This week’s Friday Poem is ‘What the Burglar Took’ by Rosalind Hudis from her collection Restorations. You can hear Rosalind chatting about the book on the The Seren Poetry Podcast which is available now on all podcast platforms.
Restorations is a journey into what it means to preserve – a monument, a moment, a life-story, a poppy. It’s about the hunger to possess and the need to let go. Welding themes from art and history with the contemporary, there are poems about pigments and dictators, glue and glass houses, collections, crinolines, and barometers, and the vagaries of memory itself. Entwined, is a more personal story that tracks the loss of a parent to dementia. Also running through, is a theme of women eroding the straitjacket of gendered roles. Linking all is a play with colour, particularly blue, in all its stages from vital to decayed.
The Seren Poetry Podcast is a new series of in-depth interviews with Seren poets. Episode 7 with Rosalind Hudis is available to listen to now.
Simply search ‘The Seren Poetry Podcast’ in your favourite podcast app and follow or subscribe to have all future editions delivered straight to your podcast feed. Available on all platforms including Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts. Don’t forget to leave us a review if you like what you hear.
Same Difference is the formally acute second collection by Ben Wilkinson. Carefully crafted, and charged with contemporary language, the poems play with poetic voice and the dramatic monologue, keeping us on our toes and asking just who is doing the talking. Throughout, he ‘steps into the shoes’ of French symbolist poet Paul Verlaine (1844-96), reframing his voice for modern readers. Brimming with everyone from cage fighters and boy racers to cancer patients and whales in captivity, Same Difference is gritty, darkly ironic and often moving – a collection for our times.
The Seren Poetry Podcast is a new series of in-depth interviews with Seren poets. Episode 6 with Ben Wilkinson is available to listen to now.
Simply search ‘The Seren Poetry Podcast’ in your favourite podcast app and follow or subscribe to have all future editions delivered straight to your podcast feed. Available on all platforms including Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts. Don’t forget to leave us a review if you like what you hear.
Carolyn Jess-Cooke’s third collection We Have to Leave the Earthdeftly interweaves the personal and the political. Climate change is confronted in a sequence about the Arctic; poems that are vividly descriptive of an extreme landscape, sensitive to the effects of global warming. A second sequence, The House of Rest, is a history in 9 poems of Josephine Butler, (1828-1906) a pioneering feminist activist. There are also tender poems about family, mental health, motherhood and the earth.
The Seren Poetry Podcast is a new series of in-depth interviews with Seren poets. Episode 5 with Carolyn Jess-Cooke is available to listen to now.
Simply search ‘The Seren Poetry Podcast’ in your favourite podcast app and follow or subscribe to have all future editions delivered straight to your podcast feed. Available on all platforms including Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts. Don’t forget to leave us a review if you like what you hear.
The Estate Agent’s Daughter by Rhian Edwards is both powerfully personal, local to the author’s Bridgend birthplace, and performative, born to be read aloud. In the title poem, the protagonist is reimagined as a surrealist house, foreshadowing both the heartbreak (a shattered first marriage) and joy (the birth of a daughter), that feature in the work that follows. Employing sly irony, close observation and sharp wit, the poet confronts a myriad of themes, from family and the body to the word of disillusioned dating. Throughout she combines her visceral skill for description with a feminist forthright courage to speak of difficult things.
The Seren Poetry Podcast is a new series of in-depth interviews with Seren poets. Episode 4 with Rhian Edwards is available to listen to now.
Simply search ‘The Seren Poetry Podcast’ in your favourite podcast app and follow or subscribe to have all future editions delivered straight to your podcast feed. Available on all platforms including Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts. Don’t forget to leave us a review if you like what you hear.
Still uses the title as a fulcrum to balance paradoxical concerns: stillness and motion, memory and forgetting, sanity and madness, survival and extinction. The old man in the title poem is seen standing, backlit by an open door. Fixing this in the mind is both memorial and a means of partial forgetting, of releasing him into history. The closing set of poems ‘Still Air’ focuses on a small landscape in the Usk Valley, observing the multiple, complex, endlessly moving parts of nature in the stars, geology, the seasons, the days. Lively and thought provoking, this is a beautifully crafted, insightful and intelligent collection.
The Seren Poetry Podcast is a new series of in-depth interviews with Seren poets. Episode 3 with Christopher Meredith is available to listen to now.
Simply search ‘The Seren Poetry Podcast’ in your favourite podcast app and follow or subscribe to have all future editions delivered straight to your podcast feed. Available on all platforms including Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts. Don’t forget to leave us a review if you like what you hear.
This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Heirloom’ by Ilse Pedler from her collection Auscultation. You can hear Ilse chatting poetry and her job as a vet in episode 2 of The Seren Poetry Podcast which is available now on all podcast platforms.
