Paul Henry

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Friday Poem – ‘Cei Newydd’ by Paul Henry

Photo of a small wooden rowing boat drifting along in blue-grey waters.

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Cei Newydd’ by Paul Henry from his Wales Book of the Year shortlisted collection As If To Sing.

Cei Newydd We drifted out one afternoon on a dinghy’s water-bed, woke to no sight of the shore. We had not been born. A panic of oars scratched the wilderness and the harbour came back to us, our mothers on the pier. The salt on the fishing nets tasted the same. Soon, Brown Helen, we shall drift out again.

Voting is now open for the Wales Book of the Year People’s Choice Award. Vote for your favourite book on this year’s shortlist via the Wales Arts Review website.

Vote now

Click below or scan the QR code to preview the first 15 pages of As If To Sing

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Two Seren authors shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year 2023

Seren authors Sophie Buchaillard and Paul Henry have both been shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year 2023.

The shortlists were announced on BBC Radio Wales on Sunday 21st May. Sophie Buchaillard’s debut novel This is Not Who We Are is shortlisted for The Rhys Davies’ Trust Fiction Award. Meanwhile Paul Henry is shortlisted for The Poetry Award with his collection As If To Sing, the second time he has been shortlisted.

This year’s judges include Emily Burnett, Emma Smith-Barton, Kristian Evans and Mike Parker. Following the announcement, Mike Parker said “…the standard of this year’s Wales Book of the Year shortlist is extraordinarily high.  To arrive at it, we had to lose wonderful books in every single category – it was a very hard-fought battle, and a supremely intense discussion.  Picking the winners will be an even tougher challenge!”

This cover shows an image of an African tree silhouetted against the purple, mist shrouded dawn sky. The text reads: This Is Not Who We Are. Sophie Buchaillard.
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.

Wales Book of the Year is an annual prize run by Literature Wales, which celebrates outstanding literary talent from Wales across many genres and in both English and Welsh. There are four categories in each language – Poetry, Fiction, Creative Non-fiction, and Children & Young People, with one of the four category winners announced as the Overall Winner, and claiming the title Wales Book of the Year 2023.

Literature Wales Executive Director Clare Furlong said, “It is a pleasure to co-celebrate Welsh Literature with writers, publishers, readers, and the whole literary sector… I encourage you all to go ahead and read the shortlist, and wherever you are – at the library, the office, or at the school gate – discuss, celebrate, and encourage others to do the same.”

The category winners and overall Wales Book of the Year 2023 will be announced in a ceremony at the Tramshed in Cardiff on Thursday 13th July 2023. Voting is now open for the Wales Book of the Year People’s Choice Award via the Wales Arts Review website, where you can vote for your favourite title on any of this year’s shortlists.

Vote now

You can view the full shortlists for all categories on the Literature Wales website.

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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

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

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 – ‘Somniloquy’ by Paul Henry

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Somniloquy’ by Paul Henry from his new 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. "One of the best lyric poets currently writing" - Hugo Williams

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 poet’s compelling body of work.

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

Somniloquy Speak into my good ear. The house is bubble-wrapped with rain. It’s late. To better hear your voice through this worn out device I lean in closer to the page. To better hear the sleep talk tangled in its sheets I lean in closer to your lips. Speak into my good ear. The crackle of dark matter on its way to this room clears at last, to better hear your dream ask, Is it you? Where have you been?

Listen to Gary Raymond, Paul Chambers and Dr Emily Garside reviewing As If To Sing on the Radio Wales Review Show.

Paul is launching As If To Sing at Book-ish in Crickhowell on Thursday 28th April. Visit their website book-ish.co.uk to buy tickets.

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

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

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Friday Poem – ‘Steel’ by Paul Henry

To celebrate the Six Nations and St David’s Day on the 1st March, this week’s Friday Poem is ’Steel‘ by Paul Henry from The Brittle Sea: New and Selected Poems.

This cover shows an abstract painting by Antony Goble of a red moon-shaped face amidst a swirling blue seal The text reads: Paul Henry, The Brittle Sea, New and Selected Poems

With a musician’s ear and an artist’s eye, Paul Henry’s poems of love and fatherhood, informed by the Welsh-speaking community of his childhood, bridge both the rural and urban experience. The Brittle Sea reacquaints readers with Henry’s vast gallery of characters, from the boy having his hair cut in ‘Daylight Robbery’ to the ghosts of his long, Newport poem, ‘Between Two Bridges.’ The new poems section includes the popular ‘Steel’, inspired by the Welsh national rugby team; others which revisit some of ‘The Visitors’ from The Milk Thief; and a moving elegy for the painter Anthony Goble.

