Friday Poem

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Friday Poem – ‘Portrait of the Artist Asleep’ by Ben Wilkinson

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Portrait of the Artist Asleep’ by Ben Wilkinson from his collection Same Difference which was published earlier this week.

This covers shows an abstract painting made up of blues and grey. There are splashed of red and green down the left hand side and a face-like smudge in the centre. The text reads: Same Difference, Ben Wilkinson "Formally dextrous... likes to keep the reader on their toes." The Poetry Review

Same Difference is the formally acute second collection by Ben Wilkinson. Carefully crafted, and charged with contemporary language, the poems play with poetic voice and the dramatic monologue, keeping us on our toes and asking just who is doing the talking. Throughout, he ‘steps into the shoes’ of French symbolist poet Paul Verlaine (1844-96), reframing his voice for modern readers. Brimming with everyone from cage fighters and boy racers to cancer patients and whales in captivity, Same Difference is gritty, darkly ironic and often moving – a collection for our times.

Portrait of the Artist Asleep after Verlaine She looks for all the world like some deadbeat angel, foetal but hopeful, an inch of light haloing her temple. She’s restless, sure, half mumbling to herself as the door rocks gently in its frame, stirred by a breeze the way her waking thoughts follow whatever her eyes light on, even you. Truth is, she’ll be up and gone before you know, back among the world and brilliant with it, and you, friend, won’t even make a painting or poem, whichever she turns her hand to next. You’re no more her muse than the lamp distilled in the mirror she’ll fix her face in before she leaves.

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Catch Ben reading from Same Difference in person at Bolton Central Library on Tuesday 8th March. Visit boltonenglish.com for more details.

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Friday Poem – ‘Steel’ by Paul Henry

To celebrate the Six Nations and St David’s Day on the 1st March, this week’s Friday Poem is ’Steel‘ by Paul Henry from The Brittle Sea: New and Selected Poems.

This cover shows an abstract painting by Antony Goble of a red moon-shaped face amidst a swirling blue seal The text reads: Paul Henry, The Brittle Sea, New and Selected Poems

With a musician’s ear and an artist’s eye, Paul Henry’s poems of love and fatherhood, informed by the Welsh-speaking community of his childhood, bridge both the rural and urban experience. The Brittle Sea reacquaints readers with Henry’s vast gallery of characters, from the boy having his hair cut in ‘Daylight Robbery’ to the ghosts of his long, Newport poem, ‘Between Two Bridges.’ The new poems section includes the popular ‘Steel’, inspired by the Welsh national rugby team; others which revisit some of ‘The Visitors’ from The Milk Thief; and a moving elegy for the painter Anthony Goble.

Steel (i) 10 Turn like a key in the game’s lock and open the score with a kick – open a door in the air onto blue sky. I dreamt I opened a door in the sky and half the world cheered. I dreamt I surfaced into a roar. No sky was like this before. Dart like a hare through a hedge at dusk and open the score with a try – open a door in the earth. I dreamt I opened a door in the earth and rose into light out of an underworld where, for years, I carried their ghosts on my back. Flash like a link in a steel chain like the sun on the sea or a wave in the industry of a rising tide. I dreamt I surfaced into a roar. The seagulls shrill as whistles were red and white. I dreamt my ghosts had taken flight.

The Brittle Sea is available on the Seren website: £9.99

Paul Henry’s forthcoming collection As if To Sing is available to pre-order now on the Seren website. Publishing 11th April 2022.

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Friday Poem – ‘Fatherhood’ by Carrie Etter

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Fatherhood’ by Carrie Etter from her collection The Weather in Normal.

This cover shows a straight road stretching into the distance beneath a story sky. A single bolt of lightening strikes the ground in the distance. The text reads: The Weather in Normal, Carrie Etter.

Carrie Etter is known for beautifully expressive and formally inventive verse. The Weather in Normal, her fourth collection, explores the changes to her hometown of Normal, Illinois following her parents’ deaths, the sale of the family home, and the effects of climate change on Illinois’ landscape and lives. The author’s restlessly inventive use of multiple tones, shifting line lengths, and fresh turns of phrase are as much a means of conveying complex and paradoxical emotions as they are a determined formal strategy.

Fatherhood The weather belongs to everyone, so you may say, but in our family, it was his. It was his study by internet, television, radio, barometer, and long rides cycling past the cornfields in all their seasons and moods. He witnessed and reported, and when I moved away, he expanded his research accordingly, learned my temperature, precipitation, wind speed, and humidity. He marveled at my extremes – the Northridge earthquake, a tornado in London. By phone he told me my weather, and sometimes I listened. Sometimes I spoke of the sun and the rain as though I held one in either hand.

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Friday Poem – From ‘You’ by John Haynes

With Valentine’s Day on the 14th February, this week’s Friday Poem is taken from the long-poem You by Costa-Award winning poet John Haynes.

You is a book-length poem by the late poet John Haynes. The ‘You’ of the title is the narrator’s partner and wife of many years. The book is not just a celebration of, and meditation on, personal love and devotion, but a record of how such love moves out of a family and is refracted out into the community and the wider world. The tensions inherent in this are compounded by the cross-cultural nature of the union. The narrator is a white British man and his wife was born and raised in Nigeria. Exploring a partnership based on culturally quite different – and in some aspects painfully incompatible –conceptions of ‘love’, the poem  is knit together by philosophical themes of ‘I’ and ‘you’ seen from many perspectives. Shortlisted for the T.S Eliot Prize.

that they flew back across the whole Sahara sleeping on the wing, as you begin to now, with those small sounds, back to Kagoma – that house where I met your mother in her starched tall headtie and her Dutch wax print and just a little shy to meet your White Man, but so glad with wrinkles smiling tight – just as I bend across you, turn the lamp off, draw the curtains, thinking with what skill I managed it on that rickety camp bed, making love with not the faintest squeal or crunk of springs. Like press-ups, I recall, rugby-fit then, mouth open while I howled into the dark not letting out a sound, or that night, at the dam, when we made love, remember, there beside the road, half in the car half out, with confidence enough to dare the world to drive towards us, then with full light on, and nights at Number Ten, insane with flesh, and resurrected new again each time as neither I nor you.

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Friday Poem – ‘Sailing by Silvership’ by Polly Atkin

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Sailing by Silvership’ by Polly Atkin from her most recent collection Much With Body.

This cover shows a painting of a swimmer floating on her back in a blue-green lake.

Much With Body is the startlingly original second collection by poet Polly Atkin. 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. There is also a distinct link with the past in a central section of found poems taken from transcripts of 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.

Sailing by Silvership The moon is a ship and we are sailing in her how can we not talk about her? She glistens and we glisten she throws out nets of herself, trailing clouds like weeds and we walk them as bridges to the stars, arm in arm, singing. And the stars themselves are glistening aren’t they? like specks of quartz in dark rock, spangling the great unknowable expanse as it squeezes into this particular wedge of night the swell of this road the dark fell sea soon, we will be there, sister waving from the deck of the one you call dipper – so big we can sit in it! – no so big it will carry us away.

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Friday Poem – ‘Off the Hook’ by Carol Rumens

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Off the Hook’ by Carol Rumens from her collection De Chirico’s Threads, chosen by our new poetry editors Rhian Edwards and Zoë Brigley.

This cover shows a colourful painting of two abstract figures by Georges De Chirico

De Chirico’s Threads by Carol Rumens features an unusual centre-piece, a verse-play, fizzing with ideas and surrealist imagery, based on the life and work of the Italian painter Georges De Chirico, as well as distinctive and beautifully crafted individual poems by one of the UK’s best poets.

Off the Hook For Isabella In those complicated days, only the rich Had ‘phones. The rest of us queued To get into a tall red box: its windows were sticky And it smelt of damp concrete and cigarette-smoke. The telephone didn’t look friendly, Shiny-black on its ledge, a bakelite toad. You’d pick the hand-set up, and hate the purr, That rumble of hunger unappeasable. You counted out heavy pennies, pushed Button A. Fingered the wheel around and let it re-roll - Three letters, four numbers. You wanted to run When the paired rings resounded. How hopeless you were! You stabbed Button B, and thought you might die. The money clanked through loudly: Your voice came out super-polite, as it did in ‘Phone Land, Leaving your mind quite dead behind one ear, Telling him you couldn’t come to the party, You had too much homework. A complete lie. Some live with their mobiles snug to their lips, Or melting against their cheeks. They belong to a different race. They sound so happy. I bury mine, and panic at its warble. And only in deepest love would I make a call And not be relieved when I heard the ‘engaged’ beeps. But when it’s your voice, Isabella, saying hello, So brave and clear, with nothing at all phoney (Ahem) in your yes and no, I see why it’s good To talk. I wish you a lifetime of easy phoning. Be mobile-merry, and never mind the bills Or curse the bells. I’ll stick to e-mail, though.

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Friday Poem – ‘Doxology’ by Dai George

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Doxology’ by Dai George from his collection Karaoke King.

The cover of Karaoke King shows a drawing of a teenage boy wearing a red and brown stripped vest and white shirt. His glasses are crooked and he is wearing a crumpled yellow crown.

Dai George’s confident second collection Karaoke King, addresses the contentious nature of the times. Always deeply thoughtful but also alternately ebullient, angry, curious, ashamed, the poet moves through urban and digital spaces feeling both uneasy and exhilarated. There is a feeling of history shifting, as a younger generation confronts its ethical obligations, its sense of complicity and disappointment. Ecological crisis hovers in the background. Karaoke King also contains numerous reflections on popular culture, culminating in ‘A History of Jamaican Music’, a sequence at the heart of the volume speaking to urgent contemporary questions of ownership and privilege, pain and celebration. 

Doxology Blessings flow, through narrow fields, a weir finds restitution as it falls. Tightroping gulls, the crumbling edge is anxious as they slip and cling to show them peace below. I number the blessings in a split and democratic sky. The clemency of inland water. The resourcefulness of creatures left to try. Blessings flow, but trouble finds me in the impasse after rain. I mean democratic as an argument that neither side can win. Praise grass from which the pylons ship invisible cargos that I wait upon unthinkingly, an emperor inured to the hand that serves him fruit. You’ll find little god here but demanding drifts of pollen, little trouble but a boy whose dream last night was of a concert and his frozen voice. The gulls find trouble in a moment they can’t trust, a wind that smashes them aloft then drops beyond the river. Obstacles and carrion, fluidity and rest, a hatchling woken in its nest of foil. The parliament still warring through its agonies of choice, the hustle never ending nor the trouble nor the joy.

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Earlier this year, Dai George put together a playlist of songs that tie in with poems from Karaoke King. Take a look here.

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Friday Poem – ‘21. When he tells me I’m not allowed’ by Kim Moore

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘21. When he tells me I’m not allowed’ by Kim Moore from All The Men I Never Married.

The cover of All The Men I Never Married shows a collage of a man made up of small images of nature - butterflies, flowers, leaves

Kim Moore’s eagerly awaited second collection All The Men I Never Married is pointedly feminist, challenging and keenly aware of the contradictions and complexities of desire. The 48 numbered poems take us through a gallery of exes and significant others where we encounter rage, pain, guilt, and love.

21. When he tells me I’m not allowed to play with cars because I’m a girl, I bring his arm up to my mouth and bite. I’m sent to the Wendy House to pretend to be good. Blank-faced dolls stare up at me. Pretend oven filled with plastic fish-fingers. Pretend windows with flowery curtains sewn by someone else’s mother. Pretend hoover, pretend washing machine. Pretend teapots and tea-set. I watch through a gap in the wall as my teacher sits in her chair, crossing her legs in the way she told us only yesterday we should copy. Be ladylike she said. Stop showing your knickers. I’m burning in here as she calls the class to order, waits for them to cross their legs and settle. I long to sit at her feet, listen to all the old stories of sleeping women who wait to be rescued. The book is a bird, its wings held tight in her hands. She bends the cover back so the spine cracks, balances it on one palm, turns to me and tells me turn around, at once, face the wall.

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Friday Poem – ‘More Context Required’ by Vidyan Ravinthiran

Following our previous guest post by Zoë Brigley on ecojustice, this week’s Friday Poem is ‘More Context Required’ by Vidyan Ravinthiran from 100 Poems to Save the Earth.

100 Poems to Save the Earth. Edited by Zoë Brigley and Kristian Evans.

Our climate is on the brink of catastrophic change. 100 Poems to Save the Earth invites us to fine-tune our senses, to listen to the world around us, pay attention to what we have been missing. The defining crisis of our time is revealed to be fundamentally a crisis of perception. For too long, the earth has been exploited. With its incisive Foreword from editors Zoë Brigley and Kristian Evans, this landmark anthology is a call to action to fight the threat facing the only planet we have. 

Vidyan Ravinthiran M O R E C O N T E x T R E Q U I R E D There is no clear picture as yet as to how many tigers were killed or if they were blue because it’s that time of year and they did themselves in as you do. I have been becoming more and more independent but I’m not a journalist or the kind of guy asked if I know the score now it’s hard to remember even if we won or lost, and who we are exactly. There was a protest, I remember that, and stories about women and children that somehow became about a witch and her cauldron, or how exactly the tiger got his stripes. And beautiful computer-generated maps.

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Read 100 Poems to Save the Earth co-editor Zoë Brigley’s guest post on ecojustice here.

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Friday Poem – ‘Offering’ by Alexandra Davis

As the last Friday Poem of 2021, this week’s Friday Poem is ‘Offering’ by Alexandra Davis from the festive pamphlet Twelve Poems for Christmas.

Christmas Closing dates

The Seren Offices will be closed for Christmas from Thursday 23rd December until Monday 4th January. We wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Merry Christmas Nadolig Llawen
Offering for Rufus After the wrapping, unwrapping. After unwrapping, the mess. Through paper wasteland my boy wades; his hot, sticky hands embrace my face, pressed like a prayer, gargoyling my smile. Our brown eyes speak of love. Along with the giving, the learning. After the learning, his deed. Up fairylit stairs he charges, inspired; above me the ceiling clunks like a factory; he delivers two papers beneath the tree: one for his daddy, one for me. After the folding, the hiding, the finding, the moment of moment: his hurried gifts. Each scarecrow portrait, carefully drawn, guards a faded five pound note. I accept this gold with kisses. Later I post the paper money back into his box. Alexandra Davis

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