Friday Poem

Posted on by

Friday Poem – ‘Body Language’ by Tamar Yoseloff

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Body Language’ by Tamar Yoseloff from her new collection The Black Place. You can watch video interviews of Tamar reading from and talking about the collection on our Youtube channel.

The Black Place is a dark and gorgeously multi-faceted collection that eschews the sentimental, embraces alternatives and offers antidotes to cheery capitalist hype. But there is a sort of dark grandeur to Tamar Yoseloff’s view of mortality, one that matches the sublime desert painting by Georgia O’Keeffe, the subject of the title poem. The book’s subjects include Georgia O’Keeffe, the poet’s cancer diagnosis and treatment, and the Grenfell Tower fire disaster.

 

The Black Place is available on the Seren website: £9.99

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

Join us to celebrate the launch of The Black Place this coming Monday (25th November) from 7pm – Downstairs at The Department Store, Brixton, London. Tamar will be joined by special guests Tim Dooley, Sue Rose, Claire Crowther and Anne Berkley. All welcome. Find the full details on our website.

Posted on by

Friday Poem – ‘Our Mothers’ Bodies’ by Alexandra Ford

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Our Mothers’ Bodies’ by Alexandra Ford. Alexandra’s debut novel What Remains at the End was published last month.

In the aftermath of World War II, hundreds of thousands of Yugoslavia’s ethnic Germans, the Danube Swabians, were expelled by Tito’s Partisan regime. A further sixty-thousand were killed. Seventy years later Marie Kholer travels to Europe to learn the truth about her grandparents’ flight to America. A story of war and suffering, of loss and the search for connection and identity, it is an intriguing debut novel from Alexandra Ford.

 

What Remains at the End is available on the Seren website: £9.99

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

Don’t miss the launch of What Remains at the End, taking place on Saturday 23rd November at the The Hurst, The John Osbourne Arvon Centre. There will be books, wine and cake! See the full details here. 

Posted on by

Friday Poem – ‘What’s the Welsh for ‘Fire-Cracker’?’ by Marc Evans

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘What’s the Welsh for ‘Fire-Cracker’?’ by Marc Evans. Marc is a regular attendee of our First Thursday evenings which happen once a month at Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff. He read this poem in the open mic session a few months ago and we thought it was perfect to share with you this week just after bonfire night.

 

 

Thinking about Christmas already? Browse our book pages and find someone the perfect gift this Christmas. 20% off online when you create your free Seren account. 

Posted on by

Friday Poem – ‘A Second Whisper’ by Lynne Hjelmgaard

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘A Second Whisper’ by Lynne Hjelmgaard from her new collection A Second Whisper. You can see videos of Lynne reading more poems from the collection on our Youtube channel.

A Second Whisper is Lynne Hjelmgaard’s moving new collection in which she looks back upon her life in New York, Demark, The Caribbean, and London. There are elegies to her late husband as well as to her mentor and partner, the renowned Welsh poet Dannie Abse, who died in 2014. Her lyrics are precise, warm in tone, and suffused with optimism for the future.

 

 

A Second Whisper is available on the Seren website: £9.99

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

Don’t miss Lynne reading alongside Mary J. Oliver at their joint launch tomorrow, 7pm at Broc Mor shop in Aberystwyth. Find the full details here. 

Posted on by

Friday Poem – ‘Gull Song’ by Zoë Skoulding

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Gull Song’ by Zoë Skoulding from her new collection Footnotes to Water which is a Poetry  Book Society Winter Recommendation.

In Footnotes to Water poet Zoë Skoulding follows two forgotten rivers, the Adda in Bangor and the Bièvre in Paris, and tracks the literary hoofprints of sheep through Welsh mountains. In these journeys she reveals urban and rural locales as sites of lively interconnection, exploring different senses of community, and the ways in which place shapes and is shaped by language.

 

Footnotes to Water 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 – ‘Lyrebird’ by Deryn Rees-Jones

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Lyrebird’ by Deryn Rees-Jones from her T. S. Eliot Shortlisted collection Erato.

Named after the Greek muse of lyric poetry, Erato combines documentary-style prose narratives with the passionate lyric poetry for which Rees-Jones is renowned. Here, however, as she experiments with form, particularly the sonnet, Rees-Jones asks questions about the value of the poet and poetry itself. What is the difference, she asks in one poem, between a sigh and a song? Erato’s themes are manifold but particularly focus on personal loss, desire and recovery, in the context of a world in which wars and displacement of people has become a terrifying norm.

Erato 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 – ‘Bicep to Bicep’ by Mary J. Oliver

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Bicep to Bicep’ by Mary J. Oliver, from her new book Jim Neat: The Case of a Young Man Down on his Luck.

Jim Neat is a coalescing of prose, poetry, documents and photographs in which Mary J. Oliver uncovers the life of her father. Tinged with the tragedy of his partner’s death and an orphaned daughter, it ranges across the history of 20th century England and Canada.

Gathering documents, following leads, Mary traces Jim’s story full circle. She presents the case for the remarkable life of an ordinary man. His family and the people who knew him are the witnesses in his defence. The verdict is this extraordinary memoir.

 

Jim Neat 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 – ‘Windfalls’ by Paul Henry

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Windfalls’ by Paul Henry, from his collection The Glass Aisle.

The Glass Aisle Paul Henry

The Glass Aisle moves between rage and stillness, past and present, music and silence. Acclaimed poet Paul Henry’s tenth book includes a moving elegy to displaced workhouse residents, set on a stretch of canal in the Brecon Beacons National Park.

‘Here is a rich and comforting voice next to you in the dark. Twenty eight poems so beguiling you know not whether they depict ancient folklore or an everyday occurrence in the next but one village’ – Caught by the River

 

The Glass Aisle 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 Birds of Rhiannon’ by Rhian Edwards

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘The Birds of Rhiannon’ by Rhian Edwards, from her pamphlet Brood.

Brood Rhian Edwards

Inspired by both a fascination with birds as well as intense personal experiences of motherhood and a broken relationship, Brood is a stunning pamphlet by prize-winning poet Rhian Edwards. Also featuring beautiful, original charcoal drawings by Welsh artist Paul Edwards.

The pamphlet opens with ‘Birds of Rhiannon’ introducing us (via a nod to the famous medieval Mabinogion story where magic birds, said to bring people back from the dead, console the heartbroken Celtic princess Rhiannon) to a darkly resonant tone that echoes from the myth.

Brood is available on the Seren website: £6.00

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

Rhian’s debut poetry collection Clueless Dogs won Wales Book of the Year in 2013. It is available from the Seren website: £9.99

Posted on by

Friday Poem – ‘Hare’ by Ross Cogan

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Hare’ by Ross Cogan, from his collection Bragr.

Ross Cogan Bragr

Whether its myth intended to explain the constellations, the secret of eternal life, or the bloodthirsty tale of the mead of poetry, Ross Cogan’s collection Bragr (meaning ‘poetry’ in Old Norse) is a reimagining of Norse mythology for our times. In particular, the collection focuses on environmental concerns. The earth’s incredible beauty seems all the more fragile in the face of habitat loss and global warming.

 

Bragr is available on the Seren website: £9.99

Catch Ross reading from Bragr at The Hive in Worcester on Thursday 3rd October. Full details and where to book are available here. 

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