Lairs

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Best Poetry of 2023 – round-up

Left to right: Rachel Carney, Kathryn Gray, Nerys Williams, Judy Brown

As the year draws to a close, several Seren poets and their recent collections have appeared on ‘Best of 2023’ lists. Here’s a round-up of Seren poetry collections currently grabbing the attention of reviewers:

This cover shows a photograph of a stone sculpture of a half-profile woman's face submerged beneath the waves. The text reads: Octopus Mind. Rachel Carney.

Octopus Mind | Guardian Best Poetry Books 2023

Rachel Carney’s debut poetry collection Octopus Mind has been featured in The Guardian as one of their Best Poetry Books of 2023.

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Hollywood or Home | Sunday Times Best Non-Fiction Poetry Books

Seren poet Kathryn Gray‘s latest collection Hollywood or Home has been listed in the Sunday Times as one of the 16 Best Non-Fiction Poetry books of 2023.

It was also selected by the London Review Bookshop as one of their Christmas 2023: Poetry titles.

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This cover shows an illustration of a woman wearing a yellow dress. She is walking down a pier surrounded by water. In the background there is lighting and a bare forest. The dress is drawn as if wind is blowing it to the left. On the right of the character is a figure in a shirt and dark trousers floating face down in the water. Hollywood or Home. Kathryn Gray. ‘‘Underpinning the comedy and satire... is a real pain at life’s jolts time’s realness” - Nick Laird.
This cover shows a colourful print of a woman dressed in a black hoodie with large bunny ears on the hood. She has dripping dark blue rings around her eyes and stands out against an acid yellow background. The text reads: Republic. Nerys Williams.

Republic | Sunday Irish Independent

Nerys Williams was featured in the Sunday Irish Independent Best Poetry Books of 2023 for her collection Republic, and was also chosen by two contributors to Wales Arts Review as 2023 recommendations.

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Lairs | London Review Bookshop

Lairs by Judy Brown was selected by London Review Bookshop bookseller John Clegg as one of his Poetry Books of the Year.

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This cover shows a 1950s style collage of a woman sitting in a field looking at a mysterious black orb. Red mountains stretch into the distance behind it. The text reads: Lairs. Judy Brown.
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Friday Poem – ‘The Larder’ by Judy Brown

Wheels of cheese sitting on a larder shelf.

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘The Larder’ by Judy Brown from her collection Lairs. You can listen to her talking in depth about the collection on Series 2 of The Seren Poetry Podcast. Listen and subscribe on your favourite podcast app to listen to the series so far.

The Larder In the shop’s moist basement the red wines lay prone in their cool dormitory. Beyond the jars of lobster bisque and canned truffle sauce, both Lancashires sat squat on their wood: Tasty and Mild like a pair of underground kings. No satisfaction in breaching the waxed cloth, breaking the stiff robes they were buried in. Only the owner had the right to draw the cutting wire twice through the horizontal before quartering. It was ritual, to bear each portion upstairs to the shop. Later we’d peel the cloth off the soft edge and unpuzzle the grain of the clotted blank face. Down there, too, was where they kept the unripe moons which were soft as what’s inside a baby’s unfused skull. In the dark they would salt to rock and start to spin. When at last the old satellite has worn to a nub, an uncut cheese will rise, white and purposeful with the sun’s reflected buttermilk light, to do its work. Think of the store of teeth a shark is born with; which, one by one, drift to the front of the mouth to take their turn to be the ones to shine, to bite.

Judy also appeared on the Mouthful of Air podcast to talk specifically about ‘The Larder’ with Mark McGuinness.

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Friday Poem – ‘Greenery’ by Judy Brown

Two tall apartment blocks flank the photograph. In the middle is a forest.

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Greenery’ from Judy Brown’s latest collection Lairs.

Greenery When I moved to the city that no longer exists it was September. The air was brown fur growing thick round the candy cane buildings that poked through cloud and were lost. I could breathe, I could talk, but my bones grew longer and rang when sheet lightning flashed its show over the mainland. I ate without using knives or forks - not to be feral, but to slow myself down.

