Friday Poem

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Friday Poem – ‘This Year’ by Ben Wilkinson

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘This Year’ by Ben Wilkinson from his collection Same Difference.

This cover shows an abstract painting made up of dark blues and greys with a face-like smudge in the centre. A splash of red, green and yellow flecks go up the left hand side. The text reads: Same Difference. Ben Wilkinson.

Carefully crafted, and charged with contemporary language, the poems in Same Difference play with poetic voice and the dramatic monologue, keeping us on our toes and asking just who is doing the talking. Throughout, Ben Wilkinson ‘steps into the shoes’ of French symbolist poet Paul Verlaine (1844-96), reframing his voice for modern readers. Brimming with everyone from cage fighters and boy racers to cancer patients and whales in captivity, Same Difference is gritty, darkly ironic and often moving – a collection for our times.

This Year If we could gift each other moments I’d wrap up that bauble sun we felt warm our backs to the tip of Mam Tor. I’d box the two hours spent tracing the tinselled reservoir, no two miles the same as we ran and ran, trails deserted, no sound but our own good hearts and honest footfall. I’d ribbon that first jog up Ringinglow, this city held as if the snow globe we’d shake. And I’d nestle under the tree those loops of a floodlit track, a reminder that what’s done is done, and of dark-bright moments still to come.

Same Difference is available on the Seren website: £9.99

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Watch Ben Wilkinson reading ‘This Year’ on our Youtube channel:

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Friday Poem – ‘Flamingo’ by Kathryn Bevis

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Flamingo’ by Kathryn Bevis from her pamphlet of the same name. If you missed the online launch for Flamingo, you can watch it back now on our Youtube channel.

This cover shows a surreal still life painting of four flamingos poking their heads out of a blue and white patterned vase. The text reads: Flamingo, Kathryn Bevis.

Kathryn Bevis’s critically-acclaimed debut pamphlet Flamingo introduces us to a troupe of wild, unique, and captivating poems. Life and our own embodiment are brought sharply into focus as we encounter a variety of subjects including work, survival, love, and mortality. Formally inventive, these hopeful and sometimes surreal poems are not afraid to confront complex or difficult emotions. Cancer is posed as a ring-tailed lemur, capering through the sufferer’s body, and the title poem imagines death as a flamboyant transformation where the speaker shapeshifts into the afterlife. Each poem is a discovery and a joy.

Flamingo My love, when I die, I’ll turn flamingo: fall asleep, face tucked in on the pillow of myself. Even as you cry, I’ll be stepping from the bed, feeling plush, pink tulle tutuing from my hips. My legs will telescope, grow thin and rosy. I’ll sense my feet web, feel a new itch to stamp and stir, to suck up larvae from the bottom of the lagoon. In this afterworld, some days I’ll fix one foot in mud, find infinite repose: the poise of a yogi in prayer. Others, I’ll gorge myself, filter feed on brine shrimp from the salty shadows. The other birds and I will grunt and growl over the choicest cuts like church women bickering over rosettes for jam at a country show. My love, do you know that the dead all flock together? We meet at the saline lake, dance our shuffle-legged shimmy, flick our heads like tango partners, flag and flap our scarlet scalloped wings, heads bopping, nodding to the beat. Do you see? After the illness, after the grief, the pain — as you will do, sweetheart — the dead must learn to love again.

Flamingo is available on the Seren website for £6.00

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Watch the recording of the online launch for Flamingo back on our Youtube channel now. Kathryn is joined by guest readers Vicky Morris and Jonathan Edwards.

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Friday Poem – ‘Hide and Seek’ by Hannah Hodgson

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Hide and Seek’ by Hannah Hodgson from her debut collection 163 Days which was recently longlisted for the Barbellion Prize.

This cover shows a photo of artist Sue Austin floating underwater in her wheelchair over a bed of yellow coral. The text reads: 163 Days. Hannah Hodgson.

In her debut collection 163 Days Hannah Hodgson uses a panoply of medical, legal, and personal vocabularies to explore what illness, death and dying does to a person as both patient and witness. In her long poem ‘163 Days’, her longest period of hospitalisation to date, she probes various truths which clash like a tray of dropped instruments in a silent operating theatre. The mundanity of hospital life is marbled by a changing landscape of mood, hope and loss. A gap yawns between the person she is, and the person in her medical notes. In ‘Aftercare’, Hannah navigates the worlds of both nightclubs and hospice care as she embarks on a new version of her life as a disabled adult. An important collection, in which Hodgson’s true voice takes poetry into difficult places.

Hide and Seek My mother learns I’m in trouble when a nurse says Resus like it rhymes with Dr Seuss. Re-seuss. He turns the monitor away from me. My body writing a tell-all-book, the hospital needs to protect me from. I can feel my heart blinking on that screen, flickering as my cursor. The machine keeps alerting the staff towards my apparent death. I’m too shallow to be captured. The doctor spends fifteen minutes trying to get a cannular into one of the branches inside my arm. How many times does a blood pressure cuff need to confirm my consciousness? How many times do I need to tell my mother which of my documents to burn?

163 Days is available on the Seren website: £9.99

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Friday Poem – ‘White Poem’ by SL Grange

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘White Poem’ by SL Grange from their pamphlet bodies and other haunted houses which won the inaugural Poetry Wales Pamphlet Competition. The Poetry Wales Wales Poetry Award is currently open for entries for single poems until the 12th January 2023.

This cover shows a black and white photo of the top of someones arm. they are pulling pack their t-shirt sleeve to reveal a ribbon tattoo which reads bodies and other haunted houses.

Speaking from and for LGBTQIA+ communities, SL Grange gives a voice to lost transcestors, celebrates acts of resistance, sings a gender-fluid love song, and hosts a tender-angry conversation with the ghosts of the personal and political histories that inhabit us. In true haunted house tradition, the non-human and the supernatural are also given rooms of their own; personal demons are summoned, we are entangled with our wilder sides. Witchcraft, seance and prophecy are invoked and brought up against sharp slices of reality. Described by judges as ‘strong and self-assured’, ‘sheer gorgeous’, and ‘a dark and brooding collection that combines the visceral nature of the body with the ephemeral and supernatural’, bodies, and other haunted houses is a beautifully crafted exploration of identity which queers time as well as self.

White poem This is a poem that throws everything else to the dogs This is a poem that buys tinned tuna Coffee Green beans out of season And finds the excess to be lyrical Full of portent This poem only cares about Walking varnished nails Across skin like cream And looks out of the window Tear ducts moistening To see a Pepper’s ghost of itself Staring back, deeply moved This poem has found The One And dances with them Under filament lightbulbs One hand upon their lover’s shoulder The other on their lover’s neck Starting to squeeze

bodies and other haunted houses is available from on the Seren website: £5.00

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Don’t forget to browse the Seren Christmas Gift Guide 2022 for last-minute gift inspiration.

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Friday Poem – ‘How to renovate a Morris Minor’ by Jonathan Edwards

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘How to renovate a Morris Minor’ by Jonathan Edwards from his Costa Prize-winning collection My Family and Other Superheroes. Jonathan recently won the Troubadour International Poetry Prize 2022 with his poem ‘My Grandfather’s Car’.

This cover shows a painting of a schoolboy falling backwards. The view point is looking up at him front on, as if from the ground. The text reads My Family and Other Superheroes. Jonathan Edwards. Winner of the 2014 Costa Poetry Award.

My Family and Other Superheroes features a motley crew of characters. 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.

How to Renovate a Morris Minor That’s him, in the camouflage green overalls, hiding under the car all day from my mother. What is he but a pair of feet, my father, muttering prayers to God and the sump gasket, wearing oil drips, enough zips for all his secrets? On his back, he pokes a spanner up at a nut, as if unscrewing heaven; grease-fingers make a crime scene of the kitchen. He gives the stars in his bucket to the bonnet and when he sees his face in it then it is smiling. His foot on the accelerator makes the world go, his right arm at the auction can’t say No and when the day is over, that’s him, that’s him – he’s snoring on the sofa, Practical Classics open on his lap – his eyes dart under their lids as he sleeps, like Jaguars he’s racing in his dreams.

My Family and Other Superheroes is available on the Seren website: £9.99

Jonathan’s second collection Gen is also available on the Seren website: £9.99

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

Don’t forget to browse the Seren Christmas Gift Guide 2022 for last-minute gift inspiration.

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Friday Poem – ‘We are coming’ by Kim Moore

Earlier this week, Kim Moore was announced the winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2022. This week’s Friday Poem is ‘We are coming’ from her wining collection All The Men I Never Married. You can hear Kim chatting in-depth about the book on the The Seren Poetry Podcast which is available now on all podcast platforms.

This cover shows a collage of a male figure made up of tiny images of nature. The figure is surrounded by butterflies which stand out against the black background. The text reads All The Men I Never Married, Kim Moore. Winner of the Forward Prize.

Pointedly feminist, challenging and keenly aware of the contradictions and complexities of desire, All The Men I Never Married is Kim Moore’s award-winning and critically acclaimed second collection. The 48 numbered poems take us through a gallery of exes and significant others where we encounter rage, pain, guilt, and love. She turns the spotlight on interactions between men and women, revealing easy misogyny, everyday sexism and uncomfortable truths about the challenges women face on a daily basis.

We are coming under cover of darkness, with our strawberry marks, our familiars, our third nipples, our ill-mannered bodies, our childhoods spent hobbled like horses where we were told to keep our legs closed, where we sat in the light of a window and posed and waited for the makers of the world to tell us again how a woman is made. We are arriving from the narrow places, from the spaces we were given, with our curses and our spells and our solitude, with our potions we swallow to shrink us small as insects or stretch us into giants, for yes, there are giants amongst us, we must warn you. There will be riots, we’re carrying all that we know about silence as we return from the forests and towers, unmaking ourselves, stepping from the pages of books, from the eye of the camera, from the cages we built for each other, the frames of paintings, from every place we were lost and afraid in. We stand at the base of our own spines and watch tree turn to bone and climb each vertebra to crawl back into our minds, we’ve been out of our minds all this time, our bodies saying no, we were not born for this, dragging the snare and the wire behind us.

The Seren Poetry Podcast is a new series of in-depth interviews with Seren poets. Listen to our in-depth interview with Kim about All The Men I Never Married in episode 9 which is available now.

Simply search ‘The Seren Poetry Podcast’ in your favourite podcast app and follow or subscribe to have all future editions delivered straight to your podcast feed. Available on all platforms including Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts. Don’t forget to leave us a review if you like what you hear.

All The Men I Never Married is available on the Seren website for £9.99

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Friday Poem – ‘1986’ by Eric Ngalle Charles

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘1986’ by Eric Ngalle Charles from his debut collection Homelands. You can hear Eric chatting about the book on the The Seren Poetry Podcast which is available now on all podcast platforms.

This cover shows a painting of a young African boy standing in front of a wooden wall. He is wearing a large black hat, blue robe around his waist and is holding a bunch of reeds.

In Homelands, his debut collection, Eric Ngalle Charles draws on his early life raised by the matriarchs of Cameroon, being sent to Moscow by human traffickers, and finding a new home in Wales. Rich in tone, subject and emotion, Charles’ poetry moves between the present and the past, between Africa and Europe, and between despair and hope. It discovers that historical injustices now play out in new forms, and that family tensions are as strong as the love within a family. Despite the difficulties Charles has faced, Homelands contains poems of fondness, warmth and humour and, as he returns to Cameroon to confront old ghosts, forgiveness. 

1986 Red Moon over lake Nyos, doomsday whispers armed with drums, survivors like ghosts of the apocalypse, singing choruses of the end times. Why have the gods forsaken us? Red Moon over the poisonous lake, salutations of umbra and penumbra. Survivors like Old Testament eremite from yonder, foretelling tales, turning ghosts, consumed by gaseous light. Red Moon, dogs in heat, barking. One lone, dazed survivor. See her: standing/stuttering/falling/holding onto nearby railings. Did she invite disaster by boiling beans overnight? Red Moon over lake Nyos. Noises, clamoring. They went to bed and never woke up. The few, resurrected, singing choruses of the end times. Why have the gods forsaken us?

*Lake Nyos disaster, Bamenda, Cameroon, 1986: a limnic eruption on the 24th of August 1986 killed 1,746 people. 

The Seren Poetry Podcast is a new series of in-depth interviews with Seren poets. Episode 8 with Eric Ngalle Charles is available to listen to now.

Simply search ‘The Seren Poetry Podcast’ in your favourite podcast app and follow or subscribe to have all future editions delivered straight to your podcast feed. Available on all platforms including Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts. Don’t forget to leave us a review if you like what you hear.

Homelands is available on the Seren website for £9.99

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

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Friday Poem – ‘What the Burglar Took’ by Rosalind Hudis

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘What the Burglar Took’ by Rosalind Hudis from her collection Restorations. You can hear Rosalind chatting about the book on the The Seren Poetry Podcast which is available now on all podcast platforms.

This cover shows an abstract print of some mountains tinged with hints of blue, red and purple. The text reads: Restorations, Rosalind Hudis.

Restorations is a journey into what it means to preserve – a monument, a moment, a life-story, a poppy. It’s about the hunger to possess and the need to let go. Welding themes from art and history with the contemporary, there are poems about pigments and dictators, glue and glass houses, collections, crinolines, and barometers, and the vagaries of memory itself. Entwined, is a more personal story that tracks the loss of a parent to dementia. Also running through, is a theme of women eroding the straitjacket of gendered roles. Linking all is a play with colour, particularly blue, in all its stages from vital to decayed.

What the Burglar Took That night it was nothing. Cinematic, he’d slid under the kitchen window, swerved an old veined saucer, rocked the vintage cactus, slippered his way across tiles on a moulting rug that still smelt of your last dog and made you wheeze. After that threshold no sign, yet you felt him in every omission the carriage clock that paced him but never chimed, silverfish partying by moonlight who’d fled into covens of dust, slivers of streetlamp that laid a grid from back to front room where shadows failed to creak. His exit, another window, half open in the study. The room was rigid with night, The Great Bear encrypted in the cushions. You touched frost on the inside, took to spying on your house, heard whispers in the heating kettle Morse in the water-pipes.

