Our Friday Poem this week is ‘Cathedral Builders’ by John Ormond from John Ormond: Collected Poems. John Ormond’s legacy as both a poet and award-winning documentary maker will be remembered at the Seren Cardiff Poetry Festival in the Inaugural Meic Stephens Lecture. Join us from 6pm on Friday 14 February to hear Kieron Smith, author of John Ormond’s Organic Mosaic, discuss the correspondences between Ormond’s twin creative channels accompanied by short film clips of his work.
John Ormond (1923-1990) is one of the remarkable generation of poets born in south Wales in the early 1920s which includes Dannie Abse and Leslie Norris. This Collected Poems draws together all of Ormond’s work, including unpublished material. It includes notes and commentary of the poems re: their geneses, backgrounds, allusions and meanings, and a bibliography of Ormond’s prose writing, films and writing about him. An index of titles and first lines completes this essential book.
John Ormond: Collected Poems is available on the Seren website: £14.99
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Daljit Nagra possesses one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary English poetry. British Museum is his third collection and marks a significant departure of style to something quieter, more contemplative and inquisitive, at times valedictory. His political edge has been honed in a series of meditations and reflections upon our heritage, our legacy, and the institutions that define them: the BBC, Hadrian’s Wall, the Sikh gurdwaras of our towns, the British Museum of the title poem.
Sound Archive by Nerys Williams uses formal strategies to conjure a complex music, intriguing narratives, and poems full of atmosphere that query identity, gender, and the dream of art as a vehicle for emotion and meaning. Williams confronts our preconceptions about what it might mean to be a woman writing against the background of two formidable traditions: that of Welsh-speaking Wales and of English literature. A thoughtful, subtle and fascinating collection.
A fascination for history, both as a source of human drama and a field for artful speculation, characterises this collection of poems by Sheenagh Pugh. In 
