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Friday Poem – The woman in the sun, a letter

This week’s poem is from Rebecca Perry’s collection little armoured, winner of the 2011 Poetry Wales Purple Moose Prize.

“little armoured is a brilliant book, which emits light and heat like the electric heater one of its poems describes as

a humming like a bee in the corner
of the room, its orangeness
brighter than your eyes expect.

Its miniatures and transforming images sometimes recall Elizabeth Bishop, its tonally various sequences Paul Muldoon, but this is a young poet who already discovered her own voice in these exact and tender, smart and moving poems.“

– John McAuliffe

The woman in the sun, a letter

I want my feet to tingle with cold again.
I want to be cold with you.
I want you to put your hands between my thighs in bed,
and I would clench them tight for you,
like daisies in a flower press.
I want to press my nipples onto your shoulder blades,
and leave tiny licks of saliva on your back, cold as skis.

I am full of tears.
All day they roll out of my eyes
and fizz to nothing by my feet.
They splash my breasts and for a second it is dark there,
then no. I am dry. I am a pillar of salt.

My body is warmed from the inside out.
My stomach is molten inside my body,
my lungs bubble from the heat of it,
my heart in your hand would be like
taking a potato straight from the oven,
my bones are the wood of a campfire,
my skin is bed sheets slept in for a day and night.

Order little armoured from our website.

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Morlais is Wales Book of the Month

WW2 writer Alun Lewis’s previously lost novel, Morlais, is Wales Book of the Month throughout August.
Morlais, which is now available to buy from our website, is Lewis’s semi-autobiographical novel about a young boy in the Welsh Valleys who is torn between his working class background and his aptitude for poetry and academia. Chosen by the Welsh Books Council, Morlais will be available in bookshops across Wales throughout the month.
To keep up to date with all of the events surrounding the Alun Lewis centenary, visit the Alun Lewis website and follow the Alun Lewis Twitter.

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Friday Poem – Metamorphic

Zoë Skoulding Museum of Disappearing Sounds

This week’s poem is from Zoë Skoulding’s 2013 collection, The Museum of Disappearing Sounds.

The disappearing sounds of Zoë Skoulding’s collection may be either in the rich sonic environments that the poems observe, or in the resonance of words themselves, which exist in traces of speech and breath.

‘The Man in the Moone’ takes its title from a 17th century work of science fiction in which lunar inhabitants can communicate their thoughts via music alone. But rather than aspiring to reach beyond language, these poems focus on the spaces that words occupy, looking at how ‘a sentence reverses itself between two pairs of eyes’ or noting ‘the distance drifted by a word shaken loose from border controls’.

Skoulding’s characteristically inventive approach to form emerges in a fractured sonnet sequence based on the coincidences of room numbers. Repeated actions build haunting interior spaces which the reader is invited to enter, each poem becoming a room in which sound ‘bounces off four walls’, as memory accumulates in the subtle rhythms of everyday life.

These poems can provoke states of eerie unease, or of passion evoked with shimmering densities of verbal texture. We can feel the ice in ‘Gwydyr Forest’ “Freezing under feathered/ water landscapes”. Provisional landscapes in which the ground itself is ‘aslant’ call for an active state of perception in which ‘I can do more dangerous things /just with my eyes’.

Exploratory and alive to the senses, The Museum of Disappearing Sounds creates new perspectives on language and the world in which it exists.

Metamorphic

The split slate weathers, lichen colonies
advancing where I stumble in mud, shocked
blood pulsing through limbs, vertical

I tilted in the scent of pine, violent green,
a wood’s engine buzz. Up against the wall
my voice comes back not mine: between ear

and stone a rock face turned aside. What’s
unintelligible isn’t silent, isn’t transcendent
blank: it’s most of it, including you – this

noise, irresolute as rain, where harmony’s
nothing but the hard facts adding up.

Order The Museum of Disappearing Sounds from our website.

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Poetry Wales and Patagonia

Don’t forget that our latest issue of Poetry Wales – Wales, Patagonia and the cultures of the imagination – is now available!

PW 51.1 Cover_pw cover.qxd

Editor Nia Davies describes the issue as arising from ‘a fascination with a two-way gaze: the ways in which Patagonia imagines Wales and in turn how Wales imagines Patagonia.’ With special features to commemorate the sesquicentenary of the first Welsh settlers to arrive in Patagonia, this summer issue also showcases an array of poetry and reviews.

If you like what you see you can subscribe to the magazine, but if you’re unsure if it’s for you, you can peruse this special issue for free here!

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The Welsh in Patagonia

Today marks 150 years since 153 Welsh settlers arrived in the Chubut Valley, Southern Argentina aboard the Mimosa, a converted tea-clipper, and founded Y Wladfa: The Welsh Colony.

Throughout 2015 there have been, and continue to be, events in Wales and in Argentina to strengthen the relationship between the two communities and mark the sesquicentenary. You can find out more about all of these celebrations on the Patagonia 150 website.

If you’re interested in learning more about the relationship between Wales and Patagonia, here at Seren we have both fiction and nonfiction for you to choose from.

beyond_the_pampas

Beyond the Pampas: In Search of Patagonia
by Imogen Rhia Herrad

Beyond the Pampas is an entrancing and highly unusual account of a journey to the ends of the earth in search of a dream. Imogen Herrad sets off in search of the descendents of the nineteenth century colony of Welsh settlers in Patagonia, in the deep south of Argentina, and discovers that Welsh-speaking communities, proud of their heritage, still exist there today. She also discovers a country and a way of life hugely different from her European experience.

Her explorations lead Herrad beyond the Welsh to discover the even more remarkable story of the Mapuche, Tehuelche and other indigenous tribes, who have suffered the all too familiar fate of colonised peoples. This unexpected direction gives Herrad a new perspective on her own life and those of others, as she ends her travels standing on a Patagonian hillside, part of an ancient Mapuche ceremony of the land.

Beyond the Pampas is an emotional, compelling, at times funny, at times painful, but always beautifully told story of a still untamed land and its people.
A Place of Meadows and Tall Treesa_place_of_meadows
by Clare Dudman

Impoverished and oppressed, they’d been promised paradise on earth: a land flowing with milk and honey. But what the settlers found after a devastating sea journey was a cold South American desert where nothing could survive except tribes of nomadic Tehuelche Indians, possibly intent on massacring them.

Silas James fears he has been tricked into sacrificing everything he loves for another man’s impossible dream. But despite his hatred of the politically adept Edwyn Owen, and under the watchful eye of Indian shaman Yelue, a new culture takes root as an old one passes away.

A Place of Meadows and Tall Trees is a lyrical and insightful evocation of the trials of the first Welsh Patagonian colonists as they battle to survive hunger, loss, and each other.

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Friday Poem – What I Did in My Summer Holidays

This week’s poem is from Kathryn Simmonds’ second poetry collection, The Visitations, originally published in 2013.

The Visitations is the follow-up to Kathryn Simmonds’ Forward Prize-winning debut, Sunday at the Skin Launderette. As with her previous collection, an appealing voice prevails, though this simplicity is something of a veil, through which the author, with subtle shifts of language and perspective, manages to imply darker themes and worlds unseen. The tone is often simultaneously satirical and elegiac and the collection abounds with sudden moments of strange illumination: a lime tree strikes up a conversation; a life coach finds an old passport; an infant teeters on the brink of speech. Here are poems where the physical and metaphysical meet, where questions of new motherhood are set against those of faith, and the larger conundrum of how to live.

What I Did in My Summer Holidays

Never ask for an ice-cream confidently or menacingly or using
any other adverb. And if you’re in pain, show me where it hurts
and how. Love is an abstract noun. Dialogue gives the effect
of real speech but with all the boring rubbish taken out.
Every thought you’ve ever had has been thought better and by
someone else. Does anyone have any questions? We talked
last week about the stanza, you might think of stanzas as little
rooms: what are you going to do in yours? Are you going to just
lie there watching light reinvent itself? The second line doesn’t
scan. Yes, flair is better. For homework, sit in a soft chair and
describe the exact experience, no, don’t do that, write down a
conversation you hear on a bus; go out in the rain and open
your mouth; make a list of everything in your bathroom cabinet.
Try not to break your line on an article. The first person
you have to please is yourself, but if nobody else is pleased
you have a problem. Fill out the form and give it back to me:
te-dum te-dum te-dum te-dum te-dum. Notice that beautiful line
where the widow’s hands are likened to the wings of a dead bird.
Less is more, but sometimes less is less. What do librarians get paid?
I’ve never seen that particular noun used as a verb. But it’s too late
now to get to grips with the Dewey Decimal System.
Did anyone else have a problem with the turnip metaphor?

Order The Visitations from our website.

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Take Inspiration from Alun Lewis for the 2015 Timothy Corsellis Prize!

The Young Poets Network have brought back the Timothy Corsellis Prize after a very successful year in 2014, and this year Alun Lewis has a small part to play!
Lewis is one of six WW2 poets – the others being Keith Douglas, Sidney Keyes, John Jarmain, Henry Reed, and Timothy Corsellis himself – whose life and/or work poets from ages 14-25 are encouraged to respond.
Timothy Corsellis was a young pilot, and poet, who was killed in 1941 when the plane he was piloting stalled and crashed. He was only 20 years old. The Timothy Corsellis Prize has been set up in his name, with the support of his family, to encourage people to read the work of the lesser-known poets of the Second World War.
This year there is also a Young Critics Prize, for short essays of 500-1,500 words discussing which of the poets are most likely to be read in 20 year’s time and why.
The deadline is Sunday 6th September, so why not get involved? You can find out everything you need to know about entering, and more information about the prize, here!

