Offers Archives - Page 2 of 3

Posted on July 20, 2017 by Simon appleby

Half-Price Hidden Gems: Prize-winners from the archives

Today we shine the spotlight on some hidden gems from the archives – fiction, poetry and non-fiction prize-winners from years passed which, if you haven’t read already, come highly recommended.

We’ve just passed the mid-week hurdle, and that means there’s only a few days left to take advantage of our half price summer sale. If you’re struggling to choose your next read, why not start with one of the extraordinary books below? These are the oldies and goodies from the Seren archive.

Letter to Patience, John Haynes
Costa Poetry Award Winner, 2006
Set in Patience’s Parlour, a small mud-walled bar in northern Nigeria, at a time of political unrest, Letter to Patience is a vividly atmospheric book-length poem divided into cantos. The poem is not only a biography, or an essay on post-colonialism, it is an epic portrayal of a beautiful and troubled country and of one man’s search for meaning in difficult times.

Touch, Graham Mort
Edge Hill Short Story Prize Winner, 2011
From a young child adrift on an ice-filled lake to an ageing farmer facing life alone, the twenty-one stories display a deep sensitivity to both the natural world and to human relationships. In skilfully crafted prose, vivid with detail, Mort examines the strength and fragility of life and the ties that hold us within it.
Touch spans twenty years of short-story writing, and includes the Bridport prize-winning story ‘The Prince’.

Berg, Hilary Menos
Winner of the Forward Prize, Best First Collection, 2010
In this extraordinarily vibrant debut collection, icebergs floating down the Thames jostle with transvestites in Singapore, aliens wading the Hudson River and the lively crew from the local slaughterhouse. We go shopping with Ingomar the barbarian and watch Bernard Manning gigging at Totnes Civic Hall. Throughout, Menos brings a sophisticated sensibility to her poetry. Her subjects are seen aslant, with ironic as well as tender intentions.

The Gift of a Daughter, Emyr Humphreys
Wales Book of the Year Winner, 1999
Archaeology lecturer Aled Morgan and his wife Marian flee to Tuscany, and the home of old friends, to escape a family tragedy. Yet even immersed in Etruscan culture, Aled finds that friendships aren’t all they seem, and that his wife has become almost a stranger to him. The Gift of a Daughter is a novel of delusion and self-knowledge, tradition and change, loss and identity in which the pace, plotting, characterisation and dialogue are as faultless as we expect from a writer of Emyr Humphreys’s experience and skill.

Sound Archive, Nerys Williams
Winner of the DLR Strong Award, 2011
Shortlisted for both the Forward Prize Best First Collection and the Michael Murphy Prize, Sound Archive is a strikingly original first collection of poems. Using formal strategies similar to modernist painting: abstraction, dislocation, surrealist juxtaposition, the poet conjures a complex music, intriguing narratives, and poems full of atmosphere that query identity, gender, and the dream of art as a vehicle for emotion and meaning. Williams confronts our preconceptions about what it might mean to be a woman writing against the background of two formidable traditions: that of Welsh-speaking Wales and of English literature.

Watching the Fire-eater, Robert Minhinnick
Wales Book of the Year Winner, 1993
Watching the Fire-eater covers variety of subjects: third world poverty and the internationalism of alcohol, rugby through the eyes of a vegetarian, nuclear power, sunbathing and a thanksgiving dinner for the demise of Margaret Thatcher. But at the core of this essay collection is a vivid series of attempts to strip away the exhausted mythologies of the writer’s own country and the increasingly-packaged places he visits. Whether in the rainforest or the big match crowd, Minhinnick’s language: acid, imagist, compassionate, celebrates the people he meets and, fleetingly, defines their lives.

