Current Books

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‘Real Swansea’

Published 22nd April 2008 by Nigel Jenkins.

Welcome to the breezily resurgent, ´ugly, lovely´ city of Swansea. Once a dynamic port and the metallurgical capital of the world, it was later famous for a vibrant artistic life, which included poets Dylan Thomas and Vernon Watkins, artists Alfred Janes and Ceri Richards and composer Daniel Jones. What does it offer now, in post-industrial Wales?
Brought up in Gower and living in Mumbles, poet Nigel Jenkins takes the reader on a tour of the obvious and the oblique, the monumental and the downright quirky. Fusing civic and social history with auto-biographical reminiscence, Jenkins brings to life a place which mixes Dylan heritage with rugby and football passions and a rare fervour for music; the natural beauty of the Bay and Clyne Valley with the dereliction of the Lower Swansea Valley and the charm of Mumbles; the frenzy of Swansea?s night-life with the tranquillity of its pioneering parks; the lofty Townhill estate, once in the vanguard of garden city housing, with the swanky postmodernism of the SA1 development at its eastern gateway.
Eclectic, gritty, whimsical, there is no better way to discover Wales´s second city – which Swansea’s citizens believe to be its first.
‘Real’ Series Editor, Peter Finch
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‘Real Aberystwyth’

Released 9th April 2008 by Niall Griffiths.

Aberystwyth: two languages, a university, a farming community, a port turned marina, a holiday resort, seat of the National Library of Wales and the Welsh Books Council, home to writers and spies. It is a singular place composed of any number of conflicting and complimentary things, with a medieval beginning, Victorian heyday and contemporary reputation as a cultural powerhouse in the guise of a market town.

Aberystwyth is a fluid mix of long-established natives, large student population, and a colony of those who came and never left. Niall Griffiths falls among the latter and the town and its environs have provided rich material for his fiction. Here he mixes autobiography with topography, aligns the oblique approach with historical report, and contrasts the prosaic with the downright odd. The birthplace of the Welsh Language Society, the home of saints, the playground of writers, crucible of alternative living, Aberystwyth and its hinterland are a remarkable phenomenon. This book is an enthralling picture of a world famous town.

An award-winning novelist, Niall Griffiths is a regular reviewer for The Guardian and a commentator on contemporary writing for a number of magazines.

‘Real’ Series Editor, Peter Finch

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‘Real Wrexham’

Published 4th December 2007 by Grahame Davies.
“Sometimes I read something and it seems to be so ‘right’ it is beautiful – and that is how this short passage seems to me…Grahame Davies is an accomplished poet, journalist and critic and is also fascinated by his home town – and it shows. This book; which seems to me to be part history, part travelogue and part memoir, seems to be the ideal merging of his talents.” Clare Dudman, keeperofthesnails.blogspot.com Wrexham: the Eastern Front of Wales. The place where the tide of Saxon invasion rolled in, hit the mountains and stopped. The place where Owain Glyndwr came to get married, where Elihu Yale came to be buried, and where the giants of English football came to be killed.
This is a border town where landscapes, accents and identities meet, mingle and merge. A place where mountain meets plain, Wales meets England, and the Mabinogion meets Man United.
The biggest town in north Wales gets the ´Real´ treatment from novelist and poet Grahame Davies. Born in Coedpoeth, now much-travelled, he´s still endlessly fascinated by his home town.
Mixing personal experience and memory with history, topography, journalism, and an unflagging interest, Davies looks beyond the town´s workaday image and finds something rather special.
Real Wrexham´s real-life characters include obsessive football fans, an ill-fated racing driver, a soccer-player-turned-TV-psychic, several hard-drinking priests, two high-society lesbians and a werewolf. Among the subject it features are a mysterious massacre, a mining disaster, a tour of Wrexham´s ´Wild West´ and a guide to ´Parallel Wrexhams´ worldwide. Even if you thought you knew Wrexham, this book will make you think again.
The history, communal and personal, which it uncovers is a revelation. It´s a masterpiece of psychogeography.
‘Real’ Series Editor: Peter Finch
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‘Real Newport’

Released 12th December 2006 by Ann Drysdale.

Britain’s youngest city as you’ve never seen it before. Just another Victorian port or an Elizabethan maritime centre? A featureless South Wales town or a growing city on the verge of massive and original redevelopment? The “new Seattle” (Paul Flynn) or a haven for single mothers working the system (John Redwood)?

From the splendour of Tredegar House to the towering presence of the Celtic Manor Resort, from the bland sixties shopping centre to the bizarre centenarian Transporter Bridge, from the decline of the football team to the continuing proud tradition at Rodney Parade, it’s a place full of contradictions and characters. Join Ann Drysdale in her offbeat exploration of Newport – old and new – and its people.