Auscultation, which means listening and specifically, in medicine, listening to sounds that come from the body’s internal organs. If listening is a central theme of this collection, it is also about being heard. There are poems about vets waiting rooms and surgical instruments, about crisis calls, about overhearing farmers and pet owners and colleagues. There are also poems about surviving a stern childhood and a heartbreaking sequence about being a stepmother. This is a compelling set of poems from a striking new voice.
The Seren Poetry Podcast is a new series of in-depth interviews with Seren poets. Episode 2 with Ilse Pedler is available to listen to now.
Simply search ‘The Seren Poetry Podcast’ in your favourite podcast app and follow or subscribe to have all future editions delivered straight to your podcast feed. Available on all platforms including Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts.
Auscultationis available on the Seren website: £9.99
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Judy Brown’s new collection Lairs was partly born out of a residency Exeter University’s Institute of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence. In this guest post she discusses the experience and how maths and poetry have more in common than you might think.
Lairs brings together something primal and secret – the lair as haven for a wild or feral animal – with the poem framed as a mathematical equation. In these terms, the ‘lair’ is a kind of nest, a beautiful accumulation of dense detail. The poems are introspective, by turns mocking, fearful and analytical. Judy Brown’s use of language is innovative, while maintaining moments of vulnerability and moving self-awareness. In these exquisite poems, the lair is both the community at large and a dark and intricate interior space where something wild still survives.
Maths and Metaphor
Before this summer, if someone had told me maths could be as much fun as writing poems, it wouldn’t have been a long chat. Professor Beth Wingate, mathematician and poet, did say as much to me in July but by then it was too late: it had become obvious. Residencies teach you things – often not what you expected.
This was a summer of empty campus lawns, rain, whiteboards crammed with notation, hours spent looking up half-heard maths phrases on Wikipedia, metaphors I splashed everywhere and tried to hold onto to avoid panic, attempts not to look stupid, looking stupid despite everyone saying, kindly, ‘There are no stupid questions.’ And lots of questions, lists of them collected amongst my drawings and notes in a big A3 sketchbook – a necessary navigation aid in this slightly frightening, very exhilarating experience. This sort of messy process is how I write anyway, I just hadn’t ever been quite so at sea.
Judy Brown’s residency sketchbooks
To backtrack a little: Arts and Culture University of Exeter has a programme that matches creative practitioners with research academics. The area under consideration can be quite sharply defined, the methodology and the outcome full of openness. I’d been attracted by the measured strangeness in the language used by Professor Peter Challenor, a statistician whose work involves producing approximations of what complex mathematical models (of the human heart, the ocean, the climate) would be likely to predict across a wide range of situations, together with exact assessments of how much you can rely on those predictions. The models themselves are often too expensive and slow to be run as many times as you’d like – just like the planet and the human body – so the techniques used by Peter’s team in the Institute of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence are of critical value, but also a little magical, seeming to create bricks out of straw.
Peter had said in his brief ‘There is always a discrepancy,’ but I had no idea how many sorts of discrepancy existed. The team’s specialisation is called uncertainty quantification – and when didn’t a poet love a paradox?
I was lucky. Peter turned out to be interested in everything, a member of the Poetry Book Society, and an eloquent explainer who could shift in and out of maths notation and take up my hesitant and extravagant metaphors to talk to me in a language I knew.
Judy Brown and Professor Peter Challenor. Photo credit: Steven Haywood
I had five weeks of great conversations – about writing on proper blackboards, machine learning, the problems of multidimensionality, different types of probability, heart surgery, whether a mathematical model is a metaphor, the importance of pattern and of deviations from it. We talked about Jack Underwood’s essay ‘On Poetry and Uncertain Subjects’ (The Poetry Society) – how our kind of uncertainty made poems hospitable, how unacknowledged uncertainty for Peter made things dangerous.
I only have a maths GSCE but I wasn’t too worried. I quite like feeling a subject is full of things I don’t know and knew that the not-knowing would itself generate ideas that would lead to poems. In the end I felt I’d been allowed to walk further into another world than I anticipated, with tiny, occasional flavours of what it might be like to know how to move in those regions as of right. As with poetry, it turns out that even small amounts of maths are worth having.
I knew that metaphor is what I think with, and where many of my poems originate – it’s central, not decorative. The fact that I couldn’t think anything without it was demonstrated very clearly over these weeks when I kept asking ‘What is it like in there?’, ‘What kind of creature is it?’ That was our difference, maybe – the poet’s obsession with specificity where a small precise detail stands in for a big abstract thing. Or maybe it’s not so different, I still don’t know.
