Friday Poem

Posted on by

Friday Poem – ‘Boasting Sonnet’ by Katrina Naomi

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Boasting Sonnet’ by Katrina Naomi from her collection Wild Persistence.

The cover of Wild Persistence shows a black and white image of three dancers dressed in 1940s style clothing, jumping in their air. They are in a circle facing each other with their arms outstretched and their toes pointed.

Wild Persistence by Katrina Naomi is a confident and persuasive collection of poems. Written following her move from London to Cornwall, it considers distance and closeness, and questions how to live. She dissects ‘dualism’ and arrival, sex and dance, a trip to Japan. The collection also includes a moving sequence of poems about the aftermath of an attempted rape.

“Funny, moving, surprising, unflinching and, above all else… joyous.” – Helen Mort

Boasting Sonnet I’m not one to brag but Sharon Olds wrote me a poem; me from a council estate. I’ve done handstands, on a skateboard, downhill yet failed both Maths and English O level. I’m still in love with the man I met at eighteen. I don’t believe in marriage but I once won an award for headbanging and chaired human rights talks at the UN. Expelled from school, I’m now a PhD. I don’t wear make-up, this is the real me unless I’m doing panto, in Cornish. I’m a qualified mountain leader. Wish you could see my scything and lindyhop. I’d say much more but sonnets make you stop.

Wild Persistence is available on the Seren website: £9.99

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

Watch Katrina read her poem ‘Poem in Which She Wears Her Favourite Wedding Dress’ on our Youtube channel:

Posted on by

Friday Poem – ‘Chorus’ by David Morley

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Chorus’ by David Morley from the anthology 100 Poems to Save the Earth, edited by Zoë Brigley and Kristian Evans.

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, this landmark anthology is a call to action to fight the threat facing the only planet we have. 

Writing from rural and urban perspectives, linking issues of social injustice with the need to protect the environment, this selection of renowned contemporary poets from Britain, Ireland, America and beyond attend carefully to the new evidence, redraw the maps and, full of trust, keep going, proving that in fact, poetry is exactly what we need to save the earth. 

“These achingly beautiful poems… remind us how to refind ourselves amid the landscape we call home.”  – Sonya Huber

David Morley CHORUS on the birth of Edward Daniel Keenan Morley The song-thrush slams down gauntlets on its snail-anvil. The nightjar murmurs in nightmare. The dawn is the chorus. The bittern blasts the mists wide with a booming foghorn. The nuthatch nails another hatch shut. The dawn is the chorus. The merlin bowls a boomerang over bracken then catches it. The capercaillie uncorks its bottled throat. The dawn is the chorus. The treecreeper tips the trees upside down to trick out insects. The sparrow sorts spare parts on a pavement. The dawn is the chorus. The hoopoe hoops rainbows over the heath and hedgerows. The wren runs rings through its throat. The dawn is the chorus. The turnstones do precisely what is asked of them by name. The wryneck and stonechats also. The dawn is the chorus. The buzzards mew and mount up on the thermal’s thermometer. The smew slide on shy woodland water. The dawn is the chorus. The heron hangs its head before hurling down its guillotine. The tern twists on tines of two sprung wings. The dawn is the chorus. The eider shreds its pillows, releases snow flurry after snow flurry. The avocet unclasps its compass-points. The dawn is the chorus. The swallow unmakes the Spring and names the Summer. The swift sleeps only when it’s dead. The dawn is the chorus. The bullfinches feather-fight the birdbath into a bloodbath. The wagtail wags a wand then vanishes. The dawn is the chorus. The corncrake zips its comb on its expert fingertip. The robin blinks at you for breakfast. The dawn is the chorus. The rook roots into roadkill for the heart and the hardware. The tawny owl wakes us to our widowhood. The dawn is the chorus. The dawn is completely composed. The pens of its beaks are dry. Day will never sound the same, nor night know which song wakes her.

100 Poems to Save the Earth is available on the Seren website: £12.99

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

Posted on by

Friday Poem – ‘The House of Everything’ by Robert Seatter

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘The House of Everything’ the title poem from Robert Seatter’s new collection of the same name which is inspired by the collection of Sir John Soane’s Museum in London.

The cover of The House of Everything is a collage of images, including the nose and mouth of a statue with a shocked expression and the eyes of Audrey Hepburn.

Sir John Soane’s Museum in central London is a unique and idiosyncratic ‘house museum’, designed and built in the early 19th century by its obsessive architect/collector owner. The House of Everything takes the reader on a personal and poetic trail, capturing the tragic story of the man who created it, the eclectic collection he gathered within its walls, and most importantly what it says about our universal desire to leave a mark in space and time. No matter if you have never visited the place before – the texts are intercut with a series of striking collages made by the poet himself. They mix archive imagery of the house with contemporary visuals and help locate the reader in his/her passage through the house. They also help conjure the unique message of this book: how to make material our elusive dreams and imaginings.

The House of Everything. Everything must go in – fragments of stained glass, ancient cornice and pedstal, odd classical fee (human/animal), odd flowers from the sea now solid as rock, great works of the Italian masters in gilded frames – their names like pasta sauces, their ten-a-penny idylls. And sling in too the grimacing gargoyles for easy contrast, hacked from facades of windy cathedrals, a lank lock of hair from a saint and a sinner (they are one and the same), a missing pistol – its ricochet bullet somewhere in these rooms. Everything, everything. Now recite the list of what you saved. Now the one thing you missed: its gleaming plinth, its jealous empty space. Note: Soane collected obsessively, the final collection in his house numbering almost 50,000 objects, each meticulously catalogued before his death.

The House of Everything is available on the Seren website: £9.99

Find out more about Sir John Soane’s Museum on their website www.soane.org

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

Join us on Wednesday 14th July from 7pm for the online launch of The House of Everything. Register for free via Eventbrite here https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/161494704007. Please note registration will close at 6:30pm on the 14th to ensure everyone receives the link.

Posted on by

Friday Poem – ‘Unseen Island’ by Christine Evans

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Unseen Island’ by Christine Evans from our new anthology A Last Respect.

The cover of A Last Respect shows a painting of rolling green fields beneath a blue sky. In the distance, a lake is visible at the bottom of the valley.

A Last Respect is a selection of contemporary Welsh poetry by winners of the Roland Mathias Prize. The poems included are wide ranging in style and subject. They contemplate relationships, nature, the environment, mortality, time, art and politics, and take place in a range of locations, from Aberystwyth to Baghdad, from war-torn landscapes to parents’ evenings. Two accompanying essays provide the context in which the poets work. In her Introduction, Jane Aaron writes about Roland Mathias: a poet himself, but also an influential editor and cultural commentator who did much to foster and develop poetry in Wales. A Last Respect is a continuation of his legacy. Daniel G. Williams’ Afterword is an incisive discussion about poetry in Wales over the past sixty years: where it started from and how it changed. A must-have anthology of poetry from Wales.

Featuring Dannie Abse, Tiffany Atkinson, Ruth Bidgood, Ailbhe Darcy, Rhian Edwards, Christine Evans, John Freeman, Philip Gross, Gwyneth Lewis, Robert Minhinnick, and Owen Sheers.

Unseen Island. From accross the sleeping Sound the unseen island nudges at my consciousness – wind-blown Enlli; nowhere more steeped in calm, more resonant of growing. There, air trembles with associations and I am played to a tune I scarcely recognise easy as water, but earthed. Is it energy or faith that breeds content in me? Washed smooth, drawn out, moulded to acceptance like clay on a wheel, so like a compass I am pointing always where you lie – elusive, shimmering – but no mirage: my unblurring.

A Last Respect is available on the Seren website: £9.99

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

Posted on by

Friday Poem – ‘Roadblock’ by Ilse Pedler

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Roadblock’ by Ilse Pelder from her newly published debut collection Auscultation.

The cover of Auscultation shows a photograph of a stethoscope lying on a white background. An orange and red butterfly is resting on the cord.

Ilse Pedler is a veterinary surgeon who works in Kendal. Her debut collection is 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.

“Unique and utterly original.” – Kim Moore

Roadblock The night is a vast blank letter waiting to be written and suddenly here are the words: blue and red interrupting the darkness glancing off shocked faces, hi-vis jackets, shoulders hunched against bad news, stationary cars. I lower my window, say I am the vet and am waved on through. In the road a horse, spotlit, head down, resting a leg as though tired from a ride, no blood, just trembling under my hands, steam beading the fine hairs on its flared nostrils, and that leg; it is like a child’s drawing, bones angled all the wrong way. I don’t have what I need and am taken to the surgery, speed elongating the streetlights, then back past journeys put on hold, through the roadblock to the horse and its bent back leg, sweat starting to carve rivers in his coat, his heat and the pulse of him that I can feel still through the rigid cold of the gun.

Auscultation is available now. As it is Independent Bookshop Week, why not buy through bookshop.org.

We’re hosting the online launch for Auscultation on Tuesday 13th July from 7pm. Register to join us for free via Eventbrite here https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/159986866023.

Watch Ilse reading her poem ‘Miss Freak’s Whelping Forceps’, also from Auscultation:

Posted on by

Friday Poem – ‘September’s Child’ by Dai George

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘September’s Child’ by Dai George from his new collection Karaoke King which was published this week.