The Seren Poetry Podcast is a new series of in-depth interviews with Seren poets. Episode 7 with Rosalind Hudis is available to listen to now.

Simply search ‘The Seren Poetry Podcast’ in your favourite podcast app and follow or subscribe to have all future editions delivered straight to your podcast feed. Available on all platforms including Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts. Don’t forget to leave us a review if you like what you hear.

Restorations is available on the Seren website for £9.99

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

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Friday Poem – ‘A Late Aubade’ by Ben Wilkinson

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘A Late Aubade’ by Ben Wilkinson from his collection Same Difference. You can hear Ben chatting about the book on the The Seren Poetry Podcast which is available now on all podcast platforms.

This cover shows an abstract painting made up of dark blues and greys. There is a face-like smudge in the centre and splashes of red, yellow and green on the left hand side. The text reads: Same Difference, Ben Wilkinson.

Same Difference is the formally acute second collection by Ben Wilkinson. Carefully crafted, and charged with contemporary language, the poems play with poetic voice and the dramatic monologue, keeping us on our toes and asking just who is doing the talking. Throughout, he ‘steps into the shoes’ of French symbolist poet Paul Verlaine (1844-96), reframing his voice for modern readers. Brimming with everyone from cage fighters and boy racers to cancer patients and whales in captivity, Same Difference is gritty, darkly ironic and often moving – a collection for our times.

A Late Aubade after Verlaine How long since we last lolled here all morning, the house quiet and still, snow falling beyond our bedroom’s window and warmth? Now we’ve time to uncover each other after what seems like months apart – losing ourselves in that same tender art to open one thought onto another – even this grim half-light has a charm of sorts. Times like these grant us leave from the world – those claims it makes of everyone – and the constant doing that comes to nothing; the snow still falls and the streets are frozen. Instead, let this moment be perfectly held: return us to something we hadn’t thought missing.

The Seren Poetry Podcast is a new series of in-depth interviews with Seren poets. Episode 6 with Ben Wilkinson is available to listen to now.

Simply search ‘The Seren Poetry Podcast’ in your favourite podcast app and follow or subscribe to have all future editions delivered straight to your podcast feed. Available on all platforms including Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts. Don’t forget to leave us a review if you like what you hear.

Same Difference is available on the Seren website for £9.99

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

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Friday Poem – ‘Peeling the Skin’ by Carolyn Jess-Cooke

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Peeling the Skin’ by Carolyn Jess-Cooke from her collection We Have to Leave the Earth. You can hear Carolyn chatting about the book on the The Seren Poetry Podcast which is available now on all podcast platforms.

This cover shows a photograph of a tangled ball of blue fishing line in relief against a pale pink and blue background. The text reads: We Have to Leave the Earth. Carolyn Jess-Cooke

Carolyn Jess-Cooke’s third collection We Have to Leave the Earth deftly interweaves the personal and the political. Climate change is confronted in a sequence about the Arctic; poems that are vividly descriptive of an extreme landscape, sensitive to the effects of global warming. A second sequence, The House of Rest, is a history in 9 poems of Josephine Butler, (1828-1906) a pioneering feminist activist. There are also tender poems about family, mental health, motherhood and the earth.

Peeling the Skin They’d try to find the hem first, the beginning of that lace-fine calyx that sometimes ran deliciously from shoulder to waist in a continuum of cells shucked by too long in the burning glare. No one thought to rub in sun cream, it seems, for each summer my lunar Irish epidermis crisped from salmon to magenta before flaking off great silvery coats and blankets, milky curtains, pearl bodices. The confetti of my childhood lies in corners of Connemara, the sands of Donegal, bearing traces of fingers that picked me to riddance. I’d hear the sellotape-tear of strips they’d peel from my back and I felt like something being primed for the spit, or dressed for the rite. Sometimes they’d shear what wasn’t ready for shearing, and blood would globe at the new rind that knitted under the husk. I think it was this small breach, this being pared in pain for others’ pleasure, that taught me where DNA ended and I begin, and begin, and begin.

The Seren Poetry Podcast is a new series of in-depth interviews with Seren poets. Episode 5 with Carolyn Jess-Cooke is available to listen to now.

Simply search ‘The Seren Poetry Podcast’ in your favourite podcast app and follow or subscribe to have all future editions delivered straight to your podcast feed. Available on all platforms including Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts. Don’t forget to leave us a review if you like what you hear.

We Have to Leave the Earth is available on the Seren website for £9.99

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