Books Books
Category: Ebooks, Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 62
ISBN: 9781781724408
Publication date: February 28, 2018
Price: £9.99
Category: Ebooks, Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 62
ISBN: 9781781724415
Publication date: February 28, 2018
Price: £7.99
Out of stock
‘… Paul Henry has much of his compatriot R.S. Thomas’s gift, in that poet’s later work, for terse, coolly forthright insightfulness …’ The TLS
‘Here is a rich and comforting voice next to you in the dark. Twenty eight poems so beguiling you know not whether they depict ancient folklore or an everyday occurrence in the next but one village’– Caught by the River
‘This is a poet still at the height of his powers, ten books in. Let the music play on.’– Wales Arts Review
The Glass Aisle moves between rage and stillness, past and present, music and silence. Acclaimed poet Paul Henry’s tenth book includes a moving elegy to displaced workhouse residents, set on a stretch of canal in the Brecon Beacons National Park.
In the book’s title poem, a telephone engineer repairs a line that crosses the canal to the site of an old workhouse. Tormented by the voices of former “inmates”, he unwittingly connects the centuries, setting free the Victorian ghosts of poacher John Moonlight, lone parent Mary Thomas, and a host of others who haunt the poem’s present-day walker.
The collection is in three parts. In the first section, a thematic poem, ‘The Hesitant Song’, “orchestrates silence” while playing “the sea’s soft pedal” to convey the loss of a mother’s songs. Familiar “visitors” from earlier books: Brown Helen, Catrin Sands et al, haunt poems where the sea and music hold a nineteen-sixties childhood in its place. The book’s closing cadence combines love poems with some raw elegies.
A performance version of The Glass Aisle, featuring songs co-written with fellow musician and songwriter Brian Briggs, (‘Stornoway’), is currently touring festivals.
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.
“The Glass Aisle enfolds the reader with intricacies and figures of sound, exploring noise, rhythm and also silence within its pages. Addressing time, loss and childhood memories ─ told through the stories of ordinary people ─ the collection’s musicality and its preoccupation with voices make for its signature sonic tapestry … it is worth reading for the titular poem alone, but The Glass Aisle as a whole is remarkable.”
Dominik Szczepaniak, DURA
