This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Mametz Woods’ by Owen Sheers from his collection Skirrid Hill.
Owen Sheers
Legend of the Month: Owen Sheers
Each month we are celebrating one fantastic Seren author in honour of Wales’ Year of Legends. This month the spotlight has fallen on Owen Sheers, whose stunning poetry and fiction are regular Seren bestsellers.
Owen Sheers is an author, poet and playwright from Wales. His first poetry collection, The Blue Book (Seren, 2000), was shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize Best First Collection and ACW Book of the Year 2001. Skirrid Hill (Seren, 2006), his second collection, won a Somerset Maugham Prize and was longlisted for Welsh Book of the Year. Sheers’ debut prose work The Dust Diaries (Faber & Faber), won the Welsh Book of the Year 2005. His first novel, Resistance (Faber & Faber), has been translated into eleven languages.
In 2009 Owen contributed to Seren’s ‘New Stories from the Mabinogion’ series with White Ravens, a contemporary response to the myth of Branwen, Daughter of Llyr. He published The Gospel of Us in 2012 – a novel based on his dramatisation of The Passion for the National Theatre of Wales, set in the streets and clubs of Port Talbot and starring Michael Sheen. Sheers’ latest novel, I Saw A Man (Faber & Faber), was published in June 2015.
We hope you enjoy Owen’s poem ‘Intermission’, from Skirrid Hill, which featured as our Poem of the Month in the Seren Newsletter.
Find Owen Sheers’ books on the Seren website.
Discover a great selection of books by our other legendary writers on the Year of Legends page.
Friday Poem – ‘Skirrid Fawr’, Owen Sheers
Today marks the start of the National Eisteddfod, this year in Abergavenny, and our Friday Poem talks of an area just a few miles north – Ysgyryd Fawr, or The Skirrid. The poem is taken from Abergavenny poet Owen Sheers’ second collection, Skirrid Hill.
Ideas of separation and divorce are important in Owen Sheers’ eagerly-awaited follow up to his acclaimed debut collection The Blue Book. The geographical divides of borders, the separation of the dead and the living, the movement from childhood to adulthood, the ending of relationships. Such divides are both moments of ‘mark-making’ and moments of absence. In this collection it is often the awareness of such separation – past or impending – and the juxtaposition of these diverse states – that provides the friction from which the poems are born.
Skirrid Fawr
Just like the farmers who once came to scoop
handfuls of soil from her holy scar,
so I am still drawn to her back for the answers
to every question I have never known.
To the sentence of her slopes,
the blunt wind glancing from her withers,
to the split view she reveals
with every step along her broken spine.
This edge of her cleft palate,
part hill, part field,
rising from a low mist, a lonely hulk
adrift through Wales.
Her east-west flanks, one dark, one sunlit,
her vernacular of borders.
Her weight, the unspoken words
of an unlearned tongue.
Buy your copy of Skirrid Hill from the Seren website: £8.99
Claim 20% off when you become a Book Club Member.
Spring into a New Series: discover New Stories from the Mabinogion
The sun has started to shine, flowers are blooming, so why not ‘spring’ into a new series?
If you haven’t yet discovered our New Stories from the Mabinogion series, then now is the perfect time. Until 14 April, the first book in the series, White Ravens by Owen Sheers, is only 99p in the Kobo Spring into a New Series sale.
The eleven stories in the Mabinogion come from two medieval Welsh manuscripts, with roots dating back many centuries earlier. They bring us Celtic mythology, Arthurian romance, and their own view of the Island of Britain. There is enchantment and shapeshifting, conflict, peacemaking, love and betrayal. In this series commissioned by Seren, the old tales are at the heart of the new. Each author reinvents a story in their own way: creating fresh, contemporary tales that speak to us as much of our own world as of events long gone. Based on ‘Branwen, Daughter of Llyr’, White Ravens is a haunting novella from an acclaimed writer.
“a gripping contemporary story… brilliantly absorbs the magical elements of the original” The Guardian
So what are you waiting for? If you have an e-book reader then don’t hesitate – go to the Kobo store and purchase your eBook copy for only 99p. And if you would prefer a paperback, you can find all eleven stories on our website.
Seren at The Hay Festival
Today marks the beginning of The Hay Festival 2015, and this year there are plenty of events involving some of our very own authors.
Paul Henry and Jonathan Edwards will be reading from their latest collections, Boy Running and the Costa Poetry Prize-winning My Family and Other Superheroes respectively. If you’re a fan of poetry, T.S. Eliot Prize-winning poet Philip Gross and visual artist Valerie Coffin Price will also be discussing their collaborative collection, A Fold in the River, and Damian Walford Davies will be discussing and reading from his latest collection, Judas.
We’re al
so going to be celebrating the centenary of Alun Lewis at Hay this year, with two events dedicated to the WW2 writer. Juliet Aykroyd, Owen Sheers and John Pikoulis will be discussing Lewis’s time in India, in particular how he met and fell in love with Juliet’s mother, Freda Aykroyd, while Owen Sheers reads some of his poems.
Another event will see Gillian Clarke, the National Poet of Wales, do a close reading and discussion of Lewis’s poems.
Our prose is also getting some attention at Hay this year. Jasmine Donahaye will be talking to Francesca Rhydderch, author of the 2014 Wales Book of the Year The Rice Paper Diaries and co-editor of New Welsh Short Stories, about her upcoming memoir, Losing Israel, a moving and honest account of nature writing, travel writing and family history exploring the displacement of Palestinians in 1948.
For those of you who are fiction lovers, Tiffany Murray will be doing a late-night reading from her acclaimed ghost story, Sugar Hall, where she will be joined by David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas and the upcoming Slade House.
With so much to see this year at Hay, you’d be a fool to miss out! Buy your tickets online at www.hayfestival.com, or check out our Events Page for more information.