Steel (i) 10 Turn like a key in the game’s lock and open the score with a kick – open a door in the air onto blue sky. I dreamt I opened a door in the sky and half the world cheered. I dreamt I surfaced into a roar. No sky was like this before. Dart like a hare through a hedge at dusk and open the score with a try – open a door in the earth. I dreamt I opened a door in the earth and rose into light out of an underworld where, for years, I carried their ghosts on my back. Flash like a link in a steel chain like the sun on the sea or a wave in the industry of a rising tide. I dreamt I surfaced into a roar. The seagulls shrill as whistles were red and white. I dreamt my ghosts had taken flight.

The Brittle Sea is available on the Seren website: £9.99

Paul Henry’s forthcoming collection As if To Sing is available to pre-order now on the Seren website. Publishing 11th April 2022.

Pre-order now

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

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Poetry for Valentine’s Day

Celebrate Valentine’s Day with poetry collections that explore many different kinds of love. Don’t forget to sign up to our book club for 20% off all books you buy directly from us.

The Brittle Sea: New and Selected Poems by Paul Henry

This cover shows an absract painting by Anthony Goble. It give the appearance of sea with a red boat, a brick church and a moon like face amongst the waves.

With a musician’s ear and an artist’s eye, Paul Henry’s poems of love and fatherhood, informed by the Welsh-speaking community of his childhood, bridge both the rural and urban experience. The Brittle Sea reacquaints readers with Henry’s vast gallery of characters, from the boy having his hair cut in ‘Daylight Robbery’ to the ghosts of his long, Newport poem, ‘Between Two Bridges.’ The new poems section includes the popular ‘Steel’, inspired by the Welsh national rugby team; others which revisit some of ‘The Visitors’ from The Milk Thief; and a moving elegy for the painter Anthony Goble.

Buy now

Heat Signature by Siobhán Campbell

This cover shows an abstract painting of red flowers that look like flames.

Heat Signature is the intelligent, provocative new collection of poems from Siobhán Campbell. An Irish poet, Campbell has inherited a rich vocabulary, the necessary ‘slant’ point of view, and a store of lively anecdote. This is a poetry that resists rapture and/or easy solutions, it rather glories in difficulty: the cussed, intractable nature of humanity, of a natural world beset with swarming bees, weeds and feral horses. There is a beautiful balance throughout between the forthright and the ironical. Heat Signature continues her fascination with her homeland in all its incarnations, both ancient and modern. These poems challenge preconceived notions as they resist cliché.

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Masculine Happiness by David Foster-Morgan

This cover had a predominantly green and black background with a painting of a young man wearing a red and black striped top on the right hand side.

Masculine Happiness is a provocative yet subtle collection which explores the author’s ambivalence towards models of masculinity handed out to us by the media and modern society. Complex, ironic, layered, fashioned with an acute and subtle intelligence, these poems are as likely to reference Elvis as Borges. There is also a considerable amount of humour here, along with astute satire and insightful character poems. Foster-Morgan’s work repays the careful attention of thoughtful readers.

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You by John Haynes

This cover has a pale yellow background. A close up photo of a Nigerian woman's face sits in the middle. She is wearing a checked head scarf and wide round glasses.

You is a book-length poem by the late poet John Haynes. The ‘You’ of the title is the narrator’s partner and wife of many years. The book is not just a celebration of, and meditation on, personal love and devotion, but a record of how such love moves out of a family and is refracted out into the community and the wider world. The tensions inherent in this are compounded by the cross-cultural nature of the union. The narrator is a white British man and his wife was born and raised in Nigeria. Exploring a partnership based on culturally quite different – and in some aspects painfully incompatible –conceptions of ‘love’, the poem  is knit together by philosophical themes of ‘I’ and ‘you’ seen from many perspectives. Shortlisted for the T.S Eliot Prize.

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Other Women’s Kitchens by Alison Binney

This cover shows a colourful abstract painting of a kitchen inhabited by shadowy figures.

Other Women’s Kitchens by Alison Binney’s introduces us to a gifted new voice who writes with flair and feeling about coming out and coming of age as a gay woman in 21st century Britain. Winner of the Mslexia pamphlet prize for poetry, 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.

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Erato by Deryn Rees-Jones

This cover shows a blurred black and white image of a woman dancing with her arms out to the sides.

Taking its title from the muse of lyric poetry, Rees-Jones’s fifth collection Erato questions how we know and write about the beauty and the horrors of the world. Documentary-style autobiographical narratives are set alongside lyric fragments and poetic sequences as the repetitions of trauma and the errors and erasures of memory are explored. This is a book full of flames and scars, landscapes and animals; at its heart is a desire for the transformative music that runs beneath words, and an understanding of the bodies we inhabit when we love. Shortlisted for the T.S Eliot Prize.

Buy now

A Second Whisper by Lynne Hjelmgaard

This cover shows an abstract painting made up of blue, grey and splashes of yellow with two figures in the foreground.