Don’t miss out on seeing Judy Brown and Graham Davies at our upcoming virtual First Thursday event. Tickets are £2 plus an Eventbrite fee. Book here:  https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/705815231357.

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Guest post: Maths and Metaphor – Judy Brown

Judy Brown’s new collection Lairs was partly born out of a residency Exeter University’s Institute of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence. In this guest post she discusses the experience and how maths and poetry have more in common than you might think.

This cover shows a sci-fi inspired collage of a girl sitting in a field at dusk looking towards a black, star filled orb in the distance. Red mountains rise up behind it beneath a purple sky. The text reads: Lairs, Judy Brown.

Lairs brings together something primal and secret – the lair as haven for a wild or feral animal – with the poem framed as a mathematical equation. In these terms, the ‘lair’ is a kind of nest, a beautiful accumulation of dense detail. The poems are introspective, by turns mocking, fearful and analytical. Judy Brown’s use of language is innovative, while maintaining moments of vulnerability and moving self-awareness. In these exquisite poems, the lair is both the community at large and a dark and intricate interior space where something wild still survives.

Maths and Metaphor

Before this summer, if someone had told me maths could be as much fun as writing poems, it wouldn’t have been a long chat. Professor Beth Wingate, mathematician and poet, did say as much to me in July but by then it was too late: it had become obvious. Residencies teach you things – often not what you expected.

This was a summer of empty campus lawns, rain, whiteboards crammed with notation, hours spent looking up half-heard maths phrases on Wikipedia, metaphors I splashed everywhere and tried to hold onto to avoid panic, attempts not to look stupid, looking stupid despite everyone saying, kindly, ‘There are no stupid questions.’ And lots of questions, lists of them collected amongst my drawings and notes in a big A3 sketchbook – a necessary navigation aid in this slightly frightening, very exhilarating experience. This sort of messy process is how I write anyway, I just hadn’t ever been quite so at sea. 

Stacks of sketch books from Judy's residency. The pages are filled with notes, pictures and bright sketches.
Judy Brown’s residency sketchbooks

To backtrack a little: Arts and Culture University of Exeter has a programme that matches creative practitioners with research academics. The area under consideration can be quite sharply defined, the methodology and the outcome full of openness. I’d been attracted by the measured strangeness in the language used by Professor Peter Challenor, a statistician whose work involves producing approximations of what complex mathematical models (of the human heart, the ocean, the climate) would be likely to predict across a wide range of situations, together with exact assessments of how much you can rely on those predictions. The models themselves are often too expensive and slow to be run as many times as you’d like – just like the planet and the human body – so the techniques used by Peter’s team in the Institute of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence are of critical value, but also a little magical, seeming to create bricks out of straw. 

Peter had said in his brief ‘There is always a discrepancy,’ but I had no idea how many sorts of discrepancy existed. The team’s specialisation is called uncertainty quantification – and when didn’t a poet love a paradox?

I was lucky. Peter turned out to be interested in everything, a member of the Poetry Book Society, and an eloquent explainer who could shift in and out of maths notation and take up my hesitant and extravagant metaphors to talk to me in a language I knew. 

Judy Brown takes notes in her sketch book whilst Peter Challenor maps out an equation on a large whiteboard.
Judy Brown and Professor Peter Challenor. Photo credit: Steven Haywood

I had five weeks of great conversations – about writing on proper blackboards, machine learning, the problems of multidimensionality, different types of probability, heart surgery, whether a mathematical model is a metaphor, the importance of pattern and of deviations from it.  We talked about Jack Underwood’s essay ‘On Poetry and Uncertain Subjects’ (The Poetry Society) – how our kind of uncertainty made poems hospitable, how unacknowledged uncertainty for Peter made things dangerous.

