Books Books
Category: Ebooks, Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 174
ISBN: 9781781726624
Publication date: July 29, 2022
Price: £12.99
Category: Ebooks, Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 174
ISBN: 9781781726631
Publication date: July 29, 2022
Price: £10.39
Out of stock
Hilary Llewellyn-Williams is one of the most renowned poets of her generation in Wales. The Little Hours: New and Selected Poems features poems from her earliest as well as her latest work.
Fully immersed in the natural world, the ‘Tree Calendar’ poems are composed in a richly pagan context: cycles of nature as reflected in the seasons which “reaffirm a mystical link between trees and language”. ‘Book of Shadows’, Llewellyn-Williams’ sequence on Renaissance monk/magician Giordano Bruno, is similarly invested in the mystical and in history, and in the heretical, the subverting or challenging of societal norms.
In ‘Animaculture’ and ‘Greenland’ her work assumes a darker tone, inspired by personal experience: family, dreams and childhood memories. She explores the natural world, the environment, the condition of women and the mysterious interface between nature and spirituality.
This exploration of darker themes continues in ‘The Little Hours’, a new sequence arranged according to the traditional monastic hours. Llewellyn-Williams continues to hone her lyrical skill with poems about domestic life, grief and loss, including a sequence written in memory of her late husband.
It is the primacy of physical place, the environment, which informs her startling and vivid imagery. Llewellyn-Williams is one of the earliest environmental poets; her response to nature is always profound, passionate and keenly observed, from immersion in the landscape to the particularity of feeding a bat. This new volume will remind admirers of Llewellyn-Williams’s many strengths and beauties and will win a new generation of readers.
Hilary Llewellyn-Williams
Hilary Llewellyn-Williams has been a Seren poet since 1987. Her first collection The Tree Calendar won a WAC Young Writers Award the following year. Three further collections followed: Book of Shadows (1990); Animaculture (1997); and Greenland (2003). A reprint of her first three books in one volume, Hummadruz, appeared in 2000. During these years she was active in the poetry scene, performing her work widely in the UK and abroad, reviewing, giving writing workshops and teaching in schools and universities. She was a regular tutor at Ty Newydd Writers Centre in North Wales, as well as for the Arvon Foundation. She taught and read alongside Wales’ finest poets, and her poems have appeared in numerous anthologies. For several years she was joint poetry editor of the journal Scintilla, with Anne Cluysenaar and Graham Hartill. In 2003 she embarked on a change of career, training as a psychotherapist while continuing creative writing tutoring with the Open University. She now has a thriving private counselling practice in Abergavenny. Her New and Selected Poems, The Little Hours, was published with Seren in June 2022, reintroducing her poetry to a new and wider audience.
‘These are lovely thought-provoking reflections on life, loss, and love.’ – Mary Mulholland
Mary Mulholland, The Alchemy Spoon
“It would be impossible to do this group of poems justice by selective quotation. Cumulatively they’re both dignified and deeply moving… The cover blurb suggests The Little Hours will win her a new generation of readers. It should.”
Stuart Henson, London Grip
“The Little Hours clues us into the importance of those moments that awaken us from the repetitive motions of everyday life, moments of finding patterns, oddities, or magic in the mundane. Unembellished and sincere in style, it nevertheless carries a striking power in its beauty. It is a well-curated portrait of a brilliant and insightful career in poetry.”
Zoe Kramer, Wales Arts Review
“Lucid, luminous, languid… The poems are liquid and flowing, yet confident and concise. Here’s a poet who’s made friends with their own pen, and it’s an instrument they wield with skill… the works within this weighty volume have been, like sculpture, ‘seen’ and hewed into perfect shape… Reading The Little Hours felt to me, therefore, like reading something inspired, yet well-earthed – a prayer, a meditation, an invocation… A selected that’s worth picking up and perusing.”
Mab Jones, Buzz Magazine
Hilary Llewelyn-Williams reading her poem ‘Considering the World’:
