kathryn simmonds

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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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Buy your copy now.

 

 

 

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Friday Poem – Elegy for the Living

Friday Poem Elegy for the Living

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Elegy for the Living’ from Kathryn Simmonds’ insightful collection The Visitations.

In this book, Simmonds infuses with beauty the everyday phenomena that we often neglect: from fleeting moments with strangers on the street, to even that peculiar yet widely recognisable experience of forgetting what exactly we went upstairs to retrieve. Through an innovative and triumphant blend of humour and realism – complemented by its simple yet wonderfully rich language – the collection explores both the truths and the uncertainties of life in terms of faith, the self, and the familial. This creative ambiguity reaches a crescendo in the title poem ‘The Visitations’ in which the divine is effortlessly combined with the domestic. Yet even her more elegiac poems are rarely sombre, but abound with the imagery of homeliness, and an underlying sense of vigour and life.

Elegy for the Living

We wash up side by side
to find each other

 

in the speakable world,
and, lulled into sense,

 

inhabit our landscape;
the curve

 

of that chair draped
with your shirt;

 

my glass of  water
seeded overnight with air.

 

After this bed
there’ll be another,

 

so we’ll roll
and keep rolling

 

until one of  us
will roll alone and try to roll

 

the other back — a trick
no one’s yet pulled off —

 

and it’ll be
as if   I dreamed you, dear,

 

as if   I dreamed this bed,
our touching limbs,

 

this room, the tree outside alive
with new wet light.

 

Not now. Not yet.


Buy The Visitations on our website. 

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Friday Poem – What I Did in My Summer Holidays

This week’s poem is from Kathryn Simmonds’ second poetry collection, The Visitations, originally published in 2013.

The Visitations is the follow-up to Kathryn Simmonds’ 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.

What I Did in My Summer Holidays

Never ask for an ice-cream confidently or menacingly or using
any other adverb. And if you’re in pain, show me where it hurts
and how. Love is an abstract noun. Dialogue gives the effect
of real speech but with all the boring rubbish taken out.
Every thought you’ve ever had has been thought better and by
someone else. Does anyone have any questions? We talked
last week about the stanza, you might think of stanzas as little
rooms: what are you going to do in yours? Are you going to just
lie there watching light reinvent itself? The second line doesn’t
scan. Yes, flair is better. For homework, sit in a soft chair and
describe the exact experience, no, don’t do that, write down a
conversation you hear on a bus; go out in the rain and open
your mouth; make a list of everything in your bathroom cabinet.
Try not to break your line on an article. The first person
you have to please is yourself, but if nobody else is pleased
you have a problem. Fill out the form and give it back to me:
te-dum te-dum te-dum te-dum te-dum. Notice that beautiful line
where the widow’s hands are likened to the wings of a dead bird.
Less is more, but sometimes less is less. What do librarians get paid?
I’ve never seen that particular noun used as a verb. But it’s too late
now to get to grips with the Dewey Decimal System.
Did anyone else have a problem with the turnip metaphor?

Order The Visitations from our website.

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Prepare Yourself for Indie Book Day!

Indie-Book-Day-embed

This Saturday is Indie Book Day – hooray!

What is Indie Book Day?

Indie Book Day is an entire day dedicated to supporting and celebrating our independent publishers and bookstores.

Great! How can I get involved?

Simple! To take part in Indie Book Day all you have to do is visit your local independent bookstore on March 21st and buy yourself a book that has been published by an independent publisher – the genre doesn’t matter! Then post a picture of your new book, its cover, or, even better, you with the book and post it on any social media site of your choice using the hashtag #indiebookday.

So, will you take up the challenge?

Look out for some Seren titles in your local independent bookstore this Saturday. Until then, here are some recommendations to whet your appetite!

my_family_and_other_superheroes_covercosta_quicksand coverMy 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.

Easter 1955. Sugar Hall by Tiffany Murray. £8.99As Lilia Sugar scrapes the ice from the inside of the windows and the rust from the locks in Sugar Hall, she knows there are pasts she cannot erase. On the very edge of the English/Welsh border, the red gardens of Sugar Hall hold a secret, and as Britain prepares for its last hanging, Lilia and her children must confront a history that has been buried but not forgotten.

Love & Fallout

When Tessa’s best friend organises a surprise TV makeover, Tessa is horrified. It’s the last thing she needs – her business is on the brink of collapse, her marriage is under strain and her daughter is more interested in beauty pageants than student politics. What’s more, the ‘Greenham Common angle’ the TV producers have devised reopens some personal history Tessa has tried to hide away. Then Angela gets in touch, Tessa’s least favourite member of the Greenham gang, and she’s drawn back into her muddy past.

Pascale Petit, FauverieThe Fauverie of this book is the big-cat house in the Jardin des Plantes zoo. But the word also evokes the Fauves, ‘primitive’ painters who used raw colour straight from the tube. Like The Zoo Father, Petit’s acclaimed second collection, this volume has childhood trauma and a dying father at its heart, while Paris takes centre stage – a city savage as the Amazon, haunted by Aramis the black jaguar and a menagerie of wild animals. Transforming childhood horrors to ultimately mourn a lost parent, Fauverie redeems the darker forces of human nature while celebrating the ferocity and grace of endangered species. Five poems fromFauverie won the 2013 Manchester Poetry Prize and the manuscript in progress was awarded an Arts Council England Grant for the Arts.

seren_-_the_advantages_of_an_older_manA light-hearted novella exploring the strange case of a Swansea woman who is apparently possessed by the spirit of Dylan Thomas. Naturally all is not as it seems. The woman, who works in the Dylan Thomas Centre, meets a rather different Dylan from the one she knows by repute, one who doesn’t really fit in with the ghosts of other poets in heaven and is desperate to train himself to join the fitter shades of the long distance runners instead. Her own life, which has been lonely and sad, is completely transformed by the encounter.

Jo Mazelis, SignificanceLucy Swann is trying on a new life. She’s cut and dyed her hair and bought new clothes, but she’s only got as far as a small town in northern France when her flight is violently cut short. When Inspector Vivier and his handsome assistant Sabine Pelat begin their investigation the chance encounters of her last days take on a new significance.

Lucy’s death, like a stone thrown into a pool, sends out far-reaching ripples, altering the lives of people who never knew her as well as those of her loved ones back home.