Reviews

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Friday Poem – ‘Even in dreamscapes‘ by Christopher Meredith

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Even in dreamscapes’ by Christopher Meredith from his most recent collection Still.

This cover shows a painting of a snowy scene with the dark branches of a tree in the foreground.

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, Meredith ‘fixes stillness’ in absences here. His perfect ear tunes in so precisely – especially to the natural world, it’s ‘edge of sense’ – we are left haunted á la Frost, by a deep lonliness in the human condition.” – Paul Henry

Even in dreamscapes Even in dreamscapes Breughel understood the movement of the real north how the inimical gorgeous cold is always coming or just gone or here. Hunching figures lurch and pass a gusting fire in the black-legged woods. Barking and the stink of breath are coiled in the polyphony of canine tails. One magpie’s signing her brief shape across the air of solstice grey. And then that single upright crow on the bough of a decorous framing tree real as any you’ve ever seen nails it, is both of this world and peeping in as are we, but spells out how we never can escape the frame and is still, and stiller than we’ll ever be.

Still is available on the Seren website: £9.99

“By any yardstick, Still is a major achievement.” – The Yorkshire Times. Read the full review on The Yorkshire Times website.

Two book deal – purchase Still and Christopher’s newest novel Please together for the discounted price of £15.00.

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‘Daniel’s Beetles’

Seren has a new exciting release!

Seren is proud to announce that the Winner of the Daniel Owen Prize for Pryfeta has adapted his originally Welsh-language novel into English.

Daniel’s Beetles is the upcoming novel from Tony Bianchi, originally from North Shields, who now lives in Cardiff.

Bianchi is the former Director of Literature at the Arts Council of Wales and is now a freelance writer and translator. Pryfeta was shortlisted for Welsh Book of the Year.

Synopsis:
Daniel’s Beetles is an absorbing, unnerving novel about memory and forgetting, stories and lies, language and borders. It describes our attempts to recreate ourselves in ways we can never fully control. And in Dr Bruno, it catches a glimpse of the smiling mendacity, at once pathetic and chilling, which some might recognise as the face of a country at war.

Reviews:
“This is an intricate and multi-layered novel, rich in ideas and eloquent in expression, which will be pored over for years to come.” – Owain Wilkins, Planet

“The writing is muscular and at times utterly overwhelming… I was exhilarated.” – Robert Arwyn

“One of the most exciting writers working in Wales today.” – Lloyd Jones, Talesin

Continue reading ‘Daniel’s Beetles’

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‘A Place of Meadows and Tall Trees’ Reviews

A Place of Meadows and Tall Trees by Clare Dudman.

An intensely moving novel based on stories about the trails and triumphs of nineteenth-century Welsh immigrants attempting to set up a Welsh-speaking colony in Patagonia. The protagonist Silas James is a character you instantly connect with, and the in-depth descriptions make you feel as though you are sitting in the Patagonian desert. A word of caution: this storry is filled with tragedy, so have your tissues at the ready.

Buzz Magazine

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