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Commissioned words by Grahame Davies performed at National Assembly Opening

The Fifth National Assembly for Wales on June 7th at The Senedd featured a specially commissioned musical composition by Prof. Paul Mealor, set to the words of Dr Grahame Davies “Wrth ddŵr a thân”, performed by the National Youth Choir of Wales.
The ceremony was attended by Her Majesty The Queen, His Royal Highness The Duke of Edinburgh, His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales and Her Royal Highness The Duchess of Cornwall, as well as Assembly Members and representatives from across Wales.
Find out more on the National Assembly for Wales website.

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Friday Poem – Borderland

friday poem borderland christopher meredith

Yesterday marked the beginning of the week-long Hay Festival, where writers from around the world gather in the staggering beauty of the Welsh borders to debate, read, share stories and inspire – among them, Tom Bullough with his new novel, Addlands (Granta).

As a nod to Hay, our Friday poem is ‘Borderland’ from Air Histories by Christopher Meredith. ‘Borderland’ and Air Histories had a significant influence on Tom Bullough’s new Radnorshire-set novel, Addlands.

air_historiesChristopher Meredith’s Air Histories starts in the Stone Age and ends in the future. It’s marked by formal diversity and a wide range of subjects, with the personal alongside the impersonal and the experimental alongside well-known forms, as well as including some translations from the Welsh. Throughout it engages the rich meanings of its title, touching on the elemental and on historical time, as well as music and story, meditating on human creativity and its fallibilities from knapping an arrowhead to playing the fiddle or making a guitar. Nature is a touchstone, particularly the Black Mountains, near the author’s home, but also often seen ‘aslant’ as in ‘Seeing the Birds’ where sparrows seem suddenly fierce as eagles.

 

Borderland

Ffin is the Welsh for border. It occurs inside diffiniad which means definition, and in Capel y Ffin, a place in the Black Mountains.

You’ll find a ffin inside each definition.
We see what is when we see what it’s not:
edges are where meanings happen.

On the black whaleback of this mountain
earth curves away so sky can start
to show a ffin’s a kind of definition

where skylarks climb across earth’s turn
to air and pulsing muscle turns to an art-
ful song the edge that lets a meaning happen.

Live rock can yield to mortared stone,
a city to a castle, then a shepherd’s hut,
where ffin’s contained inside a definition,

where the lithic turns into the human.
Here’s where things fall together, not apart
at edges that let meanings happen.

And self here blurs into annihilation.
Larkfall, earthfall, skyfall, manfall each create
the ffin that is the place of definition
the edges where we see our meanings happen.

 

Buy your copy of Air Histories now, 20% off for Book Club Members.

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Wales Book of the Year shortlist

Two Seren authors feature on the shortlist for Wales Book of the Year 2016. Paul Henry’s poetry collection Boy Running is up for the Roland Mathias Poetry Award, while Jasmine Donahaye is shortlisted for the Open University in Wales Creative Non-Fiction Award with Losing Israel.
Winners of the Poetry, Non-Fiction and Fiction Categories, and the overall Wales Book of the Year Winner, will be announced on Thursday 21 July at The Redhouse, Merthyr Tydfil. Full details of all the shortlisted books, English- and Welsh-language, can be found on the Literature Wales website http://www.literaturewales.org/news/i/147350/

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Happy 75th Birthday, Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan was 75 last Tuesday 24 May. What better way to celebrate than in the company of great writers who have responded to his creative genius with poetry of their own. The Captain’s Tower includes poems from Allen Ginsberg, Lachlan Mackinnon, Matthew Sweeney, Jeremy Reed, Linda Chase, Linda France, Roger McGough, Paul Muldoon, Simon Armitage,  Peter Finch and many more. Perfect reading for ardent Dylan fans.

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Friday Poem – Suturing Secrets

Ilse Pedler The Dogs that Chase Bicycle Wheels Mslexia pamphlet

This week’s Friday Poem is taken from Ilse Pedler’s new poetry pamphlet The Dogs that Chase Bicycle Wheels.