Blue Sky July, Nia Wyn
Barnes & Noble Discovery Prize Winner, 2009
Set between the summers of 1998 and 2005 in Cardiff, Blue Sky July follows the story of a mother whose child suffers a devastating brain injury. It traces her journey into a world hidden away in society’s pockets as she battles against impossible odds to heal him.
Through Wyn’s intimate day by day musings, the book explores the impact of the tragedy on her home life, love life, friendships and connection to the world, as the most extraordinary relationship unfolds between them. Blue Sky July won the Glen Dimplex Biography Prize and was shortlisted for both the Good Housekeeping Book of the Year, and Wales Book of the Year.

Time Being, Ruth Bidgood
Roland Matthias Prize Winner, 2011
Time Being is Ruth Bidgood’s tenth collection, and a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. It has been said, rightly, that Bidgood’s work is ‘emphatically a poetry of location’ and it is the history and nature of her particular region of mid-Wales that most inspire the author. Her distinctive voice has a quiet authority but also a subtle, conspiratory edge, as if she is letting one in on a secret, unveiling a hidden fact, or making a discovery. She avoids sentimentality, but – unfashionably – not sentiment; an observation can engender joy or sorrow or fear uncluttered by irony. These are ambitious attempts to transcend the lyric and move towards a more epic, multi-faceted form equal to the many experiences of her long life.

The Colour of Dawn, Yanick Lahens
Winner of the RFO Award (2009); Prix Millepages (2008); and Prix Richelieu de la Francophonie (2009)
Port au Prince, Haiti. The police roam the streets and no-one is safe. Fignolé, musician and political radical, is missing. His sisters Joyeuse and Angelique search for their young brother amid the colourful bustle, urban deprivation and political tension of the city. Eventually they will find him, but in the process they will also have found more about themselves than they wanted to know. The Colour of Dawn is a tense, passionate and vividly told story of small victories of hope in the face of a seemingly impossible fight against a monolithic regime.

Bilbao–New York–Bilbao, Kirmen Uribe
Spanish National Literature Prize Winner, 2009
Bilbao–New York–Bilbao takes place during a flight to New York and tells the story of journeys by three generations of the same family. The key to the book is Liborio’s fishing boat, the Dos Amigos: who are these two friends, and what is the nature of their friendship? Through letters, diaries, emails, poems and dictionaries, Kirmen reflects on the art of writing, and the distinction between life and fiction. Kirmen’s novel, translated by Elizabeth Macklin, creates a mosaic of memories and stories that combine to form a homage to a world that has almost disappeared, as well as a hymn to the continuity of life.

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Posted on July 18, 2017 by Simon appleby

Summer Sale: Seren books half price this week

Much like the nice weather, the Seren summer sale isn’t hanging around: for one week only, all our books are half price.

Everything from poetry to novels, short stories, art, history and biography are included, and with so much choice, we thought you might like a helping hand deciding what to read next. Take a look below at our summer sale suggestions.

Best for… taking on holiday:
The Women of Versailles by Kate Brown
~~£9.99~~ £4.99
This gripping and immersive novel tells the story of Adélaïde, daughter of King Louis XVI. Envious of her brother, bored with her sister and smitten with her father’s bourgeoise mistress, Adélaïde struggles with her budding sexuality and a desire for freedom of expression, both of which conflict with the expectations of the restrictive court of Versailles. Forty-four years later, under the looming shadow of the revolution, what has happened to the hopes of a young girl and the doomed regime in which she grew up?

Best for… devouring over lunch:
The Man at the Corner Table by Rosie Shepperd
~~£9.99~~ £4.99
These poems are exquisite meals, to be consumed amidst surprising intimacies. The voice is one of urban sophistication; a merciless charm that teases and tempts us with sensual evocations of food and place. The gorgeous place settings of these poems are not just carefully delineated backdrops. They toy with our interpretations of ‘at table’. As in a Dutch master ‘tablescape’, they become symbolic of our relation to ourselves, to others and the world.

Best for… armchair reading:
Waterfalls of Stars by Rosanne Alexander
~~£12.99~~ £6.49
Rosanne Alexander paints the landscape and wildlife of isolated Skomer Island in vivid detail, drawn from her ten years spent as a warden on the uninhabited nature reserve. Waterfalls of Stars is a love-letter to this remarkable island, which is an important breeding ground for many birds, and populated by a stunning array of wildlife such as puffins, manx shearwaters, seals, and kittiwakes. With her lyrical evocation of the natural world and its enthusiastic and resourceful approach to the problems of island life, Alexander’s book is sure to inspire and entertain anyone who has felt the need for escape.

Best for… livening up a long journey:
Significance by Jo Mazelis
~~£9.99~~ £4.99
Lucy Swann is trying on a new life. She’s cut and dyed her hair and bought new clothes, but only gets as far as a small town in northern France when her flight is violently cut short. When Inspector Vivier and his assistant Sabine Pelat begin their investigation, the chance encounters of her last days take on a new significance.
Jo Mazelis’ Jerwood Prize-winning novel is utterly addictive, and the cast of characters who brush ever so briefly against Lucy Swann in her last days are vividly imagined.

Best for… when you’re out and about:
Wild Places, Iolo Williams
~~£19.99~~ £9.99
Springwatch’s Iolo Williams picks his favourite forty nature sites in Wales and describes them in breathtaking detail, revealing rarities like the Snowdon lily and the Snowdonia hawkweed, where hares box and otters swim, where to spot dolphins and salmon, and where to see Wales’ great variety of hawks and other birds of prey. This informative and lavishly illustrated book confirms Wales’ pre-eminence as a country rich in stunning landscape inhabited in abundance by all manner of life. Take it with you on your travels, and discover all the delights of natural Wales.

Best for… broadening the mind:
Dark Land, Dark Skies by Martin Griffiiths
~~£12.99~~ £6.49
The constellations haven’t always been the province of Greek and Roman gods: ancient peoples around the world have looked up and added their particular myths to the heavens, only to have them subsumed by the Classics as the science of astronomy developed. Astronomer Martin Griffiths repopulates the night sky with figures from Welsh myths and legends, including the heroes of the Mabinogion, in this Celtic reclaimation of the night sky. Complete with star charts for the entire celestial year and 80 photographs of astronomically interesting objects, this informative guide is suitable for amateur and professional astronomers alike.

Best for… curling up with before bed:
The Tip of My Tongue by Trezza Azzopardi
~~£8.99~~ £4.49
Enid wants a dog and wants to be a spy, but listening in on adult conversations doesn’t seem to bring her any nearer to understanding their troubled world. For all that,when times get tough and she has to stay with the Erbins, particularly her rich and spoilt cousin Geraint, she has plenty of verbal ammunition to help her fight her corner. Trezza Azzopardi transforms the heroine from The Mabinogion’s ‘Geraint and Enid’ into a brave 1970s girl from downtown Splott in Cardiff who, no matter how difficult the circumstances, always seems to get the last word. The original Enid defends her misguided husband by warning him of approaching villains, even though he has forbidden her to speak. Azzopardi’s young Enid is also unlikely to respect a gagging order.

We hope you enjoy browsing our summer sale. The half price offer ends at midnight on Sunday 23 July, so don’t delay – see what you can find before the time runs out.

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Posted on March 20, 2017 by Simon appleby

A literary Mother’s Day Gift: the Writing Motherhood anthology

Today we welcome the arrival of Writing Motherhood, a creative anthology of poetry, interviews and essays by established writers, edited by Carolyn Jess-Cooke.

The perfect literary gift for Mother’s Day, Writing Motherhood explores the relationship between creativity and motherhood, with contributions from writers such as Carol Ann Duffy, Sharon Olds and Hollie McNish. Until Sunday 26 March, you can buy Mum her copy at 30% off, direct from the Seren website.

‘This is a truly inspiring collection, all the more so for its wit and its grit, its poetry and its honesty; here we have women producing ‘good art’ despite – and often because of – ‘the pram in the hall.’ – Shelley Day

Read a free excerpt from Carolyn Jess-Cooke’s Introduction, below.

INTRODUCTION

There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.
– Cyril Connolly

This book presents a selection of the most important contemporary
writing by women on the tensions between motherhood
and writing.
Cyril Connolly wrote about the ‘pram in the hall’ in his 1938
book Enemies of Promise, yet his caveat is directed at men (he took
it as given that women create babies, not art). Nonetheless, the
quote is still in use to capture those devastating effects brought to
artistic creation by a new baby. I’m not alone when I admit the
arrival of my first child felt like stepping inside a whirlwind. I had
plenty to worry about – SIDS, whether she was gaining enough
weight, whether we could afford maternity leave, etc. – but I do
remember that among my worries was a serious concern that I
might never be able to write again. My brain felt completely
scrambled. I could barely construct a text message for weeks,
months. Time was disjointed. It seemed to take an inordinate
amount of time to do even the smallest task. I remember thinking,
over and over, why did nobody tell me how hard this is? After the birth
of my son, however, writing proved effective in pushing back the
darkness of postnatal depression, and also inspired a new direction
in my creative practice; I had always thought I would only
ever write poetry, but the problem-solving, immersive elements of
narrative proved much more potent in batting back depression.
After the births of our third and fourth children, let’s just say that
I became a bit more creative in how I managed my time.
PUBLISHING MOTHERHOOD

In 2014, Arts Council England funded my Writing Motherhood
project to tour literary festivals in the UK to discuss the impact of
motherhood on women’s writing. I had read a number of reports
and articles that claimed the key to literary success was childlessness,
or for a woman to have just one child, or at least to bear in
mind that each child ‘costs’ a female writer four books. None of
these reports aimed their caveats at men. I became curious – and
not a little dismayed – by the idealization of motherhood, and by
the casual sexism that was prevalent and unchallenged in discourses
about motherhood. I set up the Writing Motherhood
project because I wanted to empower mothers and to encourage
them to talk about their experiences. Although the assumption
about mothers and writing was that we just didn’t have the time
or inclination (we’re all too busy dealing with that pram in the
hallway!), I perceived that other forces were at work, prohibiting
women’s writing from making it into the public sphere and/or
being perceived as good literature.

A few highlights from the kalaidescope of female experience featured here are Carolyn Jess-Cooke’s interview with Sharon Olds (where she discusses her famous rejection by a US literary magazine for writing about her children), excerpts from Hollie McNish’s motherhood diary, and Carol Ann Duffy’s beautiful portrait of being and having a daughter. This is a poignant and beautiful book celebrating motherhood, recognising it not as the ‘enemy of good art’, but often as its inspiration.

Writing Motherhood: 30% off until Mother’s Day (26 March). Order your copy now

Posted on March 8, 2017 by Simon appleby

A treat for International Women’s Day

Treat for International Women's Day Women's Work half price

Today is International Women’s Day, a worldwide celebration of women’s achievements and a call for gender equality.

We can’t think of a better book to treat yourself to than Women’s Work: Modern Women Poets Writing in English, so for today only, you can buy your copy at half price on our website.

With over 250 contributors, this generous selection of poetry by women features poets from the USA, Canada, England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Australia, and New Zealand. You will find familiar names as well as new discoveries amongst the contributors: Margaret Atwood, Sujata Bhatt, Colette Bryce, Siobhán Campbell, Amy Clampitt, Polly Clark, Wendy Cope (and many others). Some may ask: is the literary establishment still as dominated by men as it once was? Who gets to decide the canon? Eva Salzman opens Women’s Work with a lively polemic, making the case for the women-only anthology with characteristic wit and flair.

Buy your copy of Women’s Work today:
~~£14.99~~
£7.49

Offer ends midnight, 08/03/2017

Posted on January 12, 2017 by Simon appleby

Top of the Non-Fiction: what to buy in the half price sale

Top of the Non Fiction Seren half price sale

There’s still time to take advantage of our big January sale – which ends midnight, Friday 13th (not such an unlucky day, after all!)
All our books are half price, and that includes a gloriously diverse range of non-fiction: everything from biography to art, history to criticism. Here we pick a few of our favourites.

The Girl who Lived on Air by Stephen Wade examines the strange story of Sarah Jacob, ‘the Welsh fasting girl’. Though not the first anorexic, she was arguably the first to cause a national furore, and was made to be the centre of a lucrative and also media-hungry ‘spin’ on the nineteenth century nexus of knowledge between science and superstition, folk-belief and religious asceticism. Stephen Wade covers new ground in examining the medical issues surrounding the case, the legal complexities, the prison life of Sarah’s parents, and the significance of folklore and superstition.
Alun Lewis biographer John Pikoulis covers new ground in Alun, Gweno & Freda, which examines Lewis’ life and writing through the particular prism of his relationships with his wife, Gweno, and Freda Aykroyd, an ex-patriot in India whose house provided respite for British officers on leave. The book argues that Lewis’s charged relationships with these two women were the key to both his writing and his mental health, and goes on to explore the circumstances surrounding Lewis’ sudden death, and weigh into the ongoing debate over whether it was accidental, or suicide.
Losing Israel by Jasmine Donahaye is more than biography. This moving and honest memoir, which won the Wales Book of the Year, Non-Fiction Category (2016), recounts the author’s struggles with identity and history after she stumbles upon the collusion of her family in the displacement of Palestinians in 1948. Biography, travel writing and birdwatching are all weaved together in this fascinating re-evaluation of memory, family and cultural identity.
Robert Minhinnick’s Watching the Fire Eater, newly back in stock, takes us from Copacabana to urban Yorkshire, from New Mexico to a Welsh funfair, from The Netherlands to the Clare coast. Minhinnick’s essays cover a variety of subjects – sunbathing, third world poverty, the demise of Margaret Thatcher, to name a few – but at the core this is a vivid series of attempts to strip away the exhausted mythologies of the writer’s own country and the increasingly-packaged places he visits.
The Roots of Rock, from Cardiff to Mississippi and Back is Peter Finch’s serenade to rock and popular music, and an infectiously nostalgic trip from the 1950s onwards that is guaranteed to enthrall music lovers. From an old valve radio playing in the Cardiff suburbs in the ’50s to live music today in America and beyond, Peter Finch tours countries and decades to illustrate how rock and pop has evolved, giving us sharp-eyed accounts of gigs from Champion Jack Dupree to the Garth Mountain Boys, visits to musical shrines and theme parks – Dollywood, Grand Ole Opry, Graceland, Stax – and music, lots and lots of music.

See our full Non-Fiction list on the Seren website, and hurry – sale ends midnight, Friday 13 January.

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Posted on January 10, 2017 by Simon appleby

Poetry Picks: what to buy in the half price sale

If your bookshelves are looking a bit bare (or even if they’re full to bursting – who are we to judge?) then we hope our half price sale helps you discover new and intriguing collections to add to your ‘must read’ pile.

Until midnight this Friday (13th January), all books on the Seren website are 50% off. This includes hundreds of poetry books – and in an effort to help you with your decision-making, we’ve picked out a few of our favourites.

