Friday Poem

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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 – ‘Old Spyder’ by Christopher Meredith

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Old Spyder’ by Christopher Meredith from his collection Still. You can hear Christopher chatting about Still and his novel Please on the The Seren Poetry Podcast which is available now on all podcast platforms.

This cover shows a painting of a snowy landscape beneath a wintery sky. The fields are small and far away, dotted with bushes. A single black crow sits on the bare branches of a tree in the foreground. The text reads: Still Christopher Meredith.

Still uses the title as a fulcrum to balance paradoxical concerns: stillness and motion, memory and forgetting, sanity and madness, survival and extinction. The old man in the title poem is seen standing, backlit by an open door. Fixing this in the mind is both memorial and a means of partial forgetting, of releasing him into history. The closing set of poems ‘Still Air’ focuses on a small landscape in the Usk Valley, observing the multiple, complex, endlessly moving parts of nature in the stars, geology, the seasons, the days. Lively and thought provoking, this is a beautifully crafted, insightful and intelligent collection.

Old Spyder Under jewelled Aldebaran old Spyder sat, his head hunched down. All matter he thought’s just a flower fight and all that we think heavy light and all that’s truly light seems dark and all that’s truly play seems work. Oh we could shine such a jewelled light but for the memory’s grip on hurt and the interference of the heart.

The Seren Poetry Podcast is a new series of in-depth interviews with Seren poets. Episode 3 with Christopher Meredith 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.

Both Still and Please are available as a bundle on the Seren website for £15.00

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Friday Poem – ‘Heirloom’ by Ilse Pedler

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Heirloom’ by Ilse Pedler from her collection Auscultation. You can hear Ilse chatting poetry and her job as a vet in episode 2 of The Seren Poetry Podcast which is available now on all podcast platforms.

This cover shows an image of an orange butterfly resting on the cord of a stethoscope. The text reads: Auscultation. Ilse Pedler.

Auscultation, which means listening and specifically, in medicine, listening to sounds that come from the body’s internal organs. If listening is a central theme of this collection, it is also about being heard. There are poems about vets waiting rooms and surgical instruments, about crisis calls, about overhearing farmers and pet owners and colleagues. There are also poems about surviving a stern childhood and a heartbreaking sequence about being a stepmother. This is a compelling set of poems from a striking new voice.

Heirloom Inside my mother’s sewing box, little plaits of embroidery silks lie in ordered rainbows. Most evenings she licks the end of a strand into a point and threads it through my eye with fierce concentration, fixing me in little stitches to the stretched canvas. My scalp smarts as she tugs the tangles out of my hair and anchors it in neat bunches. My neck itches with the stiff collar of the dress she chain stitches for me and my toes are pinched by the tight black shoes buttoned with French knots. In running stitch, she outlines a straight-backed chair for me to sit on and a book for my hands. Finally, with little split stitches she carefully stabs out a smile on my face.

The Seren Poetry Podcast is a new series of in-depth interviews with Seren poets. Episode 2 with Ilse Pedler 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.

Auscultation is available on the Seren website: £9.99

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

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Friday Poem – ‘Borders Gothic’ by Polly Atkin

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Borders Gothic’ by Polly Atkin from her collection Much With Body. You can hear Polly chatting about her poetry in episode 1 of The Seren Poetry Podcast which is available now on all podcast platforms.

This cover shows a painting of a woman floating on her back in a blue green lake. The text reads: Much With Body. Polly Atkin.

Much With Body is a startlingly original second collection. The beauty of the Lake District is both balm and mirror, refracting pain and also soothing it with distraction. Much of the landscape is lakescape, giving the book a watery feel. Atkin also draws on the journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, from a period late in her life when she was often ill. In common with the works of the Wordsworths, these poems share a quality of the metaphysical sublime. Their reverence for the natural world is an uneasy awe, contingent upon knowledge of our fragility and mortality.

Borders Gothic You will meet it as a corner you cannot turn, a gate flung open, a muffled struggle offroad, in the woody murk where the old track hums under mulch and brambles. You will be a traveller in the midst, alone. It will throw itself into your bag as a weight so heavy you cannot go on. It will block your path in the body of a bone white calf, or lady, eyes like swollen moons, its voice the splash of stones thrown in deep water. It will howl. It will sit at your feet and sink through the bog of the tarmac with a glug like a rock or a woman being dropped in a mire. It will cry three times from the shore. It will carry its coffin or its head or its child in its hands. It will follow you home. It will make you promises. You will try to rid your house of it – the radiant boy of it, heirloom drab of it – you will take it still screaming, to sea, and drown it, you will bury it day after day and find it always back where it started, its lamp casting light through every window, its small skull shrieking I know I know I know

The Seren Poetry Podcast is a new series of in-depth interviews with Seren poets. Episode 1 with Polly Atkin 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.

Much With Body is available on the Seren website: £9.99

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

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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 – ‘Fish. Oh. Fish’ by Judy Brown

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Fish. Oh. Fish’ by Judy Brown from her forthcoming collection Lairs.

This cover shows a collage of a woman sitting in a field at twilight starting at a giant black orb, in the distance, filled with stars. Red mountains stretch out behind it. The text reads Lairs Judy Brown.

Lairs brings together something primal and secret – the lair as haven for a wild or feral animal – with the poem framed as a mathematical equation. In these terms, the ‘lair’ is a kind of nest, a beautiful accumulation of dense detail. The poems are introspective, by turns mocking, fearful and analytical. Judy Brown’s use of language is innovative, while maintaining moments of vulnerability and moving self-awareness. In these exquisite poems, the lair is both the community at large and a dark and intricate interior space where something wild still survives.

Fish. Oh. Fish ‘Even snakes lie together’ – D.H. Lawrence (‘Fish’) Your egg eye is open and you look worried. You’re the scaly junior lawyer at midnight f alling short on her target of a year’s billable hours. Corporate fish, you’re bright as pain, sliced up. You share the water with a spill of inky stripes. Y our kind blaze colours fine as banknotes. Oh, fish, you have whisked up a clever curve defining the future as it draws itself into a fist. Then the e vening comes on, pistachio and blue. You breathe and flex between bars of dark. A clerk could still walk into the hot, open night lea ving a jacket on the back of her office chair. A lit anglepoise floats above the papery desk. There’s a deep anglerfish clocking the hours. No one m ust turn off your light while you are gone or there’ll be nothing to swim back to but a scrunchie of kelp, uncounted on dry sand. Little fish, everything that matters happens here.

Lairs is available to pre-order on the Seren website: £9.99

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Friday Poem – ‘The meaning of employable’ by Bryony Littlefair

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘The meaning of employable’ by Bryony Littlefair from her forthcoming debut collection Escape Room which will be published on National Poetry Day.

This cover shows a collage of a woman in 50s dress standing beside an easel showing a close up picture of a man's torso blocking out a burning building. There is a eerie photo of white lightning against dark clouds behind her. The text reads: Escape Room, Bryony Littlefair

Escape Room is the long-awaited debut collection by Bryony Littlefair. This is a collection exploring the possibilities of freedom, goodness, meaning and connection under late capitalism. Can we escape the imperatives of money, gender and human fallibility to freely construct our own identities – should we even try This complexity is balanced with a resolute joy, humour and irony. If you’ve ever grappled with ‘a desire you could not understand / like wanting to touch dark, wet paint’, had an identity crisis at a corporate away day, or just not known what to do with your Sunday morning, the Escape Room is open for you.

The meaning of employable always changes, used to mean you could whittle or solder and almost definitely had a dick. Now your genitals can be any shape, in this part of the world anyhow. And whittling and soldering don’t matter so much. And the meaning of employable is something else, a bit to do with your handshake, how firm, how dry, a bit to do with how well you balance sincerity and irony. But not in a way anyone can define. I want to do a backflip! I am weak and clumsy, but I could learn. A good backflip is a good backflip. We know of what we speak. It must be light and springy, legs tight together. A pleasing arch of the spine. I’ll backflip into an interview, quick and light and maybe they’ll be shuffling their papers when I do it – there’s four of them – so no one would be sure they saw, and wouldn’t say anything about it to the others. All would be feeling funny. Maybe I had too many coffees today. So the backflip would not be acknowledged, would not be turned into something else, like ‘oh, I suppose it shows humour?’ drawls one. ‘Demonstrates initiative!’ the mousy one pipes up. No. It will just be a backflip, a perfect, secret backflip, and I’ll be delightful in the interview, but I won’t get the job. ‘Great on paper. But something wasn’t quite right,’ one will say, and they’ll murmur in agreement. Because I created in everyone a private unease, which is not the meaning of employable, but could well be the meaning of life.