I only have a maths GSCE but I wasn’t too worried. I quite like feeling a subject is full of things I don’t know and knew that the not-knowing would itself generate ideas that would lead to poems. In the end I felt I’d been allowed to walk further into another world than I anticipated, with tiny, occasional flavours of what it might be like to know how to move in those regions as of right. As with poetry, it turns out that even small amounts of maths are worth having.

I knew that metaphor is what I think with, and where many of my poems originate – it’s central, not decorative. The fact that I couldn’t think anything without it was demonstrated very clearly over these weeks when I kept asking ‘What is it like in there?’, ‘What kind of creature is it?’ That was our difference, maybe – the poet’s obsession with specificity where a small precise detail stands in for a big abstract thing. Or maybe it’s not so different, I still don’t know.

The experience also underlined the importance of play for writing, and for problem-solving. At school I always wanted a structure to put what I learned in – that’s often what a teacher gives you – a particular shaped bucket, and you fill it. Here I had no time to get even a small bucket; there were only the structures I already had – metaphor, language, question, answer, and sometimes just the process of sitting and drawing.

Close up picture of notes from one of Judy's sketchbooks. The word language stands out in bold black letters.
Close up of one of Judy’s sketchbooks

This was semi-feral learning in the sense that when people told me about their work I was able to choose the questions and Peter’s team worked to give me answers that might make sense in the language of the asking. I also tried to learn as much of their talk as I could – even a few equations. It felt amazing for someone middle-aged to be learning in this essentially childlike way, like a car wash for the brain. It felt just like writing.

I’ve written quite a few poems from this – now on the Arts and Culture website and in issue 2 of Finished Creatures magazine, and migrating into the manuscript of my next collection Lairs. I have lots more drafts and ideas. While the maths is not always apparent, I couldn’t have written them without that huge new space in my head. I’m slowly reading a book about calculus and watching the odd MIT lecture or Isaac Newton Institute seminar on probability or uncertainty quantification. It still feels flukey, strange, to be treasured.

Judy Brown

Read Judy’s maths-inspired poem ‘Some Security Questions’ on the Exter Arts and Culture website.

‘Uncertain Rigours’, a short film by Steve Haywood about the residency, can be viewed on the Exter University Arts and Culture website.

This article was first published by The Poetry Society in their Winter 2019 edition of Poetry News.

Lairs is available on the Seren website: £9.99

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

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Friday Poem – ‘Fish. Oh. Fish’ by Judy Brown

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Fish. Oh. Fish’ by Judy Brown from her forthcoming collection Lairs.

This cover shows a collage of a woman sitting in a field at twilight starting at a giant black orb, in the distance, filled with stars. Red mountains stretch out behind it. The text reads Lairs Judy Brown.

Lairs brings together something primal and secret – the lair as haven for a wild or feral animal – with the poem framed as a mathematical equation. In these terms, the ‘lair’ is a kind of nest, a beautiful accumulation of dense detail. The poems are introspective, by turns mocking, fearful and analytical. Judy Brown’s use of language is innovative, while maintaining moments of vulnerability and moving self-awareness. In these exquisite poems, the lair is both the community at large and a dark and intricate interior space where something wild still survives.

Fish. Oh. Fish ‘Even snakes lie together’ – D.H. Lawrence (‘Fish’) Your egg eye is open and you look worried. You’re the scaly junior lawyer at midnight f alling short on her target of a year’s billable hours. Corporate fish, you’re bright as pain, sliced up. You share the water with a spill of inky stripes. Y our kind blaze colours fine as banknotes. Oh, fish, you have whisked up a clever curve defining the future as it draws itself into a fist. Then the e vening comes on, pistachio and blue. You breathe and flex between bars of dark. A clerk could still walk into the hot, open night lea ving a jacket on the back of her office chair. A lit anglepoise floats above the papery desk. There’s a deep anglerfish clocking the hours. No one m ust turn off your light while you are gone or there’ll be nothing to swim back to but a scrunchie of kelp, uncounted on dry sand. Little fish, everything that matters happens here.

Lairs is available to pre-order on the Seren website: £9.99

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