First Thursday

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Friday Poem – ‘The Leech House’ by Rhiannon Hooson

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘The Leech House’ by Rhiannon Hooson from her forthcoming collection Goliat.

This cover shows a ghost-like figure wrapped in a sheet standing in a field at dusk. The text reads: Goliat Rhiannon Hooson

Goliat is the second collection by Rhiannon Hooson, a follow-up to her Wales Book of the Year nominated debut, The Other City. An intelligent and beautiful book, Goliat offers absorbing stories of a precarious world on the brink of climate emergency. Employing startling imagery and a deep sense of history, these poems explore the irreplaceable beauty of a wild world, and the terrible damage that humans might do to each other and the earth.

The Leech House She says he is older than me. I think it is a lie, but in his tank (round, like a chalice), he moves like an eel; he moves like a dream. Come winter someone must stoke the fire in the leech house, bring fresh moss, sweep out the channel in the floor where the river sends its emissary, while behind their glass the leeches dance. My lady has me mark on little labels when each leech has last been fed: a leech can live a year without blood, but each dark moon when the fever comes for her, he lies across her calf, or sometimes the smooth warm skin at the crook of her elbow. I scrub his tank clean while he is out of it. She says a leech is her true companion: the only thing that knows blood as well as a woman. Is it strange she has a favourite? Fresh earth for him, and cold clean water, and green pond moss. I do not like to look when he is feeding, but she smiles, and it is relief in her face, not fondness, as if as he drank he took from her the knowledge of a thing so painful she could not bear to know it.

Goliat is available on the Seren website: £9.99

Create your free Seren account and enjoy 20% off every book you buy direct from us.

Join us at 7:30pm at Chapter in Cardiff on National Poetry Day Thursday 6th October to see Rhiannon launch Goliat at Seren First Thursday alongside Hilary Llewellyn-Williams. If you can’t join us in person, we’re also streaming via Facebook live. Find the details on our website.

Seren First Thursday October. Hilary Llewellyn-Williams and Rhiannon Hooson. In person and streamed online. Thursday 6 October 7:30pm BST. Tickets £3 on the door or watch live on Facebook for free.
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Friday Poem – ‘Eva’ by Carolyn Jess-Cooke

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Eva’ by Carolyn Jess-Cooke from her new collection We Have to Leave the Earth.

This cover shows a photo of a balled up piece of blue fishing-twine lying against a pale pink and blue background.

Carolyn Jess-Cooke’s most recent collection We Have to Leave the Earth deftly interweaves the personal and the political. Climate change is confronted in a sequence about the Arctic; poems that are vividly descriptive of an extreme landscape, sensitive to the effects of global warming. A second sequence, The House of Rest, is a history in 9 poems of Josephine Butler, (1828-1906) a pioneering feminist activist. There are also tender poems about family.

Eva Then you were here real as a wound. They placed you in my arms with such care I thought you a parcel of feathers that might fly away. I stroked your face – your eyes were midnight blue. Time bended to you, language re-strung its instruments to sound your name. Visitors admired your lace- ears, your peony fists, but they could not see you as I did – you slid from your skin just as you had slipped out of me and became a shard of morning light, turning cobwebs to crystal thread, the windowsill a gold bar, dew on hedges constellations of delicacy. I knew then this love was alchemy. Our bond is not made of that loose wet rope they cut but of instruments that show the unseen and sound the silent, the heart’s infinite missions harnessed in flight.

We Have to Leave the Earth is available on the Seren website: £9.99

Create your free Seren account and enjoy 20% off every book you buy direct from us.

Join us online for Virtual First Thursday on 2nd December from 7:30pm GMT where Carolyn will be reading from We Have to Leave the Earth alongside Jeremy Dixon. Tickets are £2 plus Eventbrite admin fee. Buy yours here www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/216146057677.

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Friday Poem – ‘Crocodile’ by Jonathan Edwards

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Crocodile’ by Jonathan Edwards from his collection Gen.

Jonathan Edwards Gen

Gen is a book of lions and rock stars, street parties and servants, postmen and voices. In the opening sequence’s exploration of youth and young manhood, the author sets his own Valleys upbringing against the ’50s youth of his parents and the experience of a range of pop culture icons, including Kurt Cobain and Harry Houdini. These poems give way to a sequence of monologues and character sketches, giving us the lives of crocodiles and food testers, pianists and retail park trees. With his characteristic humour, warmth, formal range and swaggering music, Jonathan Edwards delivers a worthy follow-up to his popular and critically-lauded debut.

Gen is available on the Seren website: £9.99

Create your free Seren account and enjoy 20% off every book you buy from us.

Hear Jonathan Edwards read alongside Gillian Clarke in our next Virtual First Thursday taking place on Thursday 4 February from 7:30pm. Tickets £2.74, available from Eventbrite here https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/136594791699.

Jonathan is also tutoring a week-long online course on ‘Poems and People’ for The Garsdale Retreat at the beginning of March. Full details can be found on their website thegarsdaleretreat.co.uk.