Escape Room is available to pre-order on the Seren website: £9.99

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Friday Poem – ‘Prayer’ by Grahame Davies

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Prayer’ by Grahame Davies from his collection Lightning Beneath the Sea.

This cover shows the far away, dark silhouette of a narwal floating in the empty blue ocean. The text reads: Grahame Davies, Lightning Beneath the Sea

Lightning Beneath the Sea is the first collection of poems in English by Grahame Davies, featuring the work that he has honed over the years as he has read them at literary festivals, conferences and events world-wide. Well-known for his prize-winning Welsh-language poetry and fiction, and for his scholarly non-fiction, he brings a native warmth, an intimate, conversational tone, and a raised civic awareness to these poems.

Grahame Davies P R AY E R Spirit, use me today, not in some miracle that would make others marvel and would make me proud. Not in the word of wisdom that would stay in the mind and make me always remembered. Not in the heroic act that would change the world for the better and me for the worse. But in the mundane miracles of honesty and truth that keep the sky from falling. In the unremembered quiet words that keep a soul on the path. And in the unnoticed acts that keep the world moving slowly closer to the light.

Lightning Beneath the Sea is available on the Seren website: £8.99

This poem also featured in the anthology 100 Poems to Save the Earth.

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Friday Poem – ‘[ search ]’ by Sammy Weaver

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘[ search ]’ by Sammy Weaver from her pamphlet Angola, America which won this year’s Mslexia Poetry Pamphlet Prize.

This cover shows a geometric image of think white lines against black stripes. A gaping white hole is cut from the middle. The text reads: Angola, America. Sammy Weaver.

Angola, America, winner of the Mslexia Poetry Pamphlet Prize 2021, takes its name from a prison in Louisiana in the southern United Sates. In these strikingly original, thoroughly contemporary, and deeply moving poems, we are immersed in the world the inmates must endure. From the first poem, when we witness a home-made tattoo and understand that this scarring and incision is a “map in the connective tissue of pain and loss”, we are drawn into this world in a way that is carefully observed and beautifully empathetic.

[ search ] In the beginning the guard’s gloved hands pat you down, searching for weapons, his touch is weaponized, the muted duty of his movements smooth along each of your arms. Soon the guard’s touch is the only touch from another and you think of your mother after bath time, the harbour of her chest against yours, the rough-love of her towelling you dry, reaching into all the nooks and crannies, no cabbages behind the ears she says. And yes, I guess searching the body is another way of saying the body is a trove of treasure and your touch a torch.

Angola, America is available on the Seren website: £6.00

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Read Sammy’s poem ‘[ exhibit : electric chair ]’ and a comment about ‘How she did it’ on the Mslexia website.

The Mslexia Poetry Pamphlet Prize 2022 is now open for entries. Find out more here.

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Friday Poem – ‘Navigation Points’ by Emily Blewitt

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Navigation Points’ by Emily Blewitt from her collection This Is Not A Rescue.

This cover shows a painting of a tabby cat with it's shadow set against a sandy stone background. The text reads: This Is Not A Rescue. Emily Blewitt. 'a riotus, cacophonous and wonderful book.' - Jonathan Edwards

In This Is Not A Rescue we are introduced to a poet whose voice is fresh and striking, who writes both forcefully and tenderly about refusing to be rescued, rescuing oneself, and rescuing others. This book is about finding love and keeping it, negotiating difficult family and personal struggles, and looking at the world with a lively, intelligent and sardonic eye.

Navigation Points Crossing the bridge, you find me by touch alone; have turned off your sat nav, dipped your lights. You feel your way past landmarks, signs, the steady flow of traffic. When you arrive, though, I am still at the threshold. Standing by streetlight, I think I am lost. You smile, then, lead me gently inside; draw the curtains, undress me by sight. You lower your long dark lashes just once: to trace your route across my skin. These moles, you say, fine points for navigation. You’ll map my constellations, you explain, know me anywhere.

This Is Not A Rescue is available on the Seren website: £9.99

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