poem Archives - Page 12 of 19

Posted on August 26, 2016 by Simon appleby

Friday Poem – ‘Insomnia’, Tamar Yoseloff

This week our Friday Poem is taken from Tamar Yoseloff’s newest collection, A Formula for Night: New and Selected Poems, which is half price on our website until midnight on Monday as part of the Seren summer sale.

Tamar Yoseloff is a poet whose career has been profoundly influenced by the visual arts. A Formula for Night: New and Selected Poems is the eagerly awaited summation of her work, encompassing selections from four published print volumes: Sweetheart, Barnard’s Star, Fetch and The City with Horns (now mostly out of print); and poems from her collaborations with artists: Formerly, Marks and Desire Paths. The book also includes a generous selection of beautiful new poems. ‘Insomnia’, our Friday Poem, is one of these.

Insomnia

The clock’s small hands carry me
to the house where I was a child

and in those rooms peace settled
despite the war inside the TV,
the lunatic with an axe who filled
the drive-in screen. My parents said
no harm would come if I was good.

My room was buttercup yellow,
it was always spring; my Barbies
were missing arms or legs, while boys
came back from Nam in bags.
Everyone seemed old but they were young,

now everyone seems young, and I’m the one
crowding the night with phantoms.

Buy your copy of A Formula for Night now, half price until midnight, Monday 29th August!

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Posted on August 19, 2016 by Simon appleby

Friday Poem – ‘Bob’s Dogs’, Hilary Menos

It’s that time of the week again, and this time our Friday Poem is taken from Hilary Menos’ collection, Red Devon.

Originally a food writer and journalist, Hilary Menos’ poems are often inspired by rural farming life in Devon where she lived for some years.

In Red Devon, her second collection, Menos reveals her experiences as a “blow in” from upcountry moving into a tight-knit rural community and seeing at first hand some of the human and animal costs of the conflict between traditional farming methods and the demands of modern commercial agriculture. She also tells the story of a burgeoning love affair between farmer Grunt Garvey and haulier Jo Tucker, a romance which ends in tragedy. Alongside these two stories, one fictional and one very real, runs a concern for farmers around the world whose livelihoods – and lives – are threatened by global changes in agriculture.

Bob’s Dogs

There was the one dog, neither use nor ornament.
Each morning he lurked by the tanker’s dribbling spout
licking his chops. Spawned every cur in the district.
Bit the postman, once, and got away with it.

There was the other dog, two-bit brother to the first,
eyes like spilt milk. Danced on the slurry pit’s crust
one time too many, said Bob, and no good since.
Bit the builder’s foreman twice, and got away with it.

There was the third dog, each month went walkabout
under a chicken moon, fetching and shedding stars.
Deaf to everyone but Bob’s dad, now four years
bed-bound. What shall I say? Bit nobody, yet.

And lastly there was the bitch. Bit the child.
The four shots blew through the lanes and echoed loud
in the neighbour’s eyes. Only Bob shook my hand,
hitching his trousers up with a ‘Welcome, my friend.’

Buy your copy of Red Devon now: £8.99
Claim 20% when you become a Book Club member

Posted on August 12, 2016 by Simon appleby

Friday Poem – ‘A Pembrokeshire Artist’, Tony Curtis

A Pembrokeshire Artist Tony Curtis Llangwm

This week we have a treat for you – our Friday Poem is one of the new poems from Tony Curtis’ forthcoming From the Fortunate Isles: New and Selected Poems (Seren, October 2016).

From the Fortunate Isles, published in celebration of the author’s 70th year, features poems from ten of Curtis’ published collections as well as a substantial number of new poems. This is a poet whose themes and variations remain consistent: a profound interest in the wars of the last century, an abiding fascination for all art forms, particularly painting and poetry, tender attachments to family, and (most evident in the poem below), a deep affection for his roots in West Wales.