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Lost & Found

Recent years have been fantastic for Wales in the literary world. 2014 saw the centenary of Dylan Thomas, this year we’re celebrating the centenary of Alun Lewis, and next year, 2016, marks the centenary of Roald Dahl.

This year in particular has been a big year for the publishing world as a whole. As well as our centenary celebrations for WW2 writer Alun Lewis, 2015 marks 150 years since the publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and has even seen the publication of Harper Lee’s second novel, Go Set A Watchman, 55 years after the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird.

But Go Set A Watchman isn’t the only “lost” novel to be published this year. This year at Seren we’re publishing Morlais, a novel by Alun Lewis that was thought lost until last year.

Morlais cover

Following in the footsteps of Richard Llewellyn’s How Green Was My Valley, Morlais is set during the Depression in south Wales, and follows Morlais Jenkins and his struggle when he finds himself caught in the middle of the class divide. From a long line of miners, Morlais finds his talents lean more towards poetry and academia, and when he is adopted by the local colliery owner’s wife after the death of her own son his struggle with his identity begins.

Will you be reading Morlais this year?

Don’t forget to follow our Alun Lewis Twitter and Facebook, and check out the Alun Lewis website!

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Friday Poem – Post-Script: For Gweno

This week’s poem is another taken from WW2 writer Alun Lewis’s Collected Poems, to celebrate the launch of Dr. John Pikoulis’s latest biography, Alun, Gweno & Freda, which is now available to order from our website.

For more information about Alun Lewis and the ongoing centenary celebrations, be sure to check out the Alun Lewis website, Twitter and Facebook.

Post-Script: For Gweno

If I should go away,
Beloved, do not say
‘He has forgotten me’.
For you abide,
A singing rib within my dreaming side;
You always stay.
And in the mad tormented valley
Where blood and hunger rally
And Death the wild beast is uncaught, untamed,
Our soul withstands the terror
And has its quiet honour
Among the glittering stars your voices named.

Order Alun Lewis’s Collected Poems from our website.

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Friday Poem – A Brief History of Topiary

This week’s poem comes from the late Ellie Evans’s collection, The Ivy Hides the Fig-ripe Duchess, published in 2011.

The Ivy Hides the Fig-ripe Duchess is an exhilarating first collection of poems from Ellie Evans. Using a surrealist palette of imagery and a tightly focused idiom, the author takes us on strange journeys:to the post-apocalyptic world of the title poem, or into a skewed 18th century Venice in ‘The Zograscope’. These strange worlds are always to the purpose, they are, as Marianne Moore famously said of poetry ‘imaginary gardens with real toads in them.’ We obliquely unearth childhood trauma, fraught or intense relationships and also a singular (and perhaps also Welsh?) delight in rebellion, and in escape through the imagination. Poems like ‘Picnic with Earthquakes’ and ‘Jekyl Island, Georgia’ deftly align exotic locales (Eastern Europe, South East Asia, Greece and the USA,) with intimate states of mind. A fascination with art and history emerge in: ‘A Brief History of Topiary’ and ‘Two Monologues from The Odyssey’. There is also a palpable delight in technique: you will find a sonnet, a villanelle, triolets and a concise free verse where she employs rhyme, half-rhyme, and subtle alliteration.

A Brief History of Topiary

That September, in the Garden Nursery
three hundred yew cuttings, Taxus baccata,
stubbled in green, were ranked
in rows of fifty, in identical brown pots.

They were like schoolgirls waiting in Assembly
cross-legged and silent in the new Sports Hall
where the morning sun cast shadows on looped ropes
and blue lines on the floor for goals and penalties.

Years later, the young yews were planted out as hedges,
so they grew together sideways, twined, supported
each other. They made a garden room for picnics,
plays, dalliance and tennis. Some had alcoves

gouged out of them, to enclose pillars or gods,
satyrs and herms. Others were cut through, so
you could look out to another garden
or to a borrowed view. A few were special:

allowed to grow above the rest, until
frames were bolted round them. When they’re mature,
you don’t see these underlying structures for cones,
or balls, or obelisks, or whatever.

Purists won’t use frames, of course, but rely
on frequent trimming, checking from all angles.
Whichever method you chose, remember:
all stray shoots must be pinched out.

At night, the moon plays tricks on topiary,
on the giant women with their stove-pipe hats,
their capes and skirts like bells, who look as though
they’ll stride off to the woods, tearing the garden down.

Order The Ivy Hides the Fig-ripe Duchess from our website.