Uncategorized Archives - Page 5 of 91

Posted on April 4, 2025April 4, 2025 by Seren Books

Friday Poem – ‘The Darkening’ by Kathryn Bevis

Photo of a dark sky with a few stars shining behind the clouds.

Following her memorial celebration earlier this week, today’s Friday Poem is ‘The Darkening’ by Kathryn Bevis from her collection The Butterfly House.

The Darkening
It started with glow worms and phosphorescent fish, their lights blown out like candles on a cake.At matinees, footlights swallowed themselves entire so we only guessed poor Gloucester’s eyes were gouged and heard Lear shake
his fists against the storm. Momentum took. Bulbs began to organise, to unionise, downed tools across the globe. Lighthouse beams refused to stroke the sea to sleep. Whole tower blocks played dead, their pupils blown.
By teatime, even the blood-lit freckles of TV standby LEDs had mutinied. Dentists’ lamps sat down, sat in, called sick. We blamed the manufacturers.We blamed the government. Streetlamps picketed the roads on which they lived.
We knew we were screwed when matches joined the strike, flints declined to spark, magnifying glasses wouldn’t catch. Oil lamps, tapers, flambeaux took up arms.
Conspiracy theorists had their day at last.
Ghosted by our darkened screens tonight, we are undone.We pray for dawn’s red eye to open, watch as stars put out their fires one by one by one.

Posted on March 28, 2025March 28, 2025 by Seren Books

Friday Poem – ‘On Mother’s Day’ by Vanessa Lampert

Close up photo of flowering yellow primroses

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘On Mother’s Day’ by Vanessa Lampert from her collection Say It With Me.

On Mother’s Day
He invites his mother for lunch. The house hums with quiet hope. It’s in the food he’s bought, and in the words of songs on the radio. He polishes the windows until his arm throbs. Expectation sparks at the tip of the match. He lights the candle and its flame carries the scent of oranges. He takes the rugs into the garden and shakes them. Hope is there too, tired old thing refreshed. He hasn’t seen his mother since she died when he was eleven. Her absence has hovered low over his life. But as he watches her walk slowly up the path, he feels spent sorrow peel away like dry skin. Later he will expect to find flakes inside his clothes, but there will be nothing. At first his mother doesn’t speak but holds his grown man face in her hands. His beard is between the spread of her fingers and she looks up at him with her eyes an ancient wet blue. My boy. She straightens his glasses. All morning they chat with her in the chair by the window where the light falls as he moves about preparing food; meat with rich gravy, dumplings, runner beans, cabbage, roast potatoes, the kind of food they last ate together. At the table they sit opposite one another. Both eat everything set before them. Then there is treacle tart and custard. Afterwards he drives to the river and they walk along the towpath where primroses stagger yellow up the bank. She says look at them in their spring frocks and points, her arm inside her dark green wool coat. There are rowers on the water and they watch them for a while, before he takes her arm and they walk back to the bridge where the car is parked. At home he makes tea and they agree that she should leave quietly like last time. But this time he will know it is going to happen. He tells her that the sign will be when he goes to the sink to wash the cups. He rinses for a long time with the tap running. Though he is listening for it, he doesn’t hear the click of the front door. As he turns to walk to the window, he sees the day step back from him with his mother inside it.

Posted on March 14, 2025March 13, 2025 by Seren Books

Friday Poem – ‘Buried Treasure’ by Paul Henry

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Buried Treasure’ by Paul Henry from his collected poems, The Brittle Sea.

Buried Treasure
Three silver shells, two feathers,
twisted into a black net,
placed in a young sailor’s palm,
small interpreters of love.
He falls backwards into sand.
Nothing so profound as this
has happened so easily, so far.
‘You keep me safe,’ she says.
Continents later discover him
an older man, a dull cabin.
He has been at sea too long.
On turning the key of a small box
he is faintly surprised
to find the contents still shining.

Posted on March 13, 2025March 13, 2025 by Seren Books

We have won Small Press of the Year Wales

British Book Awards Small Press of the Year Regional and Country Winner Wales. Seren Books.

We are delighted to be named Small Press of the Year Wales in this year’s British Book Awards.

This is testament to the hard work of the Seren Team who have pulled together during a challenging year for the company and delivered strong sellers, as well as titles which speak up for the disadvantaged, for Wales and the Welsh experience.

We are looking ahead to the future with a carefully curated 2025/26 programme of engaging, innovative, era-defining and fun titles. We love what we do, are striving for growth and can’t wait to share our ambitions for the next few years.

Philip Jones, editor of The Bookseller and chair of The British Book Awards, said: “These 10 Small Press winners, ranging from new players Bedford Square and VERVE Books to established publishers Seren Books and Bluemoose Books, are at the heart of today’s re-shaped publishing business. Regional but with a national focus, commercial yet value-led, intentional but flexible, these businesses do the hard-yards on behalf of their writers, while building brands and recruiting readers for the future.”

Congratulations to our fellow Regional and Country Winners who we look forward to seeing at the British Book Awards ceremony in May where the overall Small Press of the Year will be announced.

Find out more The Bookseller website here.

Posted on March 7, 2025March 6, 2025 by Seren Books

Friday Poem – ‘Poem in which I’m a transnational drug smuggler’ by Bethany Handley

Photo of a plane coming into land against a golden sky.

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Poem in which I’m a transnational drug smuggler’ by Bethany Handley from her pamphlet Cling Film.

Poem in which I’m a transnational drug smuggler
The guy in front of me is told to remove his leg. He unscrews it and places it in the tub with his luggage.We watch
his leg disappear through the rubber curtain
as he hops through the airport scanner. His stump
is swabbed alongside another guy’s empty boot,
a tube of toothpaste and a wallet. I’m asked to wheel
past the metal detector and to park myself
where the other travellers await their bags.
A female guard cups my arms, my waist, my breasts.
She asks me to raise myself above the cushion, squeezing her hand into the gap between my skin and chair. Below, my five-hundred-pound pressure cushion
protects my skin, bags of coke stashed where the gel
should hold my form. Each bum cheek is perfectly imprinted in bleached powder. Later, when the taxi driver asks
whether my wheelchair is to support my benefits claim, I’ll smirk and nod.

Posted on February 28, 2025February 14, 2025 by Seren Books

Friday Poem – ‘Whisper It’ by Emily Cotterill

Close up photo of a pile of golden crisps

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Whisper It’ by Emily Cotterill from her collection Significant Wow.

Whisper It
What was the name of that game we played,
pooling our answers on the playground
to questions like ‘favourite flavour crisps?’
or ‘boy you want to kiss?’
But it was a girl, the first time
I felt what I learnt is a pull
to pressed lips. I waited
with boys for something different.
They don’t use the word on television –
don’t even whisper it.
She works at a shop in my hometown, where the truth
of myself is still looming and massive, at the spot
where I found a delayed first kiss –
where I came late to what this feeling is.
You know I asked my mum once, ‘am I frigid?’
The small girls answer, ‘prawn cocktail, Jordan’
‘salt and vinegar, Michael’ and I don’t know
that I am enough of anything, floundering,
‘pickled onion Monster Munch,’
I am still whispering it.

Posted on February 24, 2025February 28, 2025 by Seren Books

We’re a finalist for Small Press of the Year

The British Book Awards Small Press of the Year Regional and Country Finalist Wales.

We’re delighted to be a Wales country finalist for Small Press of the Year in this year’s British Book Awards alongside our colleagues from Parthian, Rily Publications, Firefly Press, Lucent Dreaming, Broken Sleep Books and Graffeg.

We’re up against 46 small presses from across the UK all eager to be crowned overall Small Press of the Year. We now eagerly await the 10th March when the regional and country winners will be announced.

Philip Jones, editor of The Bookseller and chair of the judges for The British Book Awards, said of the finalists: “This cohort of smaller publishers never fails to impress me. In 2024, they ducked, dived, hunkered down, and then double- downed to come out from a tough year in magnificent shape. Here, every sale is hard-gained, no author left behind, with many of these presses putting the onus on human creativity as the foundation of their businesses. In a mixed environment for small-press publishing, these finalists stepped up and made themselves big, getting noticed within and without their niches as they grew sales and pivoted towards the main-stream.”

You can find all of the regional and country finalists listed on The Bookseller website here.

Posted on February 21, 2025February 14, 2025 by Seren Books

Friday Poem – ‘The Migration of Ghosts’ by Maggie Harris

Photo of a light house flashing across the rock in the night.

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘The Migration of Ghosts’ by Maggie Harris from her collection I Sing to the Greenhearts.

The Migration of Ghosts
In the country where I was born they said the dead couldn’t swim
and migration frees you from their ghosts, their constant whimpering
on what you should or shouldn’t have done. There in the land
of massacre there’s still a scramble to leave, body or no body and some
of them hitch rides on mobile phones or tankers while some try floating
as they heard it might help with questions of identification.
I saw them myself in the Azores, their bones granulated
to form coral and even undersea they gleam with what
one might describe as a wavering hue. But I was young then
and fanciful, and not everything I say is true.
Here in my final years I could live nowhere but the sea. I tried
the country once and all it did was eat me. So I’ve managed
to build a body without bones and these sea breezes are my constant,
dress me at their whim, disguise my intent. The jewellery I wear is free.
I walk these sands every Thursday and listen to the echoes
of my empty feet. The birds can hear it too, even the gulls avoid me.
The deafness of old age is misdiagnosed: what’s happening is
your hearing is actually sharper, just not the things you want to hear.
But you don’t have to believe me, not everything I say is true.
You don’t want to hear the desperate bitterness of crabs or imagine
the beautiful bones of the boy you loved sprinkled across
a foreign shore or incarcerated in some fancy casket his family insisted
he have. Still, I listen out for him every Thursday, watching the waves.
I sealed his death with a kiss, he has to find me. Sometimes I come
to see the lighthouse flash, it reminds me of voyages I wish I’d taken
or those I didn’t. In the end all we can do is walk and carry the sands
on our feet to leave at the doors of the lonely. But don’t
listen to me, I was always being accused of too much fancy.

Posted on February 19, 2025February 14, 2025 by Seren Books

Guest post: Emily Cotterill – Now That’s What I Call ‘Significant Wow’

Close up photo of cassette tapes laid out on a table.

In today’s guest post, Emily Cotterill shares her playlist ‘Now That’s What I Call Significant Wow’ and muses on the musical influences which have shaped her as a person and a poet.

Now That’s What I Call Significant Wow

‘Two lovers missing the tranquility of solitude’ in a lyric alongside ‘a pneumatic drill and ripped up concrete’ is almost exactly the energy I want from Significant Wow, it’s a shame Paul Weller came up with that before I was born.

It’s probably not the wisest thing to say, but I’ve deliberated more over the playlist to accompany this collection than some of the poems themselves. I’ve always hated answering the question ‘what kind of music do you like?’ partly because it’s so hard to answer, partly because of my lack of self-confidence, and partly because the only people who were happy about my answer were men at least a decade older than me in pubs. This playlist isn’t quite an answer to that question but it definitely gets into the ball-park of an answer. The fact that there’s a whole collection of poetry to sit alongside it makes it easier somehow, the book gives me something to back myself up with.

There’s music directly referenced in Significant Wow that isn’t on the playlist, partly because I don’t know how to reconcile ‘Come On Eileen’, ‘Mustang Sally’ and the ‘Grease Megamix’ and partly because the things that are more important are the things that are pointed at rather than named – Pulp’s kitchen sink lyrics, women in punk, David Bowie screaming ‘give me your hands ’cos you’re wonderful’. I set out to write a collection focused on celebrity and storytelling. In a lot of ways Significant Wow is that, but I also think it’s the evolution of my teenage scrapbook, I’m showing myself who I am and hopefully other people will see themselves in the poems and maybe in this playlist as well.

Other than children’s stuff (shout out to ‘Please Mrs Butler’) and the books for school, I didn’t really properly read poetry for a long time. I was a classic sixth form poet, guilty of writing without reading but I was definitely listening. Bits of lyrics always stuck in my head. From ‘Life On Mars?’ “girl with the mousey hair” to the unexpected “microwave ovens” and “colour TVs” in Dire Straits’ ‘Money for Nothing’ or the deeply unexpected use of the word “facsimile” in ‘Love Me For A Reason’ (the Boyzone version thank you, I was born in the 90s), I was always paying attention to lyrics in a way that I’ve relatively recently realised other people were not. There’s a broad musical theme running through this playlist but alongside that there are, I think, some really great words.

It’s a fundamental fact of my existence that I’m a Manics fan. I could have ripped up the whole playlist and given you a few hours of them. I think if you didn’t love something deeply and completely as a teenager you can never know what it was like, and if you did then you really don’t need telling that I am who I am because of them. Two Manics songs, and a bonus appearance of James Dean Bradfield alongside Public Service Broadcasting, made it onto this playlist because it was thematically sensible. Then there’s ‘So Dead’ which had to be there because of how it spoke to me as a sad, bookish, intellectually arrogant girl in a left behind town – “you’re going to pay for my intelligence”.

Emily Cotterill

Posted on February 14, 2025February 14, 2025 by Seren Books

Friday Poem – ‘The Golden Hour’ by Lorcán Black

Photo of a golden hour sun setting over distant hazy hills.

In honour of Valentine’s Day, this week’s Friday Poem is ‘The Golden Hour’ by Lorcán Black from his collection Strange Husbandry which was a PBS Recommendation.

Now That’s What I Call Significant Wow

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