poem Archives - Page 13 of 19

Posted on June 24, 2016 by Simon appleby

Friday Poem – Hunting For The Man With Huge Ear Lobes

This week our Friday Poem is taken from Peter Finch’s collection Zen Cymru.

Not one for quiet meditations, Finch’s voice in Zen Cymru is: loud, bewildered, satirical, furious, sad, fearful and funny. This is a Wales that missed its revolution in ‘I Chew Gum and Think of Rifles’. This is a Wales beset by: rain, the ghosts of hard-drinking poets, of holy wells guarded by heifers, of sports crowds, Ikea, sheep, “enormous storm clouds”, and the ‘Entry of Christ Into Cardiff, 2005’.
Finch is a well-known performance poet and his poems have the immediacy and the dramatic impact of pieces conceived for the stage. Formal innovation is allied with themes that are resonant and deeply humane.

Hunting For The Man With Huge Ear Lobes

It’s difficult discussing Buddhism over
whiskey. It makes you laugh.
When you reach the tenets which
concern eternal suffering it’s hard.
I imagine my father here with me. I am
explaining reincarnation but he won’t
have any of it. I am no returned wood louse,
he insists. The bottle on the table
between us is going down at a terrific rate.

We aren’t anything, says my father,
any of us, and when we go it’s just
dark, you can’t figure it, can you?
He’s drunk, my father,
he waves his hands, this is how it is.

My father tells me alcohol is best consumed
lying down. Less chance of hurting
the living. We try this. His face still has that
lopsided look it had when I last saw him
flat-out in the morgue.

He is the greater vehicle, I am the lesser.
We drive on in the darkness looking for a
smiling man with huge ear lobes. He’ll
have the answer, I say. No, says my father,
breathing softly. No he won’t.

Buy your copy of Zen Cymru from our website. Sign up to be a Seren Book Club member to claim 20% off.

Posted on June 17, 2016 by Simon appleby

Friday Poem – A Psalm for the Scaffolders

A Psalm for the Scaffolders Kim Moore The Art of Falling

This week’s Friday Poem – published on Father’s Day weekend – is from Kim Moore’s lively debut poetry collection, The Art of Falling.

Kim sets out her stall firmly in the North amongst ‘My People’: “who swear without knowing they are swearing… scaffolders and plasterers and shoemakers and carers…”. ‘A Psalm for the Scaffolders’ is a hymn for her father’s profession.

A Psalm for the Scaffolders
who balanced like tightrope walkers,
who could run up the bracing
faster than you or I could climb
a ladder, who wore red shorts
and worked bare-chested,
who cut their safety vests in half,
a psalm for the scaffolders
and their vans, their steel
toe-capped boots, their coffee mugs,
a psalm for those who learnt
to put up a scaffold standing
on just one board, a psalm
for the scaffolder who could put
a six-inch nail in a piece of wood
with just his palm, a psalm
for those who don’t like rules
or things taking too long, who now
mustn’t go to work uncovered,
who mustn’t cut their safety vests
or climb without ladders, who must
use three boards at all times,
a psalm for the scaffolders
who fall with a harness on,
who have ten minutes to be rescued,
a psalm for the scaffolder who fell
in a clear area, a tube giving way,
that long slow fall, a psalm for him,
who fell thirty feet and survived,
a psalm for the scaffolder
who saw him fall, a psalm for those
at the top of buildings, the wind whistling
in their ears, the sky in their voices,
for those who lift and carry
and shout and swear, for those
who can recite the lengths of boards
and tubes like a song, a psalm for them,
the ones who don’t like heights
but spent their whole life hiding it,
a psalm for those who work too long,
a psalm for my father, a psalm for him.

Buy your copy of The Art of Falling from our website. Sign up to be a Seren Book Club member to claim 20% off.

Posted on June 10, 2016 by Simon appleby

Friday Poem – Darling, Would You Please Pick up those Books?

This week’s Friday Poem is one of Poetry Editor Amy Wack’s ‘favourite sestinas of all time’ and is taken from God Loves You by Kathryn Maris.

Kathryn Maris borrows rhythms, vocabulary and themes from the Bible in this collection of poems. The result is more than artful parody, although a sly wit is in evidence. It is an approach that accommodates large themes, unravelling them in new ways.
The first section, ‘What will the neighbours think?, is a kaleidoscopic view of the sins and sinners of the modern city and opens, appropriately enough, with a vision of a flood to rival Noah’s. The poems feature domestic discord, gossip, suicide, celebrity and anxiety about the safety and behaviour of children and spouses. It says much about this poet’s meticulous poise and tone that we are lured into these scenarios with our sympathies fully engaged. The following sections subvert scripture more directly. A skilful use of form is characteristic, as in the sestina ‘Darling, Will You Please Pick up those Books?’ Other pieces are set out in the numbered style of psalms or parables but have an entirely contemporary edge.

Darling, Would You Please Pick up those Books?

How many times do I have to say
get rid of the books off the goddamn floor
do you have any idea how it feels
to step over books you wrote about her
bloody hell you sadist what kind of man
are you all day long those fucking books

in my way for 3 years your acclaimed books
tell me now what do you have to say
for yourself you think you’re such a man
silent brooding pondering at the floor
pretending you’re bored when I mention her
fine change the subject ask ‘Do I feel

like I need more medication’ NO I don’t feel
like I need more medication it’s the books
don’t you see don’t you see it’s her
why don’t you listen to anything I say
and for God’s sake books on the floor
are a safety hazard remember that man

from Cork who nearly died fine that man
fell over a hurley not a book but I don’t feel
you’re getting the point the point is that a floor
is not an intelligent place for books
books I have to see and books that say
exactly where and how you shagged her

what shirt she wore before you shagged her
I can write a book too about some man
better still about you I can say
something to demonize you how would you feel
about that ha ha why don’t I write a book
about how I hoover your sodding floor

and how you’ve never once hoovered your floor
why can’t I be a muse why can’t I be a ‘her’
what does one have to do to be in a book
around here do I have to be dead for a man
to write me a poem how do you think it feels
to be non-muse material can’t you say

you feel for me what you felt for her
can’t you say I’m better than that woman
can’t you get those books off the floor?

Buy your copy of God Loves You from our website. Sign up to be a Seren Book Club member to claim 20% off.

Posted on June 3, 2016 by Simon appleby

Friday Poem – On Standby

This week’s Friday Poem is taken from Carol Rumens’ hot-off-the-press new collection, Animal People.

As the author says in her brief introduction, ‘the vertebrae of this collection are the seasons of a sometimes Welsh and sometimes English year.’ Rumens’ poems are frequently inspired by places, either wild landscapes as in ‘Fire, Stone, Snowdonia’ or urban scenes as in ‘March Morning, Pearson Park’. But just as often a setting will be a pretext for a theme that has a political, sociological, aesthetic, philosophical or even metaphysical focus. The striking ten-page title poem explores some of the effects and affects of Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD), focusing particularly on Asperger’s Syndrome and how it may be experienced by young women. Rumens opens up this topic with all her characteristic energy, empathy and curiosity.
This is a beautifully intelligent collection of poetry, sure to delight and inspire.

Buy your copy of Animal People now, 20% off on our website for Book Club members.

Posted on May 27, 2016 by Simon appleby

Friday Poem – Borderland

Yesterday marked the beginning of the week-long Hay Festival, where writers from around the world gather in the staggering beauty of the Welsh borders to debate, read, share stories and inspire – among them, Tom Bullough with his new novel, Addlands (Granta).

As a nod to Hay, our Friday poem is ‘Borderland’ from Air Histories by Christopher Meredith. ‘Borderland’ and Air Histories had a significant influence on Tom Bullough’s new Radnorshire-set novel, Addlands.

Christopher Meredith’s Air Histories starts in the Stone Age and ends in the future. It’s marked by formal diversity and a wide range of subjects, with the personal alongside the impersonal and the experimental alongside well-known forms, as well as including some translations from the Welsh. Throughout it engages the rich meanings of its title, touching on the elemental and on historical time, as well as music and story, meditating on human creativity and its fallibilities from knapping an arrowhead to playing the fiddle or making a guitar. Nature is a touchstone, particularly the Black Mountains, near the author’s home, but also often seen ‘aslant’ as in ‘Seeing the Birds’ where sparrows seem suddenly fierce as eagles.

Borderland

Ffin is the Welsh for border. It occurs inside diffiniad which means definition, and in Capel y Ffin, a place in the Black Mountains.

You’ll find a ffin inside each definition.
We see what is when we see what it’s not:
edges are where meanings happen.

On the black whaleback of this mountain
earth curves away so sky can start
to show a ffin’s a kind of definition

where skylarks climb across earth’s turn
to air and pulsing muscle turns to an art-
ful song the edge that lets a meaning happen.

Live rock can yield to mortared stone,
a city to a castle, then a shepherd’s hut,
where ffin’s contained inside a definition,

where the lithic turns into the human.
Here’s where things fall together, not apart
at edges that let meanings happen.

And self here blurs into annihilation.
Larkfall, earthfall, skyfall, manfall each create
the ffin that is the place of definition
the edges where we see our meanings happen.

Buy your copy of Air Histories now, 20% off for Book Club Members.

Posted on May 20, 2016 by Simon appleby

Friday Poem – Suturing Secrets

Ilse Pedler The Dogs that Chase Bicycle Wheels Mslexia pamphlet

This week’s Friday Poem is taken from Ilse Pedler’s new poetry pamphlet The Dogs that Chase Bicycle Wheels.

Ilse Pedler’s marvelous debut poetry booklet, The Dogs that Chase Bicycle Wheels, won the 2015 Mslexia Poetry Pamphlet Competition. Many of her poems are about animals and how they interact with humans, and reflect her working life as a Veterinary Surgeon. Pedler has a careful, empathetic eye for the characteristics of the animals she comes across. Humans and their secrets are also observed, with a sharp wryness but also with a characteristic gentleness.

Suturing Secrets

We are divided into compartments,
separated by taut membranes,

glistening planes of connective tissue,
resilient boundaries.

Today this is damaged,
anaesthetized, surgically explored

your diaphragm is a torn curtain hanging
and like a peep show I’m drawn to look behind.

In the absence of pressure lungs hesitate
to inflate, do their best to conceal

the frantic convulsions at your core,
the struggle for rebirth every second.

I look perhaps longer than I should
at the shuddering flesh, the labouring

beauty, then I pull the curtain back over
and suture the secret inside.

Buy your copy of The Dogs that Chase Bicycle Wheels now, 20% off for Book Club members.

Posted on May 13, 2016 by Simon appleby

Friday Poem – The New World

Tomorrow is International Dylan Thomas Day and we will be celebrating Swansea’s most famous son, so today our Friday Poem is by another Swansea native, Meirion Jordan.

Jordan was born in 1985 in Swansea. His début Moonrise was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and his pamphlet, Strangers Hall, was shortlisted for an East Anglia Book of the Year award.

Finely held moods and moments resonate throughout this unusually accomplished first book. The rich, complex history of Wales often crops up, sometimes in unexpected contexts: ‘The New World’ is a vision, a cross between Dylan Thomas’ ‘Under Milk Wood’ and an early J.G. Ballard novel, of post-global warming Wales, with a polyglot population: “Ronaldinho Davies/wowing the crowds at the Millennium Stadium” and swamped by tropical vegetation: “cobalt lizards and coral snakes/swallowing the cottages an Llandinam/ the mahoganies uprooting Carno’s hearths”.