A Second Whisper is a thoughtful and sensitive collection that reflects the changing identities of a woman: in motherhood, in widowhood, in friendship and grief. There are elegies to the loss in 2014 of her mentor and partner, the poet Dannie Abse which are a tribute to their deep friendship. There are also poems to her late husband who died in 2006 and for their children and for relationships from the author’s past in New York City and Denmark. The poems are both elegiac and celebratory: they move and change tone as the author travels to the past and negotiates through the geography of grief and feelings of displacement in London, and finally opens to her new life in the present.

Buy now

Browse a wide range of fantastic poetry collections on our Poetry pages, or visit Coming Soon to pre-order books coming out in 2022.

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Friday Poem – ‘St Michael’s’ by Paul Henry

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘St Michael’s’ by Paul Henry from his collection The Glass Aisle.

The Glass Aisle Paul HenryThe Glass Aisle is Paul Henry’s tenth book of verse and features all the lyrical precision, empathy for the human condition and deep sense of temporal loss that have become the hallmarks of his work. The poems move between rage and stillness, past and present, music and silence. The title poem is a moving elegy to displaced workhouse residents, set on a stretch of canal in the Brecon Beacons National Park, in which a telephone engineer unwittingly connects the centuries.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Glass Aisle (usually £9.99) is available for just £4.99 on the Seren website this weekend in our half-price Summer Sale!

We’ve got great deals across poetry, fiction and non-fiction all weekend on www.serenbooks.com. Sale ends midnight Monday 3rd August. Happy browsing! 

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Friday Poem – ‘Windfalls’ by Paul Henry

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Windfalls’ by Paul Henry, from his collection The Glass Aisle.

The Glass Aisle Paul Henry

The Glass Aisle moves between rage and stillness, past and present, music and silence. Acclaimed poet Paul Henry’s tenth book includes a moving elegy to displaced workhouse residents, set on a stretch of canal in the Brecon Beacons National Park.

‘Here is a rich and comforting voice next to you in the dark. Twenty eight poems so beguiling you know not whether they depict ancient folklore or an everyday occurrence in the next but one village’ – Caught by the River

 

The Glass Aisle is available on the Seren website: £9.99

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

 

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Friday Poem – ‘Arcades’, Paul Henry

Our new quartet of regional poetry pamphlets have just arrived, with each celebrating a special place in Wales: its people, landscape, wildlife, and vibrant goings-on. This week our Friday Poem comes from Poems from Cardiff, our tribute to the Capital.

Paul Henry’s ‘Arcades’ inhabits the busy and eclectic Victorian arcades that wind around the city centre, telling a private tale of sadness, love, and hope. The poem was first published in The Brittle Sea, Henry’s bestselling New and Selected Poems.

 

Friday Poem Arcades Paul Henry

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

All four regional pamphlets, including Poems from Cardiff, are available on the Seren website: £5.00 (each)

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

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Friday Poem – ‘Festival Field’, Paul Henry

Paul Henry Friday Poem Festival Field

In just under a month, Paul Henry will read from his remarkable tenth collection, The Glass Aisle, at the Seren/Cornerstone Poetry Festival. In the meantime, please enjoy ‘Festival Field’, one of the poems from the book.

The Glass Aisle Paul HenryThe Glass Aisle is Paul Henry’s tenth book of verse and features all the lyrical precision, empathy for the human condition and deep sense of temporal loss that have become the hallmarks of his work. The poems move between rage and stillness, past and present, music and silence. The title poem is a moving elegy to displaced workhouse residents, set on a stretch of canal in the Brecon Beacons National Park, in which a telephone engineer unwittingly connects the centuries.
Paul’s event at the Seren/Cornerstone Poetry Festival will feature a stunning musical collaboration with singer/songwriter Brian Briggs, lead singer of the band ‘Stornoway’. Tickets are available: book now.

 

Festival Field by Paul Henry Friday Poem

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Paul Henry on ‘Festival Field’ (from The Glass Aisle):

An earlier draft of this poem began with cows slithering in the mud of a churned up field, a few days after a music festival. (I was thinking of a field in Portmeirion where ‘The Flaming Lips’ had played). Poor field, like a tourist resort handed back to its quieter self in winter, a patch of land disturbed by who knows what other gatherings across the centuries – fêtes, battles, rituals….

Then I found myself in a smaller field, a smaller festival, in Flintshire, in the late summer – a much calmer affair. There were hay bales scattered about, a blacksmith, real ale, craftspeople sharing their skills… and music, of course. The late sun arrowed about the place and the field, for moments, held all of its time. And love was as old as the field.

Find out more about Paul and his forthcoming events on his website.

 

The Glass Aisle is available to pre-order from the Seren website: £9.99

Join our free Book Club for 20% off every book you buy from us.