Friday Poem

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Friday Poem: ‘Antipodes’ by Glyn Edwards

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Antipodes’ by Glyn Edwards from his new collection In Orbit.

This cover shows a water colour illustrations of the 6 phases of the moon as drawn by Galileo. The text reads: In Orbit Glyn Edwards.

Glyn Edwards’s new collection In Orbit is a sustained narrative of love, loss and longing. Using a variety of innovative forms, these poems explore grief and how we come to terms with losing someone close to us. The natural world offers sustenance and a new perspective in the face of intense emotions as a man struggles to come to terms with news of a beloved teacher’s death.   

Antipodes We are waiting in your shrunken classroom, warming our wet shoes on the growling pipes below the windowsill, drawing cocks in the condensation until you come in, later than usual, shake yourself dry like a damp dog and stare at a computer screen. Did you hear about the earthquake, Sir? You nod, though your eyes don’t nod. The tremors, says a voice, desperate to rescue you, set off car alarms in London – the other side of the world. You are silent, so close now to the monitor that when you stir it’s as if you’re butting your forehead against the glass. You are wearing yesterday’s clothes. Slowly, you stand and unpin two huge maps from the display boards, deliberately, like a general collapsing a failed campaign. You line up one upon the other as a bedsheet on a mattress folding the countries like bodies, so that the arm of America holds the waist of India, so the Atlantic bathes Australia. They’re not diametrically opposite, your voice is all wrong. If we went down, down, through the centre of the world, we’d surface and sink somewhere in the Pacific. You’re searching the stunned space for something and clench at a shining metal from the desk. You gauge the maps again, lift them like a flag and stab them through with the shaft of a pen. Soon, you are shuffling across the yard in the rain, your coat still on your chair. We take the maps away. Your fountain pen is splintered. Your computer screen blank.

In Orbit is available on the Seren website: £9.99

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Join us at Providero Coffeehouse in Llandudno on Thursday 16th March for the launch of In Orbit. Register for free here www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/549134123947.

Book Launch. In Orbit by Glyn Edwards. Thursday 16th March from 6:30pm. Providero Coffeehouse, 112 Upper Mostyn Street, Llandudno LL30 2SW. Poet Glyn Edwards launches his new collection In Orbit alongside guest readers Laura Satterthwaite, Gareth Culshaw and Ness Owen. Free to attend but please register via Eventbrite in advance.
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Friday Poem – ‘FISH’ by Peter Finch

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘FISH’ by Peter Finch. Originally published in The Machineries of Joy (2020), it now features in Volume Two of his Collected Poems which was published in 2022.

The covers of Peter Finch's collected poems show mirrored image of a geometric pattern made of grey 3D hexagons. The text reads Peter Finch Collected Poems.

Peter Finch’s remarkable career spans over fifty years. He has been taking poetry to places it didn’t know it wanted to go from the beginning; blending the avant-garde, concrete, visual, sound, performance and more conventional forms to create something unique. His new two-volume Collected Poems, edited by Andrew Taylor, cement his reputation as one of Britain’s leading poets.

Volume One brings together work from long lost chapbooks, broadsheets and limited editions, as well as more conventionally published work. Volume Two focuses on the second half of Finch’s career with poems from later collections sitting alongside works from his prose books and those engraved in the public realm on sculptures, walls and buildings, particularly in his native Cardiff. Nerys Williams and Ian McMillan provide appreciative forewords to each volume.

FISH He wrote the things decades back He did them underwater He pulled them out like sonic fish, Dada hake, Bauhaus trout, Schwitters skate, Showed them to Ormond who shook his head. You’ve energy, Finch, but they’ll not put that on your grave. Flailing in the Welsh fog. This man punctuates using the chance methods of John Cage. Potato’s Potatoe’s Potatos. There are monkeys and there are typewriters and the two shouldn’t be allowed to mix. Your leaflet advertising your amateur magazine is a joke, is it not? Beer mats, they read better, boy. Bwthyn, Llanbradach, Cariad, Hiraeth, Pysgodyn. Finch has never used words like those. Vous êtes une nation poétique san concours4, dit Chopin, piling on the micro-particles sans son sea sip seeeeth yat rat ata ata ata ata aaaah tick tick tick ttttt ttttt tteeee. Chopin this is an incorrect claim. Wales is a nation of standard-stoppages engaging with pasteurised modernism forty years outside the frame. I sound now like Kingsley Amis, it’s come to this at last. Asked him once to send in a poem. Got a postcard back reading Mr Amis regrets but he cannot do as you ask. 4. You are a poetic nation without competition

Order the Collected Poems Complete Set on the Seren website for £30.00, or buy them individually for £19.99 each.

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

Peter Finch will be reading alongside Philip Gross at Seren First Thursday in Cardiff on Thursday 2nd March. Find out more here www.serenbooks.com/event/first-thursday-march-peter-finch-and-philip-gross.

Seren First Thursday March. Peter Finch and Philip Gross. In person and via Facebook Live. Thursday 2nd March 7:30pm GMT. Tickets £3 on the door on wach live on Facebook for free. Supported by Seren and Literature Wales.
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Friday Poem – ‘The way you knew’ by Alison Binney

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘The way you knew’ by Alison Binney from her Mslexia award-winning pamphlet Other Women’s Kitchens.

This cover shows a colourful painting of a kitchen with the faint shadows of people moving through it. The text reads: Other Women's Kitchens. Alison Binney.

Other Women’s Kitchens is Alison Binney’s debut pamphlet of poems and introduces us to a poet who writes with flair and feeling about coming out and coming of age as a gay woman in 21st century Britain. The collection explores the challenges of discovering and owning a lesbian identity in the 1980s and 1990s and the joy of finding both love and increased confidence in that identity as an adult. An adroit admixture of the heart-wrenching and the humorous, the book features shaped and ‘found’ pieces, traditional narrative and compact prose poems. Beautifully entertaining, pointedly political and often very funny, Other Women’s Kitchens is essential reading.

The way you knew the way you knew your own coat in the cloakroom the way you knew as you chewed how big the next bubble would be the way everyone knew the new boy was weird even before he began drinking ink the way you knew how to share crisps and when to and why it mattered the way your bike always knew the way home the way you knew when to laugh and how much and who with the way you knew not to sit at the front the way you knew when to put your hand up and why no one did any more the way you knew not to wear shoes like that the way you knew what behind the bike sheds meant before anyone said the way everyone knew who went the way you knew the name carved on the desk wasn’t yours but the izza lezza made you go red the way you knew not to wear your hair short the way you knew how to walk how to talk how to french kiss a boy and why you had to and more the way you knew for sure that if anyone knew about you you were dead

Other Women’s Kitchens is available on the Seren website: £5.00

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Friday Poem – ‘You and I are ghosts in the future’s forest’ by Rhiannon Hooson

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘You and I are ghosts in the future’s forest’ by Rhiannon Hooson from her latest collection Goliat.

This cover shows a ghost-like figure wrapped in a sheet standing in a field at dusk. The text reads: Goliat Rhiannon Hooson

Goliat is the second collection by Rhiannon Hooson, a follow-up to her Wales Book of the Year shortlisted debut, The Other City. An intelligent and beautiful book, Goliat offers absorbing stories of a precarious world on the brink of climate emergency. Employing startling imagery and a deep sense of history, these poems explore the irreplaceable beauty of a wild world, and the terrible damage that humans might do to each other and the earth.

You and I are ghosts in the future’s forest It is a gentle, haunted world. Circumstance has thrown it far into the future, but there are things in it you and I would understand: the way silence settles across a wet morning and the roe deer raise their heads. Perhaps, also, a sense of things that need not find their equilibrium. Our sighs are vapours: no myth exists to hold us like a heart in aspic. Again and again the sun sets, swings under the earth’s belly, lifts a worn edge of cloud come morning. Perhaps we grieve for language, realising our fluency was false. Words are a closed loop. A tight knot. The roe deer raise their heads, move between the trees, listening for wolves. Pale moths and the moon’s white light. Where once we walked, water rises. You and I are ghosts in the future’s forest.

Goliat is available on the Seren website: £9.99

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Friday Poem – ‘Candlemas’ by Hilary Llewellyn-Williams

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Candlemas’ by Hilary Llewellyn-Williams from her new and selected poems The Little Hours.

This cover shows an illustration of a pagan calendar depicting the seasons. The text reads: The Little Hours: New and Selected Poems. Hilary Llewellyn-Williams.

The Little Hours: New and Selected Poems is a landmark volume which collects key poems from the career of Hilary Llewellyn-Williams, one of the outstanding poets of her generation in Wales. In addition to the classic sequences ‘The Tree Calendar’ and ‘Book of Shadows’, the book also includes ‘The Little Hours’, a sequence of new work arranged according to the traditional monastic hours. Llewellyn-Williams is one of the earliest environmental poets; her response to nature always profound, passionate and keenly observed. The Little Hours will remind readers of her many strengths and beauties and shows new readers the breadth and talent of a writer whose eye for vivid imagery and startling detail has always astounded.

Candlemas for my father, d. 2/2/81 On Brigid’s Night there was rain and wind and miles of darkness between us; there was a generation of pain between us, but I stayed awake for love’s sake, and because of the candles. On Brigid’s Night spring was calling a long way off, below the horizon invisible, but heard, like a changed note; my ears attuned, I lit candles around the room. My children slept upstairs, bundles of summer. I was tight-strung and humming. Nineteen points of fire in a small room needed watching: I sat with them. My eyes half-closed I watched them burn all night, watched wax spill pools and curl and flow, the flames dip low, wrapped round in shadows, caught in the eye of light. The night you died I talked to you through webs of sleep, recalling you in my years of childhood solid and sure, filling the fiery spaces. I slept at last towards dawn, in a darkened room. Slowly I woke to sunlight striping the carpet, the cold little heaps of wax: and my children shouting, and spring one day nearer and bottles clanking outside, and a sense of peace and freedom; then the shrill cry of the telephone, which I stumbled up to answer.

The Little Hours: New and Selected Poems is available on the Seren website: £12.99

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Watch Hilary reading her poem ‘Considering the World’ on our Youtube channel:

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Friday Poem – ‘[ correspondence : another year ]’ by Sammy Weaver

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘[ correspondence : another year ]’ by Sammy Weaver from her pamphlet Angola, America which won the Mslexia Poetry Pamphlet Competition.

This cover shows a geometric image of think white lines against black stripes. A gaping white hole is cut from the middle. The text reads: Angola, America. Sammy Weaver.

Angola, America, winner of the Mslexia Poetry Pamphlet Competition 2021, takes its name from a prison in Louisiana in the southern United Sates. In these strikingly original, thoroughly contemporary, and deeply moving poems, we are immersed in the world the inmates must endure. From the first poem, when we witness a home-made tattoo and understand that this scarring and incision is a “map in the connective tissue of pain and loss”, we are drawn into this world in a way that is carefully observed and beautifully empathetic.

[ correspondence : another year ] the grey static of the dashboard ignites into a ringtone ignites into a w oman’s voice pale-polite as a white picket fence in the still of morning: hello, this is a free call from ______ an incarcerated individual at louisiana state penitentiary, this call is not pr ivate & may be monitored, you may start the conversation now & the line ignites into song as you sing to me happy birthday & because birth is death in reverse i imag ine blowing a candle out backwards, sucking the orange talons into the prison of my lungs, the w ax congealing up the wick, the match lying down in its box, the rush of our bodies diminishing inside the bodies of our mothers

Angola, America is available on the Seren website: £6.00

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Join us online from 7:30pm on Thursday 2nd February to hear Sammy Weaver reading from Angola, America alongside Kathryn Bevis at Seren Virtual First Thursday. Tickets are £2 (plus Eventbrite admin fee).

Book now
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Friday Poem – ‘The Winter Park’ by Paul Henry

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘The Winter Park’ by Paul Henry from his collection As If To Sing.

This cover shows an abstract painting by the artist Antony Goble. A woman with blue skin dominates the image in a vibrant orange dress. She is balancing an urn on her head and holds a red crow in her hand. The text reads: As If To Sing, Paul Henry.

The power of song, to sustain the human spirit, resonates through As if to Sing. A trapped caver crawls back through songs to the sea; Welsh soldiers pack their hearts into a song on the eve of battle, ‘for safe-keeping’; a child crossing a bridge sings ‘a song with no beginning or end’… Rich in the musical lyricism admired by readers and fellow poets, As if to Sing is an essential addition to this Paul Henry’s compelling body of work.

“A poet at the top of his game.” – Radio Wales Review Show

The Winter Park Ten years now, since I left and the space between us widens so we’re ghostly when we meet and yes, the heart hardens. Our old life rarely haunts but can still surprise. This stone birdbath’s font for instance, suddenly ablaze with a ritual. The boys sail twigs in its brightness as you wait on a bench for me, to come back from the bookshop across the street – your weekly gift, these minutes alone, that pass into years, a small park’s blinding light, and you not waiting here.

As If To Sing is available on the Seren website £9.99

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Watch Paul Henry reading from As If To Sing and performing songs from ‘The Glass Aisle’ on our AM Channel.

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Friday Poem – ‘Consider’ by Angela Graham

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Consider’ by Angela Graham from her collection Sanctuary: There Must Be Somewhere.

Sanctuary is – urgent. The pandemic has made people crave it; political crises are denying it to millions; the earth is no longer our haven. In Sanctuary: There Must Be Somewhere, Angela Graham and five other writers from Wales and Northern Ireland, addresses the many meanings of sanctuary from the inside. How we can save the earth, ourselves and others? How valid is the concept of a ‘holy’ place these days? Are any values still sacrosanct? We all deserve peace and security but can these be achieved without exploitation?

With Phil Cope, Viviana Fiorentino, Mahyar, Csilla Toldy and Glen Wilson

Consider Why do you still call me ‘refugee’? Do you want me to be forever fleeing? I have fled. Now I am here, trying to keep both feet on the ground and find my balance. Sometimes I feel I have two hearts. One, the first-created − taut as a drum-skin in my chest − trembles at far-off shifts of energy in the fault-lines of the home I left. The other has grown itself around the first as lymph spreads on the surface of a wound; as albumen, fragile, tremulous, helps a new life mesh itself together somehow. I was a refugee. Now I am here where I have to do so much explaining, where I have to live so much on your terms and I am growing this second heart as bravely as I can. Where I came from will always be where I come from and now I come from − and so let me be − here.

Sanctuary: There Must Be Somewhere is currently: £4.99 in our January Sale

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Watch Angela Graham reading her poem ‘Home’ on our Youtube channel: