Poetry

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Friday Poem – ‘[ search ]’ by Sammy Weaver

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘[ search ]’ by Sammy Weaver from her pamphlet Angola, America which won this year’s Mslexia Poetry Pamphlet Prize.

This cover shows a geometric image of think white lines against black stripes. A gaping white hole is cut from the middle. The text reads: Angola, America. Sammy Weaver.

Angola, America, winner of the Mslexia Poetry Pamphlet Prize 2021, takes its name from a prison in Louisiana in the southern United Sates. In these strikingly original, thoroughly contemporary, and deeply moving poems, we are immersed in the world the inmates must endure. From the first poem, when we witness a home-made tattoo and understand that this scarring and incision is a “map in the connective tissue of pain and loss”, we are drawn into this world in a way that is carefully observed and beautifully empathetic.

[ search ] In the beginning the guard’s gloved hands pat you down, searching for weapons, his touch is weaponized, the muted duty of his movements smooth along each of your arms. Soon the guard’s touch is the only touch from another and you think of your mother after bath time, the harbour of her chest against yours, the rough-love of her towelling you dry, reaching into all the nooks and crannies, no cabbages behind the ears she says. And yes, I guess searching the body is another way of saying the body is a trove of treasure and your touch a torch.

Angola, America is available on the Seren website: £6.00

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Read Sammy’s poem ‘[ exhibit : electric chair ]’ and a comment about ‘How she did it’ on the Mslexia website.

The Mslexia Poetry Pamphlet Prize 2022 is now open for entries. Find out more here.

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Friday Poem – ‘Navigation Points’ by Emily Blewitt

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Navigation Points’ by Emily Blewitt from her collection This Is Not A Rescue.

This cover shows a painting of a tabby cat with it's shadow set against a sandy stone background. The text reads: This Is Not A Rescue. Emily Blewitt. 'a riotus, cacophonous and wonderful book.' - Jonathan Edwards

In This Is Not A Rescue we are introduced to a poet whose voice is fresh and striking, who writes both forcefully and tenderly about refusing to be rescued, rescuing oneself, and rescuing others. This book is about finding love and keeping it, negotiating difficult family and personal struggles, and looking at the world with a lively, intelligent and sardonic eye.

Navigation Points Crossing the bridge, you find me by touch alone; have turned off your sat nav, dipped your lights. You feel your way past landmarks, signs, the steady flow of traffic. When you arrive, though, I am still at the threshold. Standing by streetlight, I think I am lost. You smile, then, lead me gently inside; draw the curtains, undress me by sight. You lower your long dark lashes just once: to trace your route across my skin. These moles, you say, fine points for navigation. You’ll map my constellations, you explain, know me anywhere.

This Is Not A Rescue is available on the Seren website: £9.99

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Friday Poem – ‘A Flock of Young Birds’ by Hilary Llewellyn-Williams

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘A Flock of Young Birds’ by Hilary Llewellyn-Williams from her new book The Little Hours: New and Selected Poems.

The Little Hours: New and Selected Poems. Hilary Llewellyn-Williams.

The Little Hours: New and Selected Poems is a landmark volume which collects key poems from the career of Hilary Llewellyn-Williams, one of the outstanding poets of her generation in Wales. In addition to the classic sequences ‘The Tree Calendar’ and ‘Book of Shadows’, the book also includes new work, including ‘The Little Hours’, a new sequence arranged according to the traditional monastic hours. Llewellyn-Williams is one of the earliest environmental poets; her response to nature always profound, passionate and keenly observed. The Little Hours will remind readers of her many strengths and beauties and shows new readers the breadth and talent of a writer whose eye for vivid imagery and startling detail has always astounded.

A Flock of Young Birds for Bob Needs, i.m. Shirley Needs Something of me, a remnant enclosed in a little box tucked away in the rosy earth: yes, that dear dust, precious stuff from the breathing body that flourished and grew from my birth – while you who loved me gather around that trace of me, remember, mourn and pray on this gentle August day of sun and breeze. How can I tell you now how much I love, how happy I am? How here, how near, how free? Now in this summer tree among the leaves, the light, the webs and spiderlings, the stray bees, I call these birds to sing that song for me.

The Little Hours: New and Selected Poems is available on the Seren website: £12.99

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Friday Poem – ‘The Park in the Afternoon’ by Dai George

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘The Park in the Afternoon’ by Dai George from his collection Karaoke King.