The experience also underlined the importance of play for writing, and for problem-solving. At school I always wanted a structure to put what I learned in – that’s often what a teacher gives you – a particular shaped bucket, and you fill it. Here I had no time to get even a small bucket; there were only the structures I already had – metaphor, language, question, answer, and sometimes just the process of sitting and drawing.
Close up of one of Judy’s sketchbooks
This was semi-feral learning in the sense that when people told me about their work I was able to choose the questions and Peter’s team worked to give me answers that might make sense in the language of the asking. I also tried to learn as much of their talk as I could – even a few equations. It felt amazing for someone middle-aged to be learning in this essentially childlike way, like a car wash for the brain. It felt just like writing.
I’ve written quite a few poems from this – now on the Arts and Culture website and in issue 2 of Finished Creatures magazine, and migrating into the manuscript of my next collection Lairs. I have lots more drafts and ideas. While the maths is not always apparent, I couldn’t have written them without that huge new space in my head. I’m slowly reading a book about calculus and watching the odd MIT lecture or Isaac Newton Institute seminar on probability or uncertainty quantification. It still feels flukey, strange, to be treasured.
Judy Brown
Read Judy’s maths-inspired poem ‘Some Security Questions’ on the Exter Arts and Culture website.
‘Uncertain Rigours’, a short film by Steve Haywood about the residency, can be viewed on the Exter University Arts and Culture website.
Much With Body is a startlingly original second collection. The beauty of the Lake District is both balm and mirror, refracting pain and also soothing it with distraction. Much of the landscape is lakescape, giving the book a watery feel. Atkin also draws on the journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, from a period late in her life when she was often ill. In common with the works of the Wordsworths, these poems share a quality of the metaphysical sublime. Their reverence for the natural world is an uneasy awe, contingent upon knowledge of our fragility and mortality.
The Seren Poetry Podcast is a new series of in-depth interviews with Seren poets. Episode 1 with Polly Atkin is available to listen to now.
Simply search ‘The Seren Poetry Podcast’ in your favourite podcast app and follow or subscribe to have all future editions delivered straight to your podcast feed. Available on all platforms including Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts.
This week’s Friday Poem is ‘The Leech House’ by Rhiannon Hooson from her forthcoming collection Goliat.
Goliat is the second collection by Rhiannon Hooson, a follow-up to her Wales Book of the Year nominated debut, The Other City. An intelligent and beautiful book, Goliat offers absorbing stories of a precarious world on the brink of climate emergency. Employing startling imagery and a deep sense of history, these poems explore the irreplaceable beauty of a wild world, and the terrible damage that humans might do to each other and the earth.
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Join us at 7:30pm at Chapter in Cardiff on National Poetry Day Thursday 6th October to see Rhiannon launch Goliat at Seren First Thursday alongside Hilary Llewellyn-Williams. If you can’t join us in person, we’re also streaming via Facebook live. Find the details on our website.
To celebrate publication of her new short story collection Scar Tissue, we interviewed Clare Morgan about her inspiration, writing process and work teaching creative writing.
Scar Tissue is the enigmatic new collection of short stories by Clare Morgan, a follow up to her newly reprinted collection An Affair of the Heart. As we travel from Wales and the Marches to places as far away as India, Paris, New England, Scandinavia and Spain, these lyrical, evocative and searching stories unflinchingly explore the darker and more challenging aspects of emotional, sexual and familial relationships, while simultaneously celebrating the joys of being alive in an unfathomable world.
You founded Oxford University’s creative writing programme and are director of the course. Before we discuss your new book, tell us more about the connection between being a writer and teaching creative writing. How do they inform one another? Do you have any advice for someone thinking of studying creative writing?
I came to teaching creative writing rather by accident. I find that working with eager and able writers who are keen to explore and really take their work forward is stimulating and enriching. Our students come from a rich and diverse range of backgrounds and locations around the world, and the mix of voices and approaches this offers is unparalleled in helping to hone any writer’s ear and method. Working with other writers provides a community of comrades with a shared purpose. Addressing the challenges they face helps a writer to refresh and reinvigorate her own approaches. As to advice: I’d say, look around carefully at what’s on offer; think very carefully about why you want to study creative writing in a formal setting. It’s not right for everyone, but can – in the right circumstances – be a life-changing experience that you’ll continue to treasure, whether you achieve significant publication or not.
Scar Tissue is separated into five distinct sections: Space; Home; Away; Nowhere; and Somewhere. What was the reason behind structuring the book in this way and what do each of these headings imply within the context of the book?