A Pembrokeshire Artist
John Knapp Fisher (1931 -2015)

An evening with the rain coming in,
that sea so cold and unsettled, a heavy graphite,
you’d not have gone out with your mackerel lines
in the Viking or any of her successors
from the stone-brick embrace of Porthgain.

We’ve eaten our fill at your wake, John,
the Sloop Inn squeezed tight
with suits, black ties and memories.
Wives, patrons, grandchildren.
Photos of you through all seven ages on the screen.

Inland to Wolf ’s Castle and as far south as the cathedral
the farms, haggards and holiday lets
shrug down for the cold night.
You’d have worked to conjure the reluctant light
discovered in them under this empting, moonless sky.

And the first scurp coming would have dabbed
your paper, blossomed and been coaxed,
smudged, into the finished sketch.
Now the county will have to sing its own spirit,
compose its own shape, keep its own watch.

If you would like to listen to Tony read from his forthcoming collection and other books in his native Pembrokeshire, don’t miss his event at the Llangwm Literary Festival, Saturday 12th August. More details here.

You can buy copies of Tony Curtis’ poetry collections, anthologies he has edited, critical essays, and other writing direct from us (20% off for Book Club Members):
Crossing Over
Heaven’s Gate
Tokens for the Foundlings (ed Tony Curtis)
After the First Death (ed Tony Curtis)
Wales at War
Real South Pembrokeshire
Keep an eye out on the Seren website – Tony’s new collection, From the Fortunate Isles: New and Selected Poems, is coming soon…

Posted on August 5, 2016 by Simon appleby

Friday Poem – ‘Accent’, Carolyn Jess-Cooke

This week’s Friday Poem is taken from Carolyn Jess-Cooke’s debut collection, Inroads.

The opening piece, ‘Accent’ where ‘stowaway inflections and locally-produced slang/have passports of their own’ is a praise poem for the versatility and joy of language, “The way sound chases itself in tunnels and halls, the way senses fold memory…”.After this playful start, a difficult childhood is evoked through metaphor in poems like ‘Music Lesson’,‘One Thousand Painful Pieces’ and ‘Bitten’, all the more heartbreaking for being indirect.

Buy your copy of Inroads from the Seren website: £7.99
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Posted on July 29, 2016 by Simon appleby

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
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Posted on July 22, 2016 by Simon appleby

Friday Poem – ‘Outcast Hours’, Rhian Edwards

This week our Friday Poem is taken from Rhian Edwards’ dark and sensual debut collection Clueless Dogs.

Winner of Wales Book of the Year 2013
Winner of the Roland Mathias Prize for Poetry 2013
Winner of Wales Book of the Year People’s Choice 2013
Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2012

Full of verve and humour, with a spiky syntax featuring hard-edged consonants, Rhian Edwards’ language has a winning honesty and intensity. Poems like ‘The Welshman Who Couldn’t Sing’ chronicle a fraught childhood in Bridgend, south Wales, where the sensitive child escapes through imaginative games of ‘Playing Dead’ and ‘Broken Lifeboat’. Later poems confidently explore teenage lusts, student rivalries, damaged peers and tense situations. Although the author doesn’t flinch from ruthless depictions in which we are often implicated by her use of the second person ‘You’, there is an underlying sweetness, an elegiac thread most evident in the poems of maturity.

Outcast Hours

White light weighs heavy, bullying
bright as squash courts. I fix a dirty look
on the electric clock. The walled
minutes stagger their blinks.

Wheel-footed suitcases scurry
about me like clueless dogs,
flip flops tick-tock
on the polished rink of the concourse.

One girl’s patience is vivid,
measured by the careful brush strokes
of plum on her toenails,
the soft turning of pages.

Her boyfriend hibernates,
his legs stretched out before him.
Ankles crossed, he wags his foot
conducting his concert of sleep.

A ponytailed mother raises
an eye for her wandering son.
Shc scoops him up and breathes in his scalp
in chase of a smell that is running away from her.

The antique couple are butchering time.
Their teeth tear through baguettes
raining faded confetti
onto their open laps.

Shy of games and companions, fidgeting
in plastic-boned chairs, we comb the air
for that splintered voice,
dictating when our sky will ship us.

Buy your copy of Clueless Dogs now: £8.99

Claim 20% off as a Book Club Member

Posted on July 15, 2016 by Simon appleby

Friday Poem – ‘Talking in the Dark’, Christine Evans

This week our Friday Poem is from Christine Evans’ sensitive collection, Growth Rings, which was shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year 2007.

This collection from Christine Evans follows well-received ’Selected Poems’. Hers is a persuasive voice, highly attuned to the vagries of the seasons, to the landscapes and inhabitants of the beautiful Llyn Peninsula in North Wales where the author has made her home.
As well as vibrant short lyrics on everything from ’Bluebells in Nanhoron’ to jets flying over Wales, there are a series of tender elegiac pieces on relatives, meditations on the last moments of Shelley and the fates of the Brontes, and a number of poems featuring the mysterious Island of Bardsey.

Talking In the Dark

Now the air is indigo with evening
together by the boathouse where we’ve sprawled
an hour or more, felt earth’s breath cooling,
we wake mind-echoes of ‘the real world’.
Night prompts us all to visions of tomorrow.

A subtle fullness, like a ripening field
contains us, names and knowledge weightless now.
The biosphere, Helen thinks, might still have the power
to heal pillage, maiming, poison. Protests fly:
excuse for doing nothing, weak, evasion.

Although we can’t agree what should be done
a tribal dignity begins to hover.
Shadows with eyes that hold the light, we are
communicators, not just talking faces.
First stars beckon in a deepening sky.

The universe accepts our hopeful voices
but sea demurs with one slow-hushing sigh.

Buy your copy of Growth Rings now: £7.99

Claim 20% off as a Book Club Member

Posted on July 8, 2016 by Simon appleby

Friday Poem – ‘The Scarlet Lizard’, Caroline Smith

Last night saw us at Chapter, Cardiff, for July’s First Thursday event and among the readers was Caroline Smith with her new collection, The Immigration Handbook. This week we have a treat for you – you can listen to the Friday Poem being read by the author. Look below for the video, and accompanying poem text.

The strikingly moving poems in Caroline Smith’s The Immigration Handbook are the fruit of the author’s career as an Immigration Caseworker for one of the most diverse inner-city areas in London. Her characters are careful composites of people she’s observed. They step vividly off the page, as if out of the headlines. Written over a period of years, as layered and infused with experience as the documents she discusses: letters folded and refolded, creased with time, Caroline Smith’s poems are a moving record of global people movement, the story of our time.

The Scarlet Lizard

Nothing moves
except the evening light
crossing the Judge’s room.
The lawyers’ skeleton arguments
lay piled on his desk.
They seemed to him brittle
as bleached poppies,
tapped of their seeds.

He longed to see the quick movement
of a scarlet lizard weaving unexpectedly
through the parched, cracked hexagons
of a legal phrase, to hear the snapped stick
fritter away from a hiding place;
to feel the cold, diaphanous weed grip
in the black current of a border crossing.

He needed to sense some quiver of
indecision, an odd detail
that would open the truth of their words;
chinks of light shining
through shuttered doors.

Buy your copy of The Immigration Handbook now from the Seren website: £9.99

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Posted on July 6, 2016 by Simon appleby

An extract from Boy Running | Wales Book of the Year shortlist

The winners of the Poetry, Non-Fiction and Fiction Categories, and the overall Wales Book of the Year Winner, will be announced in just two weeks. Seren have two titles in the running for the awards, and before we find out the results, we thought you might enjoy reading an extract from each of our nominated books. Look below and you’ll find an extract from Boy Running by Paul Henry (shortlisted for the Open University in Wales Creative Non-Fiction Award).

Studio Flat

Socks hang like bats from a skylight.
They may be dry in time for the moon.
The camp site owner’s water-feature
drains more blood from the sun.

Cars queue for the narrow bridge.
Birds catch their pulses and fly.
I am suddenly old. What’s an attic
but a bungalow in the sky.