The cover of Karaoke King shows a drawing of a teenage boy wearing a red and brown stripped vest and white shirt. His glasses are crooked and he is wearing a crumpled yellow crown.

Dai George’s confident second collection Karaoke King, addresses the contentious nature of the times. Always deeply thoughtful but also alternately ebullient, angry, curious, ashamed, the poet moves through urban and digital spaces feeling both uneasy and exhilarated. There is a feeling of history shifting, as a younger generation confronts its ethical obligations, its sense of complicity and disappointment. Ecological crisis hovers in the background. Karaoke King also contains numerous reflections on popular culture, culminating in ‘A History of Jamaican Music’, a sequence at the heart of the volume speaking to urgent contemporary questions of ownership and privilege, pain and celebration. 

The Park in the Afternoon By the goats, a high-vis warden tweezers litter with glacial care. Men bear tins of Scrumpy Jack aloft to salute Ol’ Blue Eyes as he spreads the news from a battered tape machine. Their conductor lies down in the grass crafting languorous signals from a spliff. On the lunchtime news, a minister reviled my productivity: sleepwalking into a crisis is how he described the nation’s plight when output fails to tack with growth. Watching a duckling wobble afloat as sun glints, useless, on the pond, I see his point. Diverse and splendid things have brought us here, we heathens in the Christendom to come. The drunk, the retired, the roistering lads bunking off early with blazer sleeves riding up their arms – each of us truant, and gentle for an hour, our output no more than what we can make of the angle of hurried daylight before a shower.

Karaoke King is available on the Seren website: £9.99

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Catch Dai George reading from Karaoke King alongside Ilse Pedler, Sarona Abuaker & Jeremy Dixon at Seren Cardiff Poetry Festival on Friday 29th July in Published During the Pandemic. Tickets are on sale here www.cardiffpoetryfestival.com/tickets-22.

Earlier this year, Dai George put together a playlist of songs that tie in with poems from Karaoke King. Take a look here.

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Friday Poem – Page 35 from ‘Witch’ by Damian Walford Davies

This week’s Friday Poem is taken from Witch by Damian Walford Davies. This continuous narrative poem conjures a thrilling portrait of a Suffolk village in the throes of the witchcraft hunts of the mid-seventeenth century.

This cover shows a red sketchy print of a monkey sitting on a table beside a lamp. The text reads: Damian Walford Davies Witch.

With the narrative pull of a novel and the vibrancy of a play for voices, the poems in this collection are dark spells, compact and moving: seven sections, each of seven poems, each of seven couplets, are delivered by those most closely involved in the ‘making’ of a witch. The speakers authentically conjure a war-torn society in which religious paranoia amplifies local grievances to fever pitch. Damian Walford Davies’s Witch is a damning parable that chimes with the terror and anxieties of our own haunted age.

We were eeling in the fingers of the creek, drawing knots of muscle from the rushwork creels, a silty tidemark just above the knees. We watched him loll along the boards, lank sprays of loosestrife in his hands. Clem dropped her trussed skirt on the tide, two eels flailing round her wrists, quickening water lapping at our legs. He saw us, held his poor posy out. Love! he said. I couldn’t say to which.

Witch is available on the Seren website: £8.99

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Friday Poem – ‘Still’ by Christopher Meredith

This week’s Friday Poem is the title poem ‘Still’ from Christopher Meredith’s collection of the same name. Christopher was recently interviewed by Nawr magazine about his poetry and fiction. You can read the issue online via their website.

This cover shows a painting of a winter landscape looked on from far away, the tiny trees visible in the fields. The black branches of a tree are visible in the foreground with a single black crow amongst the branches. The text reads: Still Christopher Meredith.

Christopher Meredith’s new poetry collection Still, uses the title word as a fulcrum to balance various paradoxical concerns: stillness and motion, memory and forgetting, sanity and madness, survival and extinction. Lively and thought-provoking, this is a beautifully crafted, humane and intelligent collection.

“Lyrical, always surprising… His perfect ear tunes in so precisely” – Paul Henry

Still At the banister above you an old man stands in long johns like you’ll never see again except in films, backlit by an open door smiling and lifting a slow hand and you are forever in slow motion sailing down the narrow stairs. Your eyes are rolling up to watch his head inclining gently as you go. That’s all. Rerun it. Look again. He lifts a hand that’s bossed and broad. He smiles and pinpoints of white stubble light the folding cheek. The moustache shifts. No no, they say. You never saw him. He couldn’t stand, and you were far too young. But you did. He could. And were you cradled down the darkening drift, a babe in arms? Again. That backlight is the sun. Same hand slowly raised, same slow-inclining head, same kind smile, his shape at the handrail this time hunched like a passenger who’s slipping from the quay too courteous yet to turn back to the glare of the final room, though he hungers to, and will. Memory is the still of slow forgetting, the black and aching decades boiled to air, cooled to this crawling droplet in the pipe moving still and still in this suspension rolling on its empty convolutions to catch and lose a world in hard white light.

Still is available on the Seren website: £9.99

Still was published simultaneously with Christopher’s latest novel Please. You can buy them as a set on our website for £15.00.

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Friday Poem – ‘Iraqi Bride in Transit’ by Abeer Ameer

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Iraqi Bride in Transit’ by Abeer Ameer from her debut collection Inhale/Exile which has just been shortlisted for the Wales Book of the Year!

Cardiff-based poet Abeer Ameer writes of her forebears in her first collection, Inhale/Exile. Dedicated to the “holders of these stories”, the book begins with a poem about a storyteller on a rooftop in Najaf, Iraq, follows tales of courage and survival, and ends with a woman cooking food for neighbours on the anniversary of her son’s death.

Iraqi Bride in Transit She’s nineteen, waits in Charles de Gaulle airport unsure where to go. She hopes that Groom comes for her soon. Her first experience of a plane journey hasn’t been Oh là là. Far from her Baghdad home, her white suit is not so white now. It’s the first time she wears high heels; she has blisters, struggles to balance. She wears her mother’s fur coat, a white headscarf, white clutch bag holds her green passport. Feels bare without her abaya. Groom waits in Heathrow arrivals. It’s 23rd December 1974. Three flights have arrived from Paris in the last eight hours. No sign of her. Iraqi Christians who boarded the same plane from Baghdad waiting for their New York flight recognise she’s the bride, take her to the gate. Last flight before Christmas. He is pupil. He do drugs. She rolls her Rs. Groom’s lost hope. It’s late. He gets up, ready to leave Heathrow, gathers coins to make the international call. What will he tell her father? Announcement. Groom is summoned to Immigration. Your wife says you do drugs. He realises at that moment he should have taught his bride the correct English term for pharmacy student.

Inhale/Exile is available on the Seren website: £9.99

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Voting is now open for the Wales Book of the Year People’s Choice Award. Head to the Wales Arts Review website to vote for your favorite www.walesartsreview.org.

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Friday Poem – ‘43. When I open my ribs’ by Kim Moore

To celebrate her collection All The Men I Never Married being shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection, this week’s Friday Poem is ‘43. When I open my ribs’ by Kim Moore.

This cover shows a collage image of the figure of a man made up of tiny pictures of nature. He is against a black background surrounded by butterflies. The text reads: All The Men I Never Married Kim Moore

Kim Moore’s eagerly awaited second collection All The Men I Never Married is pointedly feminist, challenging and keenly aware of the contradictions and complexities of desire. The 48 numbered poems take us through a gallery of exes and significant others where we encounter rage, pain, guilt, and love.

“All the Men I Never Married is a work of immense focus, intelligence and integrity.” – The Yorkshire Times

43. When I open my ribs a dragon flies out and when I open my mouth a sheep trots out and when I open my eyes silverfish crawl out and make for a place that’s not mine. When I open my fists two skylarks soar out and when I open my legs a horse gallops out and when I open my heart a wolf slips out and watches from beneath the trees. When I open my arms a hare jumps out and when I show you my wrists a shadow cries out and when I fall to my knees a tiger stalks out and will not answer to me. Now that the beasts that lived in my chest have turned tail and fled, now that I’m open and the sky has come in and left me with nothing but space, now that I’m ready to lie like a cross and wait for the ghost of him to float clear away, will my wild things come back, will the horse of my legs and the dragon of my ribs, and the gentle sheep which lived in my throat and the silverfish of my eyes and the skylarks of my hands and the wolf of my heart, will they all come back and live here again, now that he’s left, now I’ve said the word whisper it rape, now I’ve said the word whisper it shame, will my true ones, my wild, my truth, will my wild come back to me again?

