Friday Poem

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Friday Poem – Suturing Secrets

Ilse Pedler The Dogs that Chase Bicycle Wheels Mslexia pamphlet

This week’s Friday Poem is taken from Ilse Pedler’s new poetry pamphlet The Dogs that Chase Bicycle Wheels.

The Dogs that Chase Bicycle Wheels Ilse Pedler Friday PoemIlse Pedler’s marvelous debut poetry booklet, The Dogs that Chase Bicycle Wheels, won the 2015 Mslexia Poetry Pamphlet Competition. Many of her poems are about animals and how they interact with humans, and reflect her working life as a Veterinary Surgeon. Pedler has a careful, empathetic eye for the characteristics of the animals she comes across. Humans and their secrets are also observed, with a sharp wryness but also with a characteristic gentleness.

 

Suturing Secrets

We are divided into compartments,
separated by taut membranes,

glistening planes of connective tissue,
resilient boundaries. 

Today this is damaged,
anaesthetized, surgically explored

your diaphragm is a torn curtain hanging
and like a peep show I’m drawn to look behind. 

In the absence of pressure lungs hesitate
to inflate, do their best to conceal 

the frantic convulsions at your core,
the struggle for rebirth every second.

I look perhaps longer than I should
at the shuddering flesh, the labouring

beauty, then I pull the curtain back over
and suture the secret inside.

Buy your copy of The Dogs that Chase Bicycle Wheels now, 20% off for Book Club members.

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Friday Poem – The New World

friday poem the new world meirion jordan

Tomorrow is International Dylan Thomas Day and we will be celebrating Swansea’s most famous son, so today our Friday Poem is by another Swansea native, Meirion Jordan.

Jordan was born in 1985 in Swansea. His début Moonrise was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and his pamphlet, Strangers Hall, was shortlisted for an East Anglia Book of the Year award.

moonrise meirion jordan friday poemFinely held moods and moments resonate throughout this unusually accomplished first book. The rich, complex history of Wales often crops up, sometimes in unexpected contexts: ‘The New World’ is a vision, a cross between Dylan Thomas’ ‘Under Milk Wood’ and an early J.G. Ballard novel, of post-global warming Wales, with a polyglot population: “Ronaldinho Davies/wowing the crowds at the Millennium Stadium” and swamped by tropical vegetation: “cobalt lizards and coral snakes/swallowing the cottages an Llandinam/ the mahoganies uprooting Carno’s hearths”.

The New World

Roll on global warming. The Maentwrog Junta
seizing power on a Sunday morning
just after chapel, the frenziedly moustachioed
General Gwydion Mendéz proclaiming martial law
after the third psalm of the evening service.
The Gorseinon drugs cartel expanding
to the Aberystwyth favelas, bringing the clash
of kalashnikovs to constitution hill.
Samba and harps. O Seion Fryn
bawled out at thirty in the shade
by sweating ministers. Cawl mango
and coconuts replacing lava bread. Ronaldinho Davies
wowing the crowds at the Millennium Stadium,
the Rhondda turning out in rainbows
of rippling cloth and streamers to see England lose
four-nil, Islwyn Marley at half time
shaking the stands with sounds from Ynys Mon.
Olwen Perón leading the mob in Marchog Iesu
at the Cwmdonkin bandstand, her voice
spreading like an angelus along
the Taff Fechan, along Cwm Tywi.
David Attenborough filming the fauna
of the Nantgwynant valley, eccentric Englishmen
looking for the lost city of Dolgellau
up Cwm Pennant, out behind Corris.
100 percent humidity at Rhandirmwyn.
Kurtz Jenkins on the shores of Llyn Clywedog,
and everything from Llanidloes to Rhaeadr
declared ‘the dark interior’. The rattan
wrapping itself around the spine of the A470,
the cobalt lizards and the coral snakes
swallowing the cottages at Llandinam,
the mahoganies uprooting Carno’s hearths.
The moon at Devil’s Bridge pulled earthwards
in a sail of vines, the sun
squinting in the eye of a bromeliad
that wields its universe of frogspawn out
from Carnedd Dafydd to the new world.

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Friday Poem – The woman on my National Library of Wales library card

playing house katherine stansfield

This week our Friday Poem is ‘The woman on my National Library of Wales library card’ by Katherine Stansfield, which won the 2014 PENfro poetry competition. The poem is taken from Katherine’s humorous and distinctive debut collection, Playing House.

playing house katherine stansfieldA concise wit and an unsettling view of the domestic characterise these poems whose subjects are the ordinary as viewed through the author’s satirical yet sympathetic eye. John Lennon’s tooth, an imaginary ‘Canada’, bees in Rhode Island, cats and office politics are all peculiar grist to this author’s mill. She presents both historical subjects such as Captain Scott of the Antarctic, and common objects, such as household bleach, from a skewed perspective, adding humour, drama and a quietly distinctive pathos.

 

The woman on my National Library of Wales library card

Her mouth says it all –
slack as a jellyfish. They made her

stand against the wall
with no time to pose or comb

the seagulls from her hair,
no time to dig her smile

from pockets of sand.
the Sea fret foaming at her hems

thickened once inside the dusty air
that seeps from books. See, she’s ghosting

under the card’s laminated skin. Almost
gone. She fogged the enquiry desk too.

The attendant lost his hands
in the mist, hence the wonky

shot. She’s looking at a horizon
beyond the frame. I can’t meet

her salt-stiff eye which asks
for silence from the waves

as if such a gift could be given.
She doesn’t get out much now for fear

of mackerel following her home
and wheezing to death in the road,

of mullet in the bath again.
Her doorstep is crunchy with limpets.

Can I take her something back?
She likes romance, set far inland.

 

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Friday Poem – White Clover

friday poem white clover lynne hjelmgaard

This week our Friday Poem is taken from Lynne Hjelmgaard’s new collection, A Boat Called Annalise.

A Boat Called Annalise Lynne HjelmgaardLynne Hjelmgaard was born in New York and has lived in Denmark, Rome, Paris and London. Her collection, A Boat Called Annalise, records the years she and her husband spent sailing on a boat to the Caribbean and back. The author beautifully evokes life at sea, the dream-like nature of the tropics, and the halcyon days of a marriage.
Hjelmgaard moves from scenes of risk and turbulence, of wild beauty on the open water, to visions of their dream-like destination in the West Indies. The author’s clear-eyed and tender observations are as insightful about the paradox of paradise: tropical splendor amidst local poverty, as they are about the challenges of relationships at close quarters.

 

White Clover
For Dannie
white clover lynne hjelmgaard annalise

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
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Friday Poem – April

the visitations kathryn simmonds april friday poem

This week our Friday Poem is from The Visitations by Kathryn Simmonds.

the visitations kathryn simmonds april poemThe Visitations is the follow-up to Kathryn’s Forward Prize-winning debut, Sunday at the Skin Launderette. As with her previous collection, an appealing voice prevails, though this simplicity is something of a veil, through which the author, with subtle shifts of language and perspective, manages to imply darker themes and worlds unseen. The tone is often simultaneously satirical and elegiac and the collection abounds with sudden moments of strange illumination: a lime tree strikes up a conversation; a life coach finds an old passport; an infant teeters on the brink of speech. Here are poems where the physical and metaphysical meet, where questions of new motherhood are set against those of faith, and the larger conundrum of how to live.

 

April

April Kathryn Simmonds

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Friday Poem – Yellow Dahlias

The Way the Crocodile Taught Me Katrina Naomi

Yesterday saw us at the Admiral Benbow in Penzance for the launch of Katrina Naomi’s The Way the Crocodile Taught Me, and so this week’s Friday Poem is taken from this gorgeous new collection. If you missed Katrina in Penzance, you have another chance to hear her read on 17 May, when we will be at The Yorkshire Grey, London, for a second launch event. You can find the full details on our website.

The Way the Crocodile Taught Me Penzance launch
Katrina Naomi’s book launch, Admiral Benbow, 14 April

the way the crocodile taught meThe Way the Crocodile Taught Me is a heartfelt and tragi-comic portrayal of a fraught childhood and adolescence. Central to the book are two sequences: one about an awful stepfather, and the other about a kindly but also comically old-fashioned grandmother. A mother appears, distant, glamorous as a film star. An absent father is also a dream: “After my father left, I grew/ a battery of hearts,/ felt each of them beat,/ like doves in a casket/”. These family poems are both heartbreaking and often hilarious, sometimes both at once.

 

Yellow Dahlias

This is the image that sticks:
my married mother, her costume cut
low and high, one foot below

the impossible blue of a honeymoon pool,
the other poised on the metal step;
her face, fresh of make-up,

brows plucked in static surprise,
eyes wide with the rubber pull
of yellow dahlias, her new ring and bracelet.

A triumph. My mother emerging
from the water as I’d never seen her before.
Her head, a belisha beacon of hope.

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Friday Poem – Spring ’72

To celebrate the coming of spring, our Friday Poem this week is from Sheenagh Pugh’s Selected Poems and is entitled ‘Spring ’72’. This poem is the first Sheenagh ever had published, in one of the 1972 issues of Poetry Wales.

Sheenagh Pugh's Selected PoemsPublished in 1990, Sheenagh Pugh’s Selected Poems is the best of her early work: a generous and wide-ranging selection from her first four collections, together with two dozen previously unpublished pieces. Notable inclusions are the prize-winning ‘M.S.A’ and ‘Intercity Lullaby’, and the much-anthologised ‘Sometimes.’ Throughout, a lively and enquiring mind is brought to bear on how we live and die, and how we might live more equitably. Sheenagh Pugh approaches her subject unpredictably, through Norse saga and snooker, apartheid and falling tortoises, in a poetry of invention and conviction.

Spring ’72

Now open flowers on the shirts of boys;
now mica glistens, asphalt’s morning dew,
from pavements up. Now all the girls look pregnant,
and small red sports cars blossom on the streets.

Now all birds are not sparrows; now all women
unwrap their shapes from winter. Now the man
who thought it might be fun to walk to work
find all sight aches, all touch troubles his blood.

Now all the state of opening, upspring, bud’s
soft burst, a green grenade, scrapes at his grief;
now all the many dead dress him in black
for what they had and what he cannot keep. 

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Friday Poem – Flamingos

my family and other superheroes

Our Friday poem is from the Costa Award-winning book of poetry, My Family and Other Superheroes, by Jonathan Edwards. It is titled ‘Flamingos’ and is being turned into a dance! The humor of the poem makes for an ideal April Fools’ Day piece for all to enjoy.

Screenshot 2016-04-01 15.13.43My Family and Other Superheroes introduces a vibrant and unique new voice from Wales. The superheroes in question are a motley crew. Evel Knievel, Sophia Loren, Ian Rush, Marty McFly, a bicycling nun and a recalcitrant hippo – all leap from these pages and jostle for position, alongside valleys mams, dads and bamps, described with great warmth. Other poems focus on the crammed terraces and abandoned high streets where a working-class and Welsh nationalist politics is hammered out. This is a post-industrial valleys upbringing re-imagined through the prism of pop culture and surrealism.

 

Flamingos

Who spray-painted the swans? You dilly–dally, 
       shilly-shally in the shallow end
on Meccano legs, your day a foot massage, 
       curve your neck into a clothes hanger
            for your rose-hue tutu and your feather boa.
You’re every little girl’s dream, a shock, a flock 
       of neon signs, advertising candyfloss.
Why do you blush so much? Each time you eat,
       you have to kiss the you-shaped bird who floats
            in the lake surface, steal food from its throat.
February. Outside’s a place of grey
       line managers, timetabled rain, the bus.
But with your silly-billy,Vegas waitress, 
       camouflage-for-a-world-of-joy body,
            Fuck that, you say, let’s all be fabulous.


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Friday Poem – Denominations

As we are now approaching Easter, our Friday poem this week will be from Damian Walford-Davies’ Judas.

judas cover rgbIn short-lined, intensely suggestive dramatic monologues, Damian Walford-Davies vividly summons moments of fear and swagger, doubt and passion, despair and nonchalance as an outlaw Judas finds himself haunted by his chequered and extraordinary past. Familiar stories are rendered strange and uncanny as the reader is caught in multiple ironies. As striking as the unnerving images on the news loops of our TV and computer screens, these poems locate us on the hazardous streets of a divided city with a companion-guide who shares with us his own troubling and troubled version of history.

Drawing on conflicting representations of Judas spanning twenty centuries, this chain of poems sets out to challenge orthodoxies and easy pieties. Judas offers an imaginative map of ancient enmities – and dares to hint at resolutions – in the form of a dramatic autobiography of the man whose most famous act (they say) was a kiss in the dark.

Denominations

You’ll paint me gross – 
gripping my shins, 
retching silver coins.

Let me put you straight. 
All I’ve got’s loose change 
for late-night kofta stands

outside the Lions’ Gate, 
where tote-bag tourists 
sip tart tamarind

from paper cups.
On Friday night I saw the city 
wane and wax to pixels

on the screens of untold 
mobile phones. From unbuilt 
minarets, muezzins hoist

the pale Passover moon 
above the gospel
 of the Separation Wall.

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Friday Poem – ‘Campbell’ by Siobhán Campbell

cross-talk siobhan campbell

St Patrick’s Day has just passed and fittingly, our Friday Poem this week comes from Irish poet Siobhán Campbell’s collection, Cross-Talk.

cross-talk by Siobhán CampbellAcerbic, cool, controlled, this is poetry with attitude. Many of the stories in this collection start in Ireland and although the cadences are sweetly lyrical, the narratives are otherwise. Politics here is intrinsic to the tales of the sly, the warped, the landlady “Mean as Ireland in the 50’s”. Nature is deftly invoked as a counterpoint to human illusions. The apparently personal poems here are cast in a more tender, yet characteristically unsentimental light. Campbell brings the lyric close to the conflicts that spur our passions, both personal and political. While full of wit, this collection challenges the reader by dealing with fundamental questions of borders, identity, violence and responsibility.

Siobhán’s poem ‘Framed’ has just won the Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition 2016, and ‘The same people living in the same place’ was just the featured reading at the launch of The Stinging Fly’s In the Wake of the Rising edition, edited by Sean O’Reilly.

Campbell

“I shall never deny those who came to this gnarled coast
with a skinful of sopped hope and started with their brood
this trail that would become the family you call yours.

You know in Ulster Scots they don’t use the word ‘lane’
but have to say ‘wee road’. The laming of a tongue
will map it out of mind unless it has a name.

Raymond, Ursula, the two Hughs, who laid on betting sheets,
knew when to settle odds and how to be discreet,
paid blind to the sidelong flutter of small groups.

They each made one more shift from anything that marked,
though wondered through two wars what way to stream a lay
for those who come home in droves from fights that were not ours.

I am the last.

Though you are from the south, you need to find the will
to hold a vowel too long. Tell people by their heed
and know who must be paid. Keep always your own name.
It takes a softened tongue to fill a twisted mouth.”

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