Books Books
Category: Ebooks, Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 68
ISBN: 9781781726600
Publication date: April 11, 2022
Price: £9.99
Category: Ebooks, Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 68
ISBN: 9781781726617
Publication date: April 11, 2022
Price: £7.99
Out of stock
Winner of the English Language Poetry Category at Wales Book of the Year 2023
The power of song, to sustain the human spirit, resonates through As if to Sing. A trapped caver crawls back through songs to the sea; Welsh soldiers pack their hearts into a song on the eve of battle, ‘for safe-keeping’; a child crossing a bridge sings ‘a song with no beginning or end’…
Blurring past and present, a ‘torchsong’ of music and light intensifies in ‘The Boys in the Branches’, a moving sequence to the poet’s sons where three boys scale a tree to manhood, to ‘carve their names on the late sun’. The collection’s closing cadence includes the long poem ‘The Key to Penllain’. Set in the summer of 1969, its apocalyptic dream stages a search for a key which could save the planet. Rich in the musical lyricism admired by readers and fellow poets, As if to Sing is an essential addition to this poet’s compelling body of work.
Paul Henry
Described by the late U.A. Fanthorpe as ‘a poet’s poet’ who combines ‘a sense of the music of words with an endlessly inventive imagination’, Paul Henry came to poetry through songwriting. Born in Aberystwyth and now based in Crickhowell, his work has been widely anthologised and regularly appears in journals as diverse as Poetry Wales and The TLS. A popular creative writing tutor, he ran Ledbury Festival’s Poetry Cafe at Hereford’s Courtyard theatre and is a regular tutor at writers’ centres. He’s also taught at the University of South Wales and has guest-edited Poetry Wales.
Mari d’Ingrid, a translation of his fifth book, Ingrid’s Husband (Seren), was published in France by L’Harmattan. His new and selected poems, The Brittle Sea, appeared in 2010. This was followed in 2012 by its Indian version, The Black Guitar. A regular reader and performer at festivals, he has recently written and presented arts programmes for BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4. His sixth, Boy Running, was published in February 2015 and was shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year in 2016, and in February 2018 his latest collection, The Glass Aisle, was added to the ranks and even lead to a performance version co-written with fellow musician and songwriter Brian Briggs. They performed it at festivals throughout the summer and there is now a CD available to purchase.
“Two words I’ve used before in reviews of Henry’s work, “fugue” and “elegiac”, are becoming ever more appropriate. He has always used recurring themes and images in a fugue-like way, and the more he does it, the more they resonate”
Sheenagh Pugh, LiveJournal
‘As If To Sing explores the human condition through the language of music and does so with a mastery of poetics.’ – Isobel Roach
Wales Arts Review
‘A remarkable exercise in tone – lyrical, profound … he moves across the whole landscape of life.’ – James Roderick Burns
London Grip
‘He conveys complex emotions with beauty, economy and power and it’s impossible not to be moved by his writing.’ – Jenny White
The Western Mail
‘Superb economy and control of language is evident in every poem.’ – Caroline Bracken
Nation.Cymru
‘A stunning collection. Much of what you’d anticipate to find is here: the lyricism, the haunting evocations of memory, of loss, of absence… and an exploration of song in itself. What makes his poetry so effective is the nuances of white space and the spaces between words… The suggestiveness of his work is incredible.’ – Paul Chambers; The Review Show (BBC Radio Wales)
Radio Wales
Praise for Paul Henry
“He takes his place as one of the most important Welsh poets now writing.” – Carol Ann Duffy on The Glass Aisle
“This haunting, elegiac collection, about music, and made of music, leaves a reader’s mind full of phrases that catch the heart and lodge in the memory.” – Gillian Clarke on The Glass Aisle
“Paul Henry has much of his compatriot R.S.Thomas’s gift, in that poet’s later work, for terse, coolly forthright insightfulness.” – The TLS
“Henry is working at the core of lyric poetry, with love and loss and the ‘deeper river’.” – The Poetry Review