Carrie Etter’s Imagined Sons is visceral and emotionally intense, a reflection on the experience of a birthmother who gave up her son when she was seventeen. These haunting, psalm-like prose poems are bursting with courage and insight. She describes possible encounters with this son, now in his late twenties, expressing how ‘sometimes the melancholy arrives before the remembering’. These poems leave a mark upon the reader, and explore with profound skill the aching agony of displaced motherhood.
The Museum of Disappearing Sounds by Zoë Skoulding is a collection of densely intellectual poems, experimental, rich and resonant. Rather than aspiring to reach beyond language, these poems focus on the spaces that words occupy, looking at how ‘a sentence reverses itself between two pairs of eyes’ or noting ‘the distance drifted by a word shaken loose from border controls’. Exploratory and alive to the senses, these poems create new perspectives on language and the world in which it exists.
Jonathan Edwards’ My Family and Other Superheroes is (in contrast) utterly joyful and hilarious, and introduces the reader to a mishmash of odd characters, including Evel Knievel, Sophia Loren, Ian Rush, Marty McFly, a bicycling nun and a recalcitrant hippo. Winner of the Costa Poetry Prize, and shortlisted for the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize, Jonathan Edwards’ debut has charmed the masses, and is a must-read – if you haven’t already.
Kim Moore’s The Art of Falling twists and manipulates the idea of falling into an abundance of meanings, and weaves this central theme alongside vivid and unabashedly realistic descriptions of the North and ‘My People’: ‘who swear without knowing they are swearing… scaffolders and plasterers and shoemakers and carers’. Blisteringly raw poems appear in the central sequence, ‘How I Abandoned My Body To His Keeping’: the story of a woman embroiled in a relationship marked by coercion and violence. These are poems that confront the reader, steeped in realism, not designed to soothe or beguile. Midnight, Dhaka is the debut collection by Mir Mahfuz Ali. As a boy, Mahfuz witnessed atrocities and writes about them with a searing directness in poems like ‘My Salma’: ‘They brought Salma into the yard, / asked me to watch how they would explode / a bullet into her’. His trauma becomes transformative, and his poetry the key to unlocking memories of a childhood that are rich in nuance, gorgeous in detail and evocative of a beautiful country. Influenced by Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) and Jibanananda Das (1899-1954), as well as modern British poets, Mahfuz brings his own unique voice in these poems, which celebrate the human capacity for love, survival and renewal.

See our full Poetry list on the Seren website, and hurry – sale ends midnight, Friday 13 January.

Posted on January 6, 2017 by Simon appleby

January Sale: 50% off all Seren books

The big January sale has now begun – all our books are 50% off for one week only.

The time for gift giving might be over but all that means is you have the perfect excuse to treat yourself instead.

If you’re looking for a new novel to grip you, we suggest Jayne Joso’s critically acclaimed My Falling Down House, a story of modern Japanese identity.

Tony Curtis’ New & Selected collection, From the Fortunate Isles, is a must-read for poetry lovers, and The Other Tiger, the new bilingual anthology of South and Latin American poetry translated by Richard Gwyn, will open up a new continent of undiscovered riches for you.

For nature lovers we recommend Iolo Williams’ Wild Places: Wales’ Top 40 Nature Sites – this is a book to get you out of the house, making the most of the beautiful wildlife sites within reach.

Explore our Poetry, Fiction and Non-Fiction categories, where all our books are half price until midnight on Friday 13th January.

Posted on December 1, 2016 by Simon appleby

Seren Advent Calendar: 24 days of offers

Here’s a special Seren advent calendar– instead of chocolate, you’ll find 24 fantastic book offers to enjoy.

Each day in December we’ll reveal a different book, available half price for one day only. We’ll have a range of poetry, fiction, biography, art, photography and Welsh interest titles included, so there are sure to be surprises to delight everyone.

We’ll be updating this blog post every day with the latest offer, so keep your eyes peeled!

~~1st December: 50% off Wales’ Best One Hundred Churches~~
~~2nd December: 50% off Masque~~
~~3rd December: 50% off Leslie Norris: The Complete Poems~~
~~4th December: 50% off Star-Shot~~
5th December: 50% off ~~Losing Israel~~
6th December: 50% off ~~Significance~~
~~7th December: 50% off A Formula for Night: New and Selected Poems~~
~~8th December:~~ 50% off Writing the Picture
~~9th December: 50% off The Immigration Handbook~~
~~10th December: 50% off American Sycamore~~
~~11th December: 50% off The Road to Zagora~~
12th December: 50% off ~~House of Small Absences~~
~~13th December: 50% off Borderlands~~
~~14th December: 50% off Limestone Man~~
15th December: 50% off ~~A Boat Called Annalise~~
~~16th December: 50% off The Harp in Wales~~
~~17th December: 50% off Morlais~~
18th December: 50% off Newspaper Taxis: Poetry After The Beatles
19th December: 50% off Men Who Played the Game
20th December: 50% off ~~Swimming on Dry Land~~
21st December: 50% off Playing House
22nd December: 50% off The Rivalry of Flowers