“The prose is often laugh-out –loud, the poetry is always excellently crafted. Versatile in traditional forms, Drysdale has some great pastiche and some wryly moving pieces; it’s a successful contrast with the experimental poetry in Peter Finch’s Real Cardiff books … Drysdale’s book is so essential for anyone wanting to know anything at all about Newport, and such an enjoyable read, that some may hesitate to go there, lest their sojourn prove less amusing and instructive. To Newportians it must be a revelation.”

Tom Cheesman, New Welsh Review, December 07

‘Real’ Series Editor: Peter Finch

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The Real Series

“Well-written and passionate, they’re all intriguing and full of offbeat observations… if you’re looking to get inside the character of any of these places, you’ll find the series perfect.” — Time Out

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‘What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Khalo’

Author: Pascale Petit

SHORTLISTED FOR THE T.S ELIOT PRIZE 2010

LONG LISTED FOR WALES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2011

“Pascale’s poems are as fresh as paint, and make you look all over again at Frida and her brilliant and tragic life.” Jackie Kay,  The Observer

“Poems about paintings rarely set off fireworks, but this is ekphrasis with a difference: Petit speaks in Kahlo’s voice with eerie believability, animating her paintings with a behind-the-scenes narrative of romantic and reproductive woes, chronic pain after a bus crash, and the occasional moment of joy. ‘Whenever we make love, you say/it’s like fucking a crash –/I bring the bus with me into the bedroom’ (‘Remembrance of an Open Wound’)” Time Out London

What the Water Gave Me contains fifty-two poems in the voice of the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. Some of the poems are close interpretations of Kahlo’s work, while others are parallels or version homages where Petit draws on her experience as a visual artist to create alternative ‘paintings’ with words. More than just a verse biography, this collection explores how Kahlo transformed trauma into art after the artist’s near-fatal bus accident. Petit, with her vivid style, her feel for nature and her understanding of pain and redemption, fully inhabits Kahlo’s world. Each poem is an evocation of “how art works on the pain spectrum”, laced with splashes of ferocious colour.

“Their apparent shared sensibility makes the ventriloquism of these poems entirely unforced, and while Kahlo’s voice is subtly distinguished from Petit’s own, both women have a way of taking painful, private experiences and transmuting them, through imagery, into something that has the power of folklore. They capture the unsettling spirit of Frida Kahlo and her work perfectly.”Poetry London

“No other British poet I am aware of can match the powerful mythic imagination of Pascale Petit.” Les Murray, Times Literary Supplement

Pascale Petit’s latest collection of poetry ‘What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo’ has now been published by Black Lawrence Press in the US (April, 2011). 

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‘Understudies: New and Selected Poems’

Anne-Marie Fyfe – as is apparent in her Understudies: New and Selected Poems – is a subtle and engaging poet. She has developed much like a painter, spare themes moving towards a deeper complexity. Her earlier work includes quite a few domestic interiors; rooms recalled from an Irish childhood and stories told by parents and grandparents. Later poems often feature crucial or pitvotal moments in her life and the imagined lives of others: a significant conversation, the look a woman gives herself in the mirror when she’s about to leave her husband, the odour left in the air by a certain perfume. All this eventually evolves into her characteristic poem, a cityscape wrought with careful observation and melded with flashbacks of memory, both her own and including her family, and others, beautifully imagined. Her voice is direct, with a conversational tone that invites you into the narrative. This volume includes selections from her previous books:Late Crossing (1999), Tickets from a Blank Window (2002) – both from Rockingham Press, and The Ghost Twin (Peterloo, 2005).

Published by Seren in September 2010.

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‘Noteworthy’

Noteworthy

Author:

Bruce Cardwell

Music makers are the focus of Bruce Cardwell latest book of black and white reportage and portrait photography. Practitioners of acoustic and vocal music – folk, gospel, opera, choral, classical and ethnic – in Wales as the start of the twenty first century make a rich and diverse gallery of talent. Cardwell’s subjects range from harpists Catrin Finch and Elinor Bennett, through Bryn Terfel, conductor Owain Arwel Hughes and Incredible String Band songwriter Robin Williamson to Welsh bagpipers, hurdy gurdy players, harpmakers, and African drummers in Newbridge and steel bands in Carmarthen.

Due for release on 4th April 2011.

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Nerys Williams debut poetry collection ‘Sound Archive’

Sound Archive by Nerys Williams has arrived into the Seren office this morning.
A striking original first collection of poems from Nerys Williams. Using formal strategies similar to modernist painting: abstraction, dislocation, surrealist juxtaposition, the poet conjures a complex music, intriguing narratives, andpoems full of atmosphere that query identity, gender, and the dream of art as a vehicle for emotion and meaning. There is a playful lightness of touch and tone and for every serious inquisition like ‘An Anatomy of Arguments’ or‘Conversations with Cocteau’, there is a poem that will muse on ‘Canter’s Starstruck Diner, L.A.’ or on the ‘artifacts’ left by Marilyn Monroe, in ‘Marilyn’s Auction House’.

Available now at www.serenbooks.com – Join our online book club and get 20% off every purchase, including Sound Archive.