The Dogs that Chase Bicycle Wheels Ilse Pedler Friday PoemIlse Pedler’s marvelous debut poetry booklet, The Dogs that Chase Bicycle Wheels, won the 2015 Mslexia Poetry Pamphlet Competition. Many of her poems are about animals and how they interact with humans, and reflect her working life as a Veterinary Surgeon. Pedler has a careful, empathetic eye for the characteristics of the animals she comes across. Humans and their secrets are also observed, with a sharp wryness but also with a characteristic gentleness.

 

Suturing Secrets

We are divided into compartments,
separated by taut membranes,

glistening planes of connective tissue,
resilient boundaries. 

Today this is damaged,
anaesthetized, surgically explored

your diaphragm is a torn curtain hanging
and like a peep show I’m drawn to look behind. 

In the absence of pressure lungs hesitate
to inflate, do their best to conceal 

the frantic convulsions at your core,
the struggle for rebirth every second.

I look perhaps longer than I should
at the shuddering flesh, the labouring

beauty, then I pull the curtain back over
and suture the secret inside.

Buy your copy of The Dogs that Chase Bicycle Wheels now, 20% off for Book Club members.

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The Poetry School interviews Katrina Naomi

“I think the main thing for me is if you’re going to write about violence, do it well. Let us smell it, taste it.”
Read Katrina Naomi’s interview with Ali Lewis of The Poetry School, where she discusses violence, ‘the gentility bind’ and her new poetry collection, The Way the Crocodile Taught Me.
Katrina also talks about her upcoming one-day workshop with The Poetry School, “The Bloodjet: Violence in Poetry”, in which she will teach how to harness violence in your writing.
The Way the Crocodile Taught Me is a collection richly bound up with violence, as Katrina explains:“The collection has two main concerns regarding violence – violence in the family (specifically from my step-father) and violence on the street (specifically sexual violence). People seem to have picked up on the ‘Willpower’ poem, I’m glad about that, it was quite a tough one to write and also I’ve had a lot of positive feedback on the title poem, which responds to being playful about sex and relationships after an attempted rape.  It’s probably my most personal set of poems to date. It’s interesting, other people have picked up on the humour in the book. While I knew the collection would have an undertow of violence, it has a lighter side too.”
Read the interview, and buy the book.

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International Dylan Thomas Day 2016 | News and Offers

international dylan day 2016 offers

Happy International Dylan Thomas Day! This year is the second annual celebration of Dylan Thomas, held on 14th May to mark the date Under Milk Wood was first read on stage at 92Y The Poetry Center, New York in 1953.

International Dylan Thomas Day 2016 Dylan Day offers Seren

We have a number of Dylan Thomas related books in our store, and for today only, these titles are 50% off:

dylanday

Dylan Remembered: Volume One: 1914-1934, ed. David N. Thomas
Paperback:
£12.95

£6.48
Hardback:
£25.00
£12.50
This is the first of two volumes of transcribed interviews about the poet Dylan Thomas. Journalist, broadcaster, and author Colin Edwards interviewed numerous sources close to Thomas for a planned biography of the poet, but he was unable to begin work before his early death. The transcribed tapes have been edited into two collections, with the second due in 2004. Startling new information about Thomas’s life and writing is disclosed, including influences on his writing and the sources from which he drew inspiration and storylines.

Dylan Remembered: Volume Two: 1914-1934, ed. David N. Thomas
Paperback:
£12.95

£6.48
Hardback:
£25.00
£12.50
This second volume culled from the Colin Edwards Archive of interviews with Dylan Thomas’ family, friends and colleagues made during the 1960s covers Thomas’ ‘adult’ life from his move, aged 20, to London to become a professional writer to his death in New York 51 years ago. It is a story which we think we know, but the archive sheds new – often contradictory – light on a life which has been much mythologised.

Fatal Neglect: Who Killed Dylan Thomas, David N. Thomas
£9.99
£5.00
Who and what killed Dylan Thomas? The death of this iconic writer, in New York in November 1953, remains shrouded in mystery fifty-five years later. What might have been a triumphant new departure in his career and life with the first production of Under Milk Wood, and plans to work on operas with Igor Stravinsky and Samuel Barber turned instead into a requiem for man whose life spiralled out of control.
Leading Dylan Thomas authority David N. Thomas draws on his extensive research, and uncovers startling new evidence, to produce the definitive answers in a superbly written account which balances historical context with forensic detail, Thomas’ character with the demands made upon him by friends, lovers and his reading public.. His verdict is a chilling study of a poet, a place and a death.