23rd December: 50% off the New Stories from the Mabinogion complete signed box set
~~£100~~ £50
In New Stories from the Mabinogion ten great authors have taken the Celtic myth cycle as a starting point to give us masterly re-workings with a modern twist in a series both various and wonderful. This box set contains all ten contemporary tales, signed by the authors – Owen Sheers, Gwyneth Lewis, Horatio Clare, Cynan Jones, Niall Griffiths, Russell Celyn Jones, Tishani Doshi, Fflur Dafydd, Lloyd Jones and Trezza Azzopardi.

Each offer ends at midnight on the specified day.

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Posted on November 26, 2016 by Simon appleby

Forget Black Friday – get set for a Civilised Saturday

Forget the madness and stress of Black Friday and let’s all have a lovely Civilised Saturday.

Launched last year by booksellers, Civilised Saturday is a day for cosiness and comfort, an antidote to the deep discounts and high stress levels of Black Friday. We’re eager to do our part to enhance your Christmas shopping experience and help you have a thoroughly relaxing day (or two) at home. So for this weekend only, enjoy free postage and free tea with every order. Your books will be whisked across the country to you free of charge, and delivered with the perfect pick-me-up – a lovely, warming cup of tea (just add hot water!)

Civilised Saturday free tea free postage

So go on, put your feet up and do your Christmas shopping in style. And when that order arrives, we don’t blame you if you keep it all to yourself..

Our special Civilised Saturday offer ends midnight, Sunday 27 November, giving you a full weekend to take advantage from the comfort of home. Don’t miss out – shop now at www.serenbooks.com

Posted on October 7, 2016 by Simon appleby

Friday Poem – ‘Making Out’, Deryn Rees-Jones

This week our Friday Poem is ‘Making Out’ by Deryn Rees-Jones, which originally appeared in her second collection, Signs Round a Dead Body, and also features in her generous new What It’s Like to Be Alive: Selected Poems.

Both collections (along with Deryn’s other books The Memory Tray, Quiver, And You, Helen and Burying the Wren) are half price until midnight on Sunday, 9th October as part of our National Poetry Day sale.

What It’s Like to Be Alive marks a mid-career milestone in the life of this highly-acclaimed writer. From the poems written in her teens and early twenties included in her exciting debut The Memory Tray to her most recent exploration of time and grief, we see the arc of development in her writing over twenty-five years as she visits and revisits the concerns that are the mainstay of her writing: memory, love, desire, and heartbreak in all its manifestations. The following poem originally featured in Signs Round a Dead Body, Deryn’s second collection.

Making Out

Now it was airports that she needed –
to sit there going nowhere
counting aeroplanes like sheep,

with Concorde like an archaeopteryx or angel
and Egypt, Russia, the Azores and Lithuania
spinning in her head. She’d sit there

writing letters that she knew she wouldn’t send,
telling him about the dull, red moon, the way
the landscape then, so pale, unreal,

the fishermen, the midnight seas
had been tattooed like hieroglyphs
in blues and golds

deep into her skin. It was his hands, I think,
she could imagine best
travelling across her. But she thought about the way

he’d kiss her too, the way she’d smile, nod yes
to his demolishing her. The way he’d start
to reassemble, slowly, in the rented bed

her mouth, her throat, her shoulders, breasts,
her knees, her arms, her thighs, her calves, and love etc.

Until midnight on Sunday 9 October,What It’s Like to Be Alive: Selected Poems is half price: only £6.49 (RRP £12.99). Buy your copy now to take advantage of this fantastic offer.

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