And where are you, my sons?
I heard your voices in the bells
of snowdrops pulled by the wind.
These tulips have lost their smell.

Perhaps I could tell you, one day
where the snowdrops went, why old men
dry their socks on the moon, and what
darkened the skylight, just then.

Ring

I can’t get the ring out of my finger.
How long till it disappears
this ghost ring, twenty years deep?
I’m branded. Is it the same with you?
Your fingers were slenderer than mine.

We hope you enjoyed reading this free extract from Boy Running by Paul Henry. Keep an eye on the Seren blog, as we will be announcing the Wales Book of the Year Awards results in just over two weeks time.

About Boy Running:
Paul Henry has gained a reputation as one of of the best poets in the UK. Boy Running is his beautiful sixth collection and the first to follow The Brittle Sea: New and Selected Poems. Also a singer-songwriter, Henry is known for his precise lyricism, intimate tone and a cast of characters inspired (like Dylan Thomas) by his childhood by the sea in Aberystwyth, West Wales.

Posted on July 1, 2016 by Simon appleby

Friday Poem – ‘All Day It Has Rained’, Alun Lewis

On this day, one of the best-known English-language poets of the Second World War came into the world. Alun Lewis was born on 1 July 1915 in Cwmaman, Wales.

A year later, on 1 July 1916, the British Army would see its bloodiest day as The Battle of the Somme commenced, and over 57,000 British Soldiers became casualties on the first day alone.

Our Friday Poem this week is both in celebration of Alun Lewis’ birth, and in remembrance of all those who fought and died on the Somme.

Alun Lewis
Some critics see Lewis as the last of the great Romantic poets, a twentieth century Keats. Others view him as the bridge between pre-war poets like Auden and Yeats to post-war poets such as Hughes and Gunn. He was born and raised in Depression-struck south Wales and, following degrees in history at Aberystwyth and Manchester, became a teacher there. Early in 1940, despite his pacifist inclinations he enlisted and, after long periods of training, joined the war in India.

‘All Day It Has Rained’ was written whilst Lewis was stationed with the Royal Engineers at Longmoor, Hampshire. It is among the poems featured in Alun Lewis: Collected Poems.

All Day It Has Rained

All day it has rained, and we on the edge of the moors
Have sprawled in our bell-tents, moody and dull as boors,
Groundsheets and blankets spread on the muddy ground
And from the first grey wakening we have found
No refuge from the skirmishing fine rain
And the wind that made the canvas heave and flap
And the taut wet guy-ropes ravel out and snap.
All day the rain has glided, wave and mist and dream,
Drenching the gorse and heather, a gossamer stream
Too light to stir the acorns that suddenly
Snatched from their cups by the wild south-westerly
Pattered against the tent and our upturned dreaming faces.
And we stretched out, unbuttoning our braces,
Smoking a Woodbine, darning dirty socks,
Reading the Sunday papers – I saw a fox
And mentioned it in the note I scribbled home; –
And we talked of girls and dropping bombs on Rome,
And thought of the quiet dead and the loud celebrities
Exhorting us to slaughter, and the herded refugees:
Yet thought softly, morosely of them, and as indifferently
As of ourselves or those whom we
For years have loved, and will again
Tomorrow maybe love; but now it is the rain
Possesses us entirely, the twilight and the rain.

And I can remember nothing dearer or more to my heart
Than the children I watched in the woods on Saturday
Shaking down burning chestnuts for the schoolyard’s merry play,
Or the shaggy patient dog who followed me
By Sheet and Steep and up the wooded scree
To the Shoulder o’ Mutton where Edward Thomas brooded long
On death and beauty – till a bullet stopped his song.

Buy your copy of Alun lewis: Collected Poems from the Seren website. Become a Book Club Member to claim 20% off your order.

Want to see more Alun Lewis titles? Take a look at our website for biographies, short stories, poetry, and Lewis’ previously unpublished 1930’s novel, Morlais.

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