Clueless Dogs

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Friday Poem – ‘All the Terrors’ by Rhian Edwards

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘All the Terrors’ by Rhian Edwards from her collection The Estate Agent’s Daughter. You can hear Rhian chatting about the book on the The Seren Poetry Podcast which is available now on all podcast platforms.

This cover shows a black and white photograph of Gareth L Edwards outside his estate agents with three other men dress in 70s style suits. The text reads: The Estate Agent's Daughter. Rhian Edwards.

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.

All the Terrors are gathered in this portmanteau, this Hammmer House, this Ealing-made. The razor cut of Cushing’s cheeks, hollowed eyes, RP that belongs to the Raj. How I long for Christopher Lee, his oil-slicked widow’s peak, badger grey, immaculate cravat. I would give the earth, mortality, to be the trussed brunette in Regency. Could my generous décolletage invite the screeches of a fishing-lined bat to my Juliet balcony? Or could the punctured cloud of my négligée summon an unseasonable wind to my French doors? Behold the jagged cloak, crimson lining, arms raised. Regard as I back away in mugging fear, mesmerised by the bloodshot white of his eyes, all a swoon to the preachery of his pearly fangs.

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.

The Estate Agent’s Daughter is available on the Seren website for £9.99

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Friday Poem – ‘Rhys’ by Rhian Edwards

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Rhys’ by Rhian Edwards from her collection Clueless Dogs.

This cover shows a cartoon collage of a Dalmatian. The text reads Clueless Dogs Rhian Edwards.

Clueless Dogs is the multi-award-winning debut collection by Rhian Edwards. Full of verve and humour, Rhian Edwards’ language has a winning honesty and intensity. Poems like ‘The Welshman Who Couldn’t Sing’ chronicle a fraught childhood in Bridgend, south Wales, where the sensitive child escapes through imaginative games of ‘Playing Dead’ and ‘Broken Lifeboat’. Later poems explore teenage lusts, student rivalries, damaged peers and tense situations. Although the author doesn’t flinch from ruthless depictions, in which we are often implicated by her use of the second person ‘You’, there is an underlying sweetness, an elegiac thread to this remarkable collection.

Rhys Like the time you invited me inside the ottoman on the landing and sat on the lid laughing while I scratched and screamed at the wood. Or when the babysitter wasn’t looking, you taught me the quickest way to add nine, showed me to tie my laces with the tale of two rabbits disappearing down a hole. Like the day you caught the slow-worm that tried to whip away the sun, letting it loose into the folds of the blanket that I held like a lover. Not to mention the crimes I invented for which I never knew you were beaten, or that summer you took away the stabilisers to be the sole witness to me riding away. Like the times I spied in your bedroom, played your records and fanned open your books, only to slip between the sheets with a nakedness meant only for bath time.

Clueless Dogs is available on the Seren website: £9.99

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Friday Poem – ‘The Hatching’, Rhian Edwards

Friday Poem The Hatching Rhian Edwards

Spring has just arrived and so our Friday Poem this week is ‘The Hatching’ by Rhian Edwards – a decidedly alternative portrait of new life.

Taken from Edwards’ multi award-winning debut, Clueless Dogs, ‘The Hatching’ places us in claustrophobic darkness to witness the faltering first steps of a baby bird. This sense of magnified reality prevails throughout the collection – Time Out Magazine hits the nail on the head by saying, ‘although her poems are accessible … and supremely crafted they are also inhabited by something far rarer, an unerring ability to find the extraordinary in the ordinary.’
Clueless Dogs is a brave and beautiful first book, full of verve and humour, with a winning honesty and intensity.

 

 

The Hatching Clueless Dogs Rhian Edwards

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Clueless Dogs is available from the Seren website: £9.99

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Friday Poem – ‘Outcast Hours’, Rhian Edwards

Clueless Dogs Rhian Edwards

This week our Friday Poem is taken from Rhian Edwards’ dark and sensual debut collection Clueless Dogs.

Winner of Wales Book of the Year 2013
Winner of the Roland Mathias Prize for Poetry 2013
Winner of Wales Book of the Year People’s Choice 2013
Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2012

clueless_dogs72Full of verve and humour, with a spiky syntax featuring hard-edged consonants, Rhian Edwards’ language has a winning honesty and intensity. Poems like ‘The Welshman Who Couldn’t Sing’ chronicle a fraught childhood in Bridgend, south Wales, where the sensitive child escapes through imaginative games of ‘Playing Dead’ and ‘Broken Lifeboat’. Later poems confidently explore teenage lusts, student rivalries, damaged peers and tense situations. Although the author doesn’t flinch from ruthless depictions in which we are often implicated by her use of the second person ‘You’, there is an underlying sweetness, an elegiac thread most evident in the poems of maturity.

Outcast Hours

White light weighs heavy, bullying
bright as squash courts. I fix a dirty look
on the electric clock. The walled
minutes stagger their blinks.

Wheel-footed suitcases scurry
about me like clueless dogs,
flip flops tick-tock
on the polished rink of the concourse.

One girl’s patience is vivid,
measured by the careful brush strokes
of plum on her toenails,
the soft turning of pages.

Her boyfriend hibernates,
his legs stretched out before him.
Ankles crossed, he wags his foot
conducting his concert of sleep.

A ponytailed mother raises
an eye for her wandering son.
Shc scoops him up and breathes in his scalp
in chase of a smell that is running away from her.

The antique couple are butchering time.
Their teeth tear through baguettes
raining faded confetti
onto their open laps.

Shy of games and companions, fidgeting
in plastic-boned chairs, we comb the air
for that splintered voice,
dictating when our sky will ship us.

 

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