Advantages of the Older Man, Gwyneth Lewis
£7.99
£4.00
A light-hearted novella exploring the strange case of a Swansea woman who is apparently possessed by the spirit of Dylan Thomas. Naturally all is not as it seems. The woman, who works in the Dylan Thomas Centre, meets a rather different Dylan from the one she knows by repute, one who doesn’t really fit in with the ghosts of other poets in heaven and is desperate to train himself to join the fitter shades of the long distance runners instead. Her own life, which has been lonely and sad, is completely transformed by the encounter.
Fluent and entertaining, the story is written with all the confidence and panache you would expect from the former national poet, also a playwright and award-winning author of fiction and non-fiction. Alongside the humour there is a warmth and pathos, and some pithy observations on poets and poetry and the nature of fame.

This offer ends midnight, 14th May, so take advantage before the time runs out!

And as always, there are events running all across the UK in celebration of Dylan Day, so when you’re finished browsing our website take a look on the Literature Wales website to find a Dylan Day event near you.

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Happy International Dylan Thomas Day! Offers in store

Happy International Dylan Thomas Day! This year is the second annual celebration of Dylan Thomas, held on 14th May to mark the date Under Milk Wood was first read on stage at 92Y The Poetry Center, New York in 1953.
We have a number of Dylan Thomas related books in our store, and for today only, these titles are 50% off:
Dylan Remembered: Volume One: 1914-1934, ed. David N. ThomasPaperbackWas: £12.95Now: £6.47HardbackWas: £25.00Now: £12.50This is the first of two volumes of transcribed interviews about the poet Dylan Thomas. Journalist, broadcaster, and author Colin Edwards interviewed numerous sources close to Thomas for a planned biography of the poet, but he was unable to begin work before his early death. The transcribed tapes have been edited into two collections, with the second due in 2004. Startling new information about Thomas’s life and writing is disclosed, including influences on his writing and the sources from which he drew inspiration and storylines.
Dylan Remembered: Volume Two: 1935-1953, ed. David N. ThomasPaperbackWas: £12.95Now: £6.47HardbackWas: £25.00Now: £12.50This second volume culled from the Colin Edwards Archive of interviews with Dylan Thomas’ family, friends and colleagues made during the 1960s covers Thomas’ ‘adult’ life from his move, aged 20, to London to become a professional writer to his death in New York 51 years ago. It is a story which we think we know, but the archive sheds new – often contradictory – light on a life which has been much mythologised.
Fatal Neglect: Who Killed Dylan Thomas, David N. ThomasWas: £9.99Now: £4.99Who and what killed Dylan Thomas? The death of this iconic writer, in New York in November 1953, remains shrouded in mystery fifty-five years later. What might have been a triumphant new departure in his career and life with the first production of Under Milk Wood, and plans to work on operas with Igor Stravinsky and Samuel Barber turned instead into a requiem for man whose life spiralled out of control.Leading Dylan Thomas authority David N. Thomas draws on his extensive research, and uncovers startling new evidence, to produce the definitive answers in a superbly written account which balances historical context with forensic detail, Thomas’ character with the demands made upon him by friends, lovers and his reading public.. His verdict is a chilling study of a poet, a place and a death.
Advantages of the Older Man, Gwyneth LewisWas: £7.99Now: £3.99A light-hearted novella exploring the strange case of a Swansea woman who is apparently possessed by the spirit of Dylan Thomas. Naturally all is not as it seems. The woman, who works in the Dylan Thomas Centre, meets a rather different Dylan from the one she knows by repute, one who doesn’t really fit in with the ghosts of other poets in heaven and is desperate to train himself to join the fitter shades of the long distance runners instead. Her own life, which has been lonely and sad, is completely transformed by the encounter.Fluent and entertaining, the story is written with all the confidence and panache you would expect from the former national poet, also a playwright and award-winning author of fiction and non-fiction. Alongside the humour there is a warmth and pathos, and some pithy observations on poets and poetry and the nature of fame.
The 50% discount ends midnight tonight, 14th May, so take advantage before the time runs out!
And as always, there are events running all across the UK in celebration of Dylan Day, so when you’re finished browsing our website take a look on the Literature Wales website to find a Dylan Day event near you.