The New World

Roll on global warming. The Maentwrog Junta
seizing power on a Sunday morning
just after chapel, the frenziedly moustachioed
General Gwydion Mendéz proclaiming martial law
after the third psalm of the evening service.
The Gorseinon drugs cartel expanding
to the Aberystwyth favelas, bringing the clash
of kalashnikovs to constitution hill.
Samba and harps. O Seion Fryn
bawled out at thirty in the shade
by sweating ministers. Cawl mango
and coconuts replacing lava bread. Ronaldinho Davies
wowing the crowds at the Millennium Stadium,
the Rhondda turning out in rainbows
of rippling cloth and streamers to see England lose
four-nil, Islwyn Marley at half time
shaking the stands with sounds from Ynys Mon.
Olwen Perón leading the mob in Marchog Iesu
at the Cwmdonkin bandstand, her voice
spreading like an angelus along
the Taff Fechan, along Cwm Tywi.
David Attenborough filming the fauna
of the Nantgwynant valley, eccentric Englishmen
looking for the lost city of Dolgellau
up Cwm Pennant, out behind Corris.
100 percent humidity at Rhandirmwyn.
Kurtz Jenkins on the shores of Llyn Clywedog,
and everything from Llanidloes to Rhaeadr
declared ‘the dark interior’. The rattan
wrapping itself around the spine of the A470,
the cobalt lizards and the coral snakes
swallowing the cottages at Llandinam,
the mahoganies uprooting Carno’s hearths.
The moon at Devil’s Bridge pulled earthwards
in a sail of vines, the sun
squinting in the eye of a bromeliad
that wields its universe of frogspawn out
from Carnedd Dafydd to the new world.

Buy your copy now.

Posted on May 6, 2016 by Simon appleby

Friday Poem – The woman on my National Library of Wales library card

This week our Friday Poem is ‘The woman on my National Library of Wales library card’ by Katherine Stansfield, which won the 2014 PENfro poetry competition. The poem is taken from Katherine’s humorous and distinctive debut collection, Playing House.

A concise wit and an unsettling view of the domestic characterise these poems whose subjects are the ordinary as viewed through the author’s satirical yet sympathetic eye. John Lennon’s tooth, an imaginary ‘Canada’, bees in Rhode Island, cats and office politics are all peculiar grist to this author’s mill. She presents both historical subjects such as Captain Scott of the Antarctic, and common objects, such as household bleach, from a skewed perspective, adding humour, drama and a quietly distinctive pathos.

The woman on my National Library of Wales library card

Her mouth says it all –
slack as a jellyfish. They made her

stand against the wall
with no time to pose or comb

the seagulls from her hair,
no time to dig her smile

from pockets of sand.
the Sea fret foaming at her hems

thickened once inside the dusty air
that seeps from books. See, she’s ghosting

under the card’s laminated skin. Almost
gone. She fogged the enquiry desk too.

The attendant lost his hands
in the mist, hence the wonky

shot. She’s looking at a horizon
beyond the frame. I can’t meet

her salt-stiff eye which asks
for silence from the waves

as if such a gift could be given.
She doesn’t get out much now for fear

of mackerel following her home
and wheezing to death in the road,

of mullet in the bath again.
Her doorstep is crunchy with limpets.

Can I take her something back?
She likes romance, set far inland.

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Posted on April 29, 2016 by Simon appleby

Friday Poem – White Clover

This week our Friday Poem is taken from Lynne Hjelmgaard’s new collection, A Boat Called Annalise.

Lynne Hjelmgaard was born in New York and has lived in Denmark, Rome, Paris and London. Her collection, A Boat Called Annalise, records the years she and her husband spent sailing on a boat to the Caribbean and back. The author beautifully evokes life at sea, the dream-like nature of the tropics, and the halcyon days of a marriage.
Hjelmgaard moves from scenes of risk and turbulence, of wild beauty on the open water, to visions of their dream-like destination in the West Indies. The author’s clear-eyed and tender observations are as insightful about the paradox of paradise: tropical splendor amidst local poverty, as they are about the challenges of relationships at close quarters.

White Clover
For Dannie

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Posted on April 22, 2016 by Simon appleby

Friday Poem – April

the visitations kathryn simmonds april friday poem

This week our Friday Poem is from The Visitations by Kathryn Simmonds.

The 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

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