzas to prose poems to shaped poems in the form of birds, circuits, or hands. The narrative shifts in time, moving from his teen years to the present day when he himself has become a teacher, working alongside the man he mourns.
The book not only grieves the loss of the teacher, but also toxic standards for boys and men. Beyond human connection, sustenance is found in the moon, the stars, the sky, and nature. The discovery of a badger’s track or the treasure of a bird egg reminds us how small our trajectories are in the context of the more-than-human: an answer perhaps to the grieving process. In Orbit is a deeply moving account of love, longing, and loss.
Glyn Edwards
Glyn Edwards has been described as one of ‘Wales’ most exciting young poets’. He is a former winner of Terry Hetherington Award for Welsh young writers, and remains a trustee of the prize.
His collection Vertebrae, published by The Lonely Press, was both a Wales Arts Review and Poetry Wales ‘Book of the Year’, and was recommended in the Irish Times. His poetry has been translated into Greek as part of a European Literature Project, featured in poetry installations in Dublin and Paris, performed as libretto with a string orchestra in Manchester, and been published widely in journals and anthologies, from Wales Arts Review, to The Guardian, to Verve Press’ Eighty Four. He has been Poet in Residence at the Chester Literature Festival, and the Dylan Thomas Boathouse, has delivered workshops for Gladfest and the Conwy Libraries Trust, and has read at festivals and poetry events across North Wales and North West England.
Glyn is a PhD researcher in ecopoetry at Bangor University, considering the role of poetry as activism in the wake of the Anthropocene. He co-edits Modron, a journal for environmental writing, and the Wild Words feature for North Wales Wildlife Trust.
He is a former winner of Wales’ Teacher of the Year, and has created educational resources for the Welsh Government, the WJEC and Poetry Wales. He works as a teacher in North Wales.
“Poetry might be a microscope, or a telescope; a scalpel, or a stethoscope. This book proves that Edwards has many such instruments at his disposal, and that that he keeps them sharp. Deftly written, and often sparsely, darkly beautiful, reading this book feels like recognising a constellation in the gloom.”
Mab Jones, Buzz Mag
“Each poem becomes a point of illumination in a constellation of grief. The numbness of regret is present in each line, as small human acts and tokens – a fingernail, an ellipse, a closed coffin – are consistently set against the immeasurable emptiness of space.”
Mark Pajak
“Our expanding perception of the universe pervades In Orbit, illuminating its “diurnal courses” of love and longing.”
Paul Henry
“These poems are deep draughts of experience, rendered in a way that nothing in our age of rapid and simplistic judgments can do half as well as poetry.”
Philip Gross
“Grief, loss and the haunting power of memory are some of the themes deftly explored in this open and vulnerable collection. A skilful, impassioned dive into both the pain and comforts of nostalgia, In Orbit weaves its ideas into elaborate shape poems, zooming out to behold Venus before closing in on a dead starling, urging us to lean in closer ‘until your mourning makes it fly.’”
Matthew Haigh