The cover of Karaoke King shows a drawing of a teenage boy, with short dark hair wearing a yellow and brown stripped vest over a white shirt. His head is to one side and his glasses are wonky. He wears a crumpled, gold crown. The title is on a yellow-gold box at the bottom.

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. As with the Auden of the inter-war period, 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, glimpsed in the ‘Fooled Evening’ of a world whose seasonal rhythms have fallen out of joint. 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. 

September’s Child Hormonally it ripens, tickling the blood, building through the part of me that would be womb, a premonition of loss or change, an over-fattened moon. Saccharine and festive, it makes of me a boy in bed failing to sleep on his birthday eve. Still I find myself September’s child, bookish, mild, ever eldest in the year, a connoisseur of subtle treats, like ravioli from the tin, the adult jokes in Asterix, or better yet a malady that softly lowers you to the settee but doesn’t stop your eyes from lapping at a page. Every year, sure as morning bell, I’d feel the bulge descend upon my tonsil gland, as now I feel the blossoming of an earthier and urgent need, a waft of chestnut smoke at summer’s end. I don’t know what it is, I only know it comes in August with a sky of schoolsweater grey and declining light. My pinky custard shivers, barely set within its rabbit mould. Sometimes it only takes a bar of Charles Trenet unwinding through ‘La Mer’ and I’m awash. A salt of yearning rises to my throat. Everywhere I look the children are younger, or else I’m fatter and forgetful, still stumbling on the brink of coming into something long deserved.

Karaoke King is available on the Seren website: £9.99

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

Posted on by

Friday Poem – ‘Midnight, Dhaka, 25 March 1971’ by Mir Mafuz Ali

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Midnight, Dhaka, 25 March 1971’ by Mir Mafuz Ali from his collection Midnight, Dhaka.

Midnight, Dhaka is the debut collection by Mir Mahfuz Ali. As a boy, Mahfuz witnessed atrocities and writes about them with a searing directness in poems like ‘My Salma’: ‘They brought Salma into the yard, / asked me to watch how they would explode / a bullet into her’. His trauma becomes transformative, and his poetry the key to unlocking memories of a childhood that are rich in nuance, gorgeous in detail and evocative of a beautiful country. Influenced by Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) and Jibanananda Das (1899-1954), as well as modern British poets, Mahfuz brings his own unique voice in these poems, which celebrate the human capacity for love, survival and renewal.

Midnight, Dhaka is available on the Seren website: £9.99

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

Posted on by

Friday Poem – ‘The Guns’ by Katrina Naomi

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘The Guns’ by Katrina Naomi from her collection Wild Persistence which was published this time last year.

Wild Persistence by Katrina Naomi is a confident and persuasive collection of poems. Written following her move from London to Cornwall, it considers distance and closeness, and questions how to live. She dissects ‘dualism’ and arrival, sex and dance, a trip to Japan. The collection also includes a moving sequence of poems about the aftermath of an attempted rape.

“Funny, moving, surprising, unflinching and, above all else… joyous.” – Helen Mort

Wild Persistence is available on the Seren website: £9.99

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

Watch Katrina read her poem ‘London: A Reply’ on our Youtube channel:

Posted on by

Friday Poem – ‘Free, No Obligation Valuation’ by Rhian Edwards

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Free, No Obligation Valuation’ by Rhian Edwards from her second collection The Estate Agent’s Daughter, published this time last year.

The Estate Agent’s Daughter is the eagerly awaited follow up to Rhian Edwards’s Wales Book of the Year winning debut collection Clueless Dogs. Acute and wryly observed, the poems step forth with a confident tone, touching on the personal and the public, encapsulating a woman’s tribulations in the twenty-first century.

“…fast-talking, wise-cracking and worldly wise” – Zoë Brigley

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

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

Watch Rhian Edwards reading her poem ‘Argos Wedding’ from The Estate Agent’s Daughter on our Youtube channel:

Posted on by

Friday Poem – ‘City’ by Peter Finch

This week our Friday Poem is ‘City’ by Peter Finch from his 2020 collection The Machineries of Joy.

The Machineries of Joy is the vibrant, uproarious, pointed & wildly entertaining new collection from renowned Cardiff-based performance poet, Peter Finch. Known for his inventive and multi-faceted formal strategies & his best-selling psycho-geographical peregrinations around Wales and the USA, he gives us the world in all its contemporary complexity.

The Machineries of Joy is available on the Seren website: £9.99

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

Last year Peter joined us for an event as part of the Seren Stay-at-Home Series. Rewatch it in full on our Youtube channel: