This week’s Friday Pome is ‘Peau’ by Damian Walford Davies from his collection Viva Bartali!.
Viva Bartali! and lots more great poetry titles are currently available half-price in our Summer Sale which runs until 1st September 2024. Use the code summer2024 for 50% off any featured title.
This week’s Friday Poem is taken from Witch by Damian Walford Davies. This continuous narrative poem conjures a thrilling portrait of a Suffolk village in the throes of the witchcraft hunts of the mid-seventeenth century.
With the narrative pull of a novel and the vibrancy of a play for voices, the poems in this collection are dark spells, compact and moving: seven sections, each of seven poems, each of seven couplets, are delivered by those most closely involved in the ‘making’ of a witch. The speakers authentically conjure a war-torn society in which religious paranoia amplifies local grievances to fever pitch. Damian Walford Davies’s Witch is a damning parable that chimes with the terror and anxieties of our own haunted age.
Witch is available on the Seren website: £8.99
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This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Gifts’ by Damian Walford Davies which appears in his collection Docklands: A Ghost Story.
A disquieting fin-de-siècle ghost story in verse, Docklands explores grey worlds at the edges of the eye, conjuring late-Victorian Cardiff’s hustling, booming, sullied docks –and the horrors they conceal. A study of the violences perpetrated against wives and daughters, and of patterns of grief and longing, this disturbing sequence summons lost children and dark desires.
Docklands: A Ghost Story is available on the Seren website: £9.99
Create your free Seren account and enjoy 20% off every book you buy from us.
It’s 1st March – Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Sant Hapus (or Happy St David’s Day) to you! This Welsh holiday has been celebrated since the 12th Century, and honours Wales’ patron saint.
On such a historic holiday it seems fitting to consider Wales’ history, and our Friday Poem does just that – ‘Perspective’, the opening poem from Docklands by Damian Walford Davies, introduces Victorian Cardiff: the chilling and visceral setting of this intriguing ghost-story-in-verse.
‘When much new poetry looks no further than the poet’s navel, this kind of imaginative leap is a tonic.’ – The Telegraph
Damian Walford Davies’s compellingly eerie new poetry collection, Docklands: A Ghost Story, introduces us to a Cardiff architect – a man supremely sure of himself – as he is commissioned to transform an area in the busy docks. Docklands explores grey worlds at the edges of the eye, conjuring late-Victorian Cardiff’s hustling, booming, sullied docks – and the horrors they conceal.
Docklands: A Ghost Story is available from the Seren website: £9.99
Create your free Seren account and enjoy 20% off every book you buy from us.
This week’s poem is a section from Damian Walford Davies’ second collection Witch, just in time for Halloween!
With the narrative pull of a novel and the vibrancy of a play for voices, Damian Walford Davies’ Witch offers a thrilling portrait of a Suffolk village in the throes of the witchcraft hunts of the mid-seventeenth century. The poems in this collection are dark spells, compact and moving: seven sections, each of seven poems, each of seven couplets, are delivered by those most closely involved in the ‘making’ of a witch. The speakers – from Thomas Love the priest, the villagers who slowly succumb to suspicion and counter-accusation, the ‘discoverer of witches’ Francis Hurst, and the ‘witch’ herself – authentically conjure a war-torn society in which religious paranoia amplifies local grievances to fever pitch. Witch is a damning parable that chimes with the terror and anxieties of our own haunted age.
An extract from Witch
She was threshing out
a prayer from deep inside
her chained throat’s
gabble. The air was dizzy
with her dirt. Which art,
she kept repeating,
which art in, as if the once
lithe tongue were damned
to dwell on it. Hustling
clouds let sunlight flush
in pools; she sprang
and chased it, thwacking,
thwacking back again
along her jangling leash.
Did they expect she’d
partner them in one
last meek pavane?
She scratched and bit,
lapsed sullen. At the gate
they bound her wrists
until the knot was
knuckled like a fist
and dragged her bucking
in the dirt. I followed
in her rut and fierce
curlicues, like the carving
of the vine stock’s sudden
flourish into grapes.
Shouldered like a sheaf,
bare hockshins shocking
white, she felt the press
of bodies pitching up
against the pikes. Each
rung made her trussed
bulk skip. He botched
the roping-up, the halter
like a bridle round her
mouth. She turned to him
with squally eyes. Her feet
on his, he held her like
a husband by the waist,
and let her go.
Start carving your pumpkins and stocking up on sweets, because Halloween is on the way!
What do you mean it’s too early? It’s never too early, and here at Seren we have even more reason to celebrate, because the earliest roots of Halloween date back to the harvest festivals in the Celtic nations, like Wales.
Okay, okay, maybe it’s a tad early to dig those skeletons out of your closet and dangle them from your wall, but it’s never too early – or too late, for that matter! – to read something that will put you in the mood for the spookiest time of the year…
Sing Sorrow Sorrow
ed. Gwen Davies
Sing Sorrow Sorrow is a chilling collection of supernatural myth and otherworldly horror stories from some of Wales’ most exciting new and established authors.
From the dark waters of the Styx to the circling birds of the Mabinogion, from the lonely house to cities of the mind, the contemporary stories in Sing Sorrow Sorrow grow out of European folk, fable, fairy tale and legend – all tales which belong to the domain of the underworld. There are ghosts, murderesses, blood-soaked enchantment, black humour and stories with the darkest twists of the imagination – draw the chair nearer the fire and enjoy.
With contributions from Niall Griffiths, Maria Donovan, Deborah Kay Davies, Gee Williams, Richard Gwyn, Tristan Hughes, Cynan Jones, Matthew Francis, Anne Lauppe-Dunbar, Mary-Ann Constantine, Zillah Bethell, Dai Vaughan, Imogen Herrad, Lloyd Jones, Euron Griffith, Jo Mazelis Glenda Beagan, Alan Bilton, Roshi Fernando, Christine Harrison, Jon Gower, Charlotte Greig.
Witch
by Damian Walford Davies
With the narrative pull of a novel and the vibrancy of a play for voices, Damian Walford Davies’ Witch offers a thrilling portrait of a Suffolk village in the throes of the witchcraft hunts of the mid-seventeenth century. The poems in this collection are dark spells, compact and moving: seven sections, each of seven poems, each of seven couplets, are delivered by those most closely involved in the ‘making’ of a witch. The speakers – from Thomas Love the priest, the villagers who slowly succumb to suspicion and counter-accusation, the ‘discoverer of witches’ Francis Hurst, and the ‘witch’ herself – authentically conjure a war-torn society in which religious paranoia amplifies local grievances to fever pitch. Witch is a damning parable that chimes with the terror and anxieties of our own haunted age.
Sugar Hall
by Tiffany Murray
Easter 1955. As Lilia Sugar scrapes the ice from the inside of the windows and the rust from the locks in Sugar Hall, she knows there are pasts she cannot erase. On the very edge of the English/Welsh border, the red gardens of Sugar Hall hold a secret, and as Britain prepares for its last hanging, Lilia and her children must confront a history that has been buried but not forgotten.
Based on the stories of the slave boy that surround Littledean Hall in the Forest of Dean, this is a superbly chilling ghost story from Tiffany Murray.
It’s a lesson we’re all taught, but one few of us ever really learn. No matter how much we try and convince ourselves otherwise, how our books look matters; it’s easy to appeal to the wrong audience, or not appeal to the audience you’re aiming for at all, if you have a cover that isn’t right for your book.
It’s true that it’s what’s inside that counts, but nobody’s going to bother taking a look inside, or even picking your book up off the shelf, if it has a hideous cover. You could have written the next masterpiece – winner of all the awards! – but the way your story is packaged has to appeal to readers.
The great thing about book covers, and, frankly, life in general, is that everyone’s different. You’re unique, just like everyone else. All of our tastes vary, so what could be a horrible cover to some is a beautiful one to others. In that case you might even ask: ‘well what’s the point of this blog post at all?’ And to that I say: here are some of my personal favourite Seren book covers.
I’d love to know what some of yours are!
Today marks the beginning of The Hay Festival 2015, and this year there are plenty of events involving some of our very own authors.
Paul Henry and Jonathan Edwards will be reading from their latest collections, Boy Running and the Costa Poetry Prize-winning My Family and Other Superheroes respectively. If you’re a fan of poetry, T.S. Eliot Prize-winning poet Philip Gross and visual artist Valerie Coffin Price will also be discussing their collaborative collection, A Fold in the River, and Damian Walford Davies will be discussing and reading from his latest collection, Judas.
We’re al
so going to be celebrating the centenary of Alun Lewis at Hay this year, with two events dedicated to the WW2 writer. Juliet Aykroyd, Owen Sheers and John Pikoulis will be discussing Lewis’s time in India, in particular how he met and fell in love with Juliet’s mother, Freda Aykroyd, while Owen Sheers reads some of his poems.
Another event will see Gillian Clarke, the National Poet of Wales, do a close reading and discussion of Lewis’s poems.
Our prose is also getting some attention at Hay this year. Jasmine Donahaye will be talking to Francesca Rhydderch, author of the 2014 Wales Book of the Year The Rice Paper Diaries and co-editor of New Welsh Short Stories, about her upcoming memoir, Losing Israel, a moving and honest account of nature writing, travel writing and family history exploring the displacement of Palestinians in 1948.
For those of you who are fiction lovers, Tiffany Murray will be doing a late-night reading from her acclaimed ghost story, Sugar Hall, where she will be joined by David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas and the upcoming Slade House.
With so much to see this year at Hay, you’d be a fool to miss out! Buy your tickets online at www.hayfestival.com, or check out our Events Page for more information.
An Easter themed poem for this week’s installment. ‘Corpus’ comes from Damian Walford Davies’ latest collection, Judas.
A shattered Judas Iscariot – that byword for betrayal – tells his own story in Damian Walford Davies’ compelling and finely wrought new collection from Seren.
We follow Judas over the course of five days as he moves through first-century Jerusalem trying to make sense of the bewildering events surrounding the life and execution of Jesus. But this is a man for whom the future is as real as his anguished and traumatized present, and for whom the Arab-Israeli conflict is as urgent as the tension between the Romans and Jews. Emphasising our compulsion to create, and challenge, gospel truths, Judas gives voice to man caught up in the promise and violence of history.
In short-lined, intensely suggestive dramatic monologues, Damian Walford Davies vividly summons moments of fear and swagger, doubt and passion, despair and nonchalance as an outlaw Judas finds himself haunted by his chequered and extraordinary past. Familiar stories are rendered strange and uncanny as the reader is caught in multiple ironies. As striking as the unnerving images on the news loops of our TV and computer screens, these poems locate us on the hazardous streets of a divided city with a companion-guide who shares with us his own troubling and troubled version of history.
Drawing on conflicting representations of Judas spanning twenty centuries, this chain of poems sets out to challenge orthodoxies and easy pieties. Judas offers an imaginative map of ancient enmities – and dares to hint at resolutions – in the form of a dramatic autobiography of the man whose most famous act (they say) was a kiss in the dark.
Corpus
What can I say? I wasn’t there:
neither ready to relieve him
of the transom’s heft
at Via Dolorosa, Station number five;
nor standing with his mother
on the quarry’s scree
to watch his wrists
spiked expertly
between electric nerve
and bone, and hear him
gurgle, drowning in the liquor
of his lungs. I could have tracked
the trail of blood
from here to where the last gob
hit the ground. The morning
had an air of perfect
commonplace. I howled,
so silently I know he heard.
This September, you’re invited to explore the unseen and the unsettling. From dark and menacing landscapes to the everyday terrors of domestic settings disturbingly close to home, these stories will horrify and delight in equal measure. Be prepared, for ‘this is a land of ancient power, and even more ancient beings...’ Pre-order the latest addition to our Welsh Gothic series, ‘Giving the Darkness Life’ on our website now.
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Stories by @markblayney1, Mary-Ann Constantine, @damianwalforddavies, Caradoc Evans, Dorothy K. Haynes, @lucie_mckhardy Arthur Machen, Elinor Mordaunt, John Llewellyn Probert, L.T.C. Rolt, @priyasharma1000, Edward Thomas, Elizabeth Walter and D.P. Watt
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@inpressbooks @books.wales #WelshGothic #SerenBooks #NationalYearOfReading2026 #SpookySeason #AutumnBooks
We had a wonderful time listening to @megan.c.hayes talking about her memoir ‘Glimmering’ with Kath Little from @bardic_books at St Illtud’s church in Llantwit Major on Saturday. Diolch yn fawr to everyone who joined us and to Kath for hosting! Copies of ‘Glimmering’ are available now in your local bookshop.
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#Glimmering #Memoir #SerenBooks #IndependentBookshop #NationalYearOfReading2026
Ebooks available now! ‘In Search of Sea Dragons’, ‘Muslim Wales’ and ‘The Waters That Raised Us’ are now available from all major ebook retailers meaning you can take them with you on the go 🎉 Do you prefer reading ebooks, print books or both?
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@severn.sea.fossils @azimwales @tayloredmonds #Ebooks #Kindle #SerenBooks #BooksFromWales #LoveReading
🏆@maggiepoet continues her winning streak having won the Guyana Prize for Literature Poetry Award with her collection ‘I Sing to the Greenhearts’! Available now in bookshops nationwide and on our website!
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#AwardWinning #GuyanaPrize #Poetry #PoetryBooks #SerenBooks