All The Men I Never Married is available on the Seren website: £9.99

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Catch Kim at the Seren Cardiff Poetry Festival on the 30th July! She’ll be taking part in a session on Poetry & Empowerment and discussing The Result is What You See Today, an anthology about running which she co-edited with Paul Deaton and Ben Wilkinson. See the full programme and buy tickets at cardiffpoetryfestival.com. All our in person events are also being streamed online.

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Friday Poem – ‘The Artist Mixes Colour in the Renaissance’ by Rosalind Hudis

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘The Artist Mixes Colour in the Renaissance’ by Rosalind Hudis from her collection Restorations.

This cover shows an abstract print of blue and red mountains blocking out the sky. The text reads: Restorations: Roaalind Hudis. "If a poem is like a picture, these are history paintings, rich in human detail and many-layered in their brushwork." – Matthew Francais

Inspired by the art restorer’s keen eye and by a vivid empathy for people and events, Restorations, is a journey through memory. Suffused with colour, inspired by thoughts of people and places, by artefacts and how the passage of time shifts perspectives and erodes surfaces, these poems are beautifully complex explorations, full of curiosity and the adventure of seeing and listening.

The Artist Mixes Colour in the Renaissance Don’t think of me as lime-robed and lost in undailiness; I come with sleeves rolled-up, worker in a mire of substance. Yes, I stink! I chew on a rotted wafer of dried fish glue my saliva in the mix. How else to stretch the hue of some frosty cleric? My paints are part kill: rabbit skin, horse hoof, pig’s blood. I knife, mine, grind, churn, pound, steep, sweat my way to that primal blue you worship. When you varnish me with meaning, remember the grit under my nails, the fumes. Green comes from the labour camps you made for your longing. And that hair-coiled girl resolved from light. She’s no touched-up pink fix. She took on the earth to coagulate: egg-yolk, red clay, mineral, old linen marble dust. Do you think, if she looked up she wouldn’t roar with the energy of her roots?

Restorations is available on the Seren website: £9.99

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Friday Poem – ‘Dogwoman’ by Deryn Rees-Jones

This week’s Friday Poem is the opening page of the sequence ‘Dogwoman’ by Deryn Rees-Jones. ‘Dogwoman’ draws on the work of Portuguese artist Paula Rego, who passed away earlier this week. It first appeared in Deryn’s collection Burying the Wren, and later in What It’s Like to Be Alive: Selected Poems.

This cover shows a drawing by the artist Paula Rego of three children leaping in the air. The text reads: Deryn Rees-Jones What It's Like To Be Alive Selected Poems

What It’s Like to Be Alive: Selected Poems brings together poems from five of Deryn Rees-Jones’s early collections: The Memory Tray, Signs Round a Dead Body, Quiver, Burying the Wren, and And You, Helen. We see the arc of development in her writing as she visits and revisits the concerns that are the mainstay of her writing: memory, love, desire, and heartbreak in all its manifestations. The cover features a drawing by Paula Rego.

Dogwoman after Paula Rego No one can love this horror, no one can want it. I’m crouched between my own thighs, with my dog heart and my dog soul. For now I’m a woman brought up by dogs, bitch in the muck and the blood and the dirt. For once, now, I’ve got no words, and look – I’m trampling my bed, I’m baying at the moon. And no one can hear me, with my skirts pulled up, head back as my eyes roll. Look. I’m swallowing sorrow. No one can hear me in spite of the howls. * I am lying on my back, my legs outsplayed. That would be my dog-look, now, I’m giving you, my half-cock, something askance and going to hell, take me/leave me, inbreath, outbreath. Trembling, I’m all upturned. Heart-hit, flesh-bound, saying love love in a ring of devotion. Here’s my dogbelly with its small pink teats. I’m waiting for the pressure of your well-shaped hand. * Now dog’s the divine. Strange thought. Dancing on hind legs, head to one side, and the face of her master. Dog sudden, well-met. Dog sitting, dog listening, dog running with big joy and ghost dogs on the fields now with her. Dog blur, hellhound, dog shaking, hare-bound; dog in the wind, sky-bound. (Once, attendant in my blue dress, I hadn’t the words to call you back.) Dog in the snow, dog in the sea. Dog glorious, glories herself. Dog racing with gleam and thunder. Best friend. Neither fish nor fowl. Just for this moment hound bliss.

…

What It’s Like to Be Alive is available on the Seren website: £12.99

Burying the Wren is available on the Seren website: £9.99

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