The stories fell naturally into these divisions. The first story – ‘Breathing on the Moon’ uses the concept of space and space travel as a metaphor for life experiences. The ‘Home’ section focuses on stories set in the Welsh Marches – a very distinct borderland between countries and cultures.. ‘Away’ places its characters in various locations around the world – the U.S, India, France – and explores the search for some kind of belonging. ‘Nowhere’ equally uses foreign settings (Scandinavia, Spain, a transatlantic flight from Washington), to consider lives in motion between different ways of being; while the final section, ‘Somewhere’, comes to rest in a medieval farmhouse in Snowdonia, where past lives co-exist and enrich the present, posing more questions than can ever be answered, and disturbing the veil between ‘then’ and ‘now’. Like scar tissue in the flesh, the collection as a whole looks at where things divided and where – and if – they have grown back together. It looks at what is and what might have been.
There is a strong sense of place in the stories in Scar Tissue. What does the concept of ‘place’ mean to you and how does it influence your writing?
Place is fundamental to who and what I am.It was a defining feature as I grew up in the Welsh countryside (rural Monmouthshire) and remains so. My paternal forebears were from Cardiganshire and Aberdare. My maternal family from the Marches – Pembridge Castle, Shobden, Symond’s Yat, Monmouth. Place to me is about belonging, or the absence of belonging. It has always been interlinked with history and time, and family, in complex ways.
You write often of relationships and their complexities. What draws you to this subject and how does it relate to other themes in your work?
Relationships are fundamental to who we are and how we survive in the world. I believe they are infinitely complex and impossible ever to understand fully. The affections co-exist very often with their opposite. Goodness and morality in all of us are countered by darker actions and instincts. My characters enact these endless oppositions and counter-tows, as they are buffeted by the equally complex and conflicting tides of life and circumstance. I think short stories have always explored these aspects of being human, from de Maupassant onwards through Raymond Carver and to George Saunders today.
You often switch between male and female narrators in your work, and many of the stories in Scar Tissue are written in the third person. How do you approach characterisation and narrative voice in your stories?
The stories speak to me in terms of who their central character is, and this influences the voice in terms of gender, and in terms of first, third or second person narration. I’ve always been comfortable writing from a male character. It just depends on who the story emanates from, and who I see and hear in my head. I often approach stories quite obliquely, and the third person allows plenty of room for manoeuvre in moving indirectly from the start point to the crux of the story.
The stories in Scar Tissue and your previous collection An Affair of the Heart are set in a wide range of geographical locations, although the characters in these stories aren’t always from those places. What drew you to each of these locations as settings for these stories?
I’ve visited or worked in all the locations I write about. Being away from a usual environment enables a very different perspective on things in that being ‘other’ offers a detachment that fosters observation and reveals previously unrealised aspects of people and things.
In Scar Tissue American novelist Henry Miller and philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche frequently appear, and elsewhere writers such as Virginia Wolf have featured in your work. How have these figures and other writers influenced your writing, and in particular the stories within Scar Tissue and An Affair of the Heart?
Nietzsche and Woolf were characters in my novel A Book For All and None and have exercised a strong influence on my writing, as characters and as thinkers. Nietzsche’s writings on time, redemption and alienation are reflected in particular in some stories in Scar Tissue, while Woolf’s approaches to writing, and her contribution to the Modernist aesthetic, resonate throughout my work. Henry Miller is a key aspect of ‘Breathing on the Moon’ the first story in Scar Tissue, where he exercises a strong influence on the life and emotional approaches of the young central character.
In the story ‘Special’ you choose to write in second person. What difference does this make to the story and why did you make this decision?
The second person allows a writer to simultaneously occupy closeness and distance of voice and perspective. This give the almost hallucinatory quality of recollection that I was seeking in ‘Special’, where a young girl is at a turning point in her life and in her family’s fortunes.
Over twenty years have passed between first publication of An Affair of the Heart and your new collection Scar Tissue. How has your writing process changed during this time?
I think a constant has been the battle to carve out time to write, or at least substantial enough blocks of time to enable the intense concentration needed for a longer work. I used to write by hand initially, always in pencil. Now I tend to type onto my laptop, although I revert to longhand if I get stuck, or am writing in the middle of the night. Composing on my laptop still involves multiple drafts and sub-drafts (just as by hand) and I usually work with many windows open simultaneously, mimicking the pages of a A4 ruled writing book.
The last piece in Scar Tissue brings us inside your own home. What is the significance of ending the collection with this piece?
The medieval farmhouse in Gwynedd where the last piece is set does offer a kind of permanence to set against the transient and fast-paced aspects of contemporary existence. Time appears to operate differently and there is a rootedness that doesn’t seem available in more recent settings. There’s a silence, too, through which it appears you can ‘hear’ the past and perhaps feel a connection to it that isn’t obvious elsewhere. It’s an illusion, no doubt, but perhaps a comforting one, and that has allowed me to suggest a kind of concreteness through being ‘Somewhere’ as opposed to ‘Nowhere’.
