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Friday Poem – Love

friday poem love kate bingham

cohabitation kate binghamThis week, our Friday Poem is taken from Cohabitation by Kate Bingham.

Until midnight on February 14th, claim 35% off this beautiful collection in our Valentine’s poetry sale.

A brisk wit and intelligence characterises these poems by Kate Bingham. Her subjects are friends, family, work, the experiences of any day, but her keen and compassionate focus brings these moments vividly to life. Her gift is a point of view that is startling, moving and humorous.

Reflective and playful, intimate and exuberant, these poems have a wry, deliberate logic of their own which makes Cohabitation an engaging as well as an illuminating first collection.

Love

There were so many flies we spoke in sign language
and wore long socks and sun-glasses for protection.

Just thinking of them as eggs or creamy worms
writhing, unseen, in the flower heads
could make you sick,

but it was a kind of torture, with the grasses deep
and the air so soft,
not to go out into the haze.

A kind of ecstasy to risk bare skin
in the profusion.

 

Buy your copy of Cohabitation now, and discover the other treasures in our Valentine’s poetry sale.

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Friday Poem – Bamp

my family and other superheroes

Our Friday poem is from Jonathan Edwards’ Costa Award-winning My Family and Other Superheroes, which is 35% off until 14th February in our Valentine’s sale (so what better time to pick up a copy?)

my family and other superheroes jonathan edwardsMy Family and Other Superheroes introduces a vibrant and unique new voice from Wales. The superheroes in question are a motley crew. Evel Knievel, Sophia Loren, Ian Rush, Marty McFly, a bicycling nun and a recalcitrant hippo – all leap from these pages and jostle for position, alongside valleys mams, dads and bamps, described with great warmth. Other poems focus on the crammed terraces and abandoned high streets where a working-class and Welsh nationalist politics is hammered out. This is a post-industrial valleys upbringing re-imagined through the prism of pop culture and surrealism.

Bamp

That’s him, with the tweed and corduroy
skin, wearing the slack gloves of his hands,
those liver spots like big full stops. That’s him

passing time with his favourite hobby, which is
you know, pottering, or staring closely
at the middle distance, enjoying the magic tricks

his watch does. His pockets are for special things
he has forgotten, no one fills the holes
in crumpets like he does, and in his wallet

is a licence from the Queen and what it means
is he can say what the hell he likes and you
can’t do nothing. That’s him, with a cupboard full

of tea cosies, a severe hearing problem
round those he doesn’t like, gaps in his smile
and stories, a head full of buried treasure

and look, that’s him now, twiddling his thumbs
so furiously, it’s like he’s knitting air.
It’s only him can hold the air together.

Buy your copy now.

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Friday Poem – Soup

Soup by Tony Curtis

This week’s Friday Poem is Tony Curtis’ Arvon Prize-shortlisted ‘Soup’.

This is one of many poems on the subject of conflict in Tony’s War Voices (1995) and will also feature in the soon-to-be published From the Fortunate Isles: New and Selected Poems, out in October this year. Wednesday 27th January was Holocaust Remembrance Day and so this poem is an especially poignant choice.

Soup

One night our block leader set a competition:
two bowls of soup to the best teller of a tale.
That whole evening the hut filled with words –
tales from the old countries
of wolves and children
potions and love-sick herders
stupid woodsmen and crafty villagers.
Apple-blossom snowed from blue skies,
orphans discovered themselves royal.
Tales of greed and heroes and cunning survival,
soldiers of the Empires, the Church, the Reich.

And when they turned to me
I could not speak,
sunk in the horror of that place,
my throat a corridor of bones, my eyes
and nostrils clogged with self-pity.
‘Speak,’ they said, ‘everyone has a story to tell.’
And so I closed my eyes and said:
I have no hunger for your bowls of soup, you see
I have just risen from the Shabbat meal –
my father has filled our glasses with wine,
bread has been broken, the maid has served fish.
Grandfather has sung, tears in his eyes, the old songs.
My mother holds her glass by the stem, lifts
it to her mouth, the red glow reflecting on her throat.
I go to her side and she kisses me for bed.
My grandfather’s kiss is rough and soft like an apricot.
The sheets on my bed are crisp and flat
like the leaves of a book …

I carried my prizes back to my bunk: one bowl
I hid, the other I stirred
and smelt a long time, so long
that it filled the cauldron of my head,
drowning a family of memories.

Buy War Voices from our website, and look out for From the Fortunate Isles: New and Selected Poems, available October 2016.

 

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Friday Poem – Elegy for the Living

Friday Poem Elegy for the Living

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Elegy for the Living’ from Kathryn Simmonds’ insightful collection The Visitations.

In this book, Simmonds infuses with beauty the everyday phenomena that we often neglect: from fleeting moments with strangers on the street, to even that peculiar yet widely recognisable experience of forgetting what exactly we went upstairs to retrieve. Through an innovative and triumphant blend of humour and realism – complemented by its simple yet wonderfully rich language – the collection explores both the truths and the uncertainties of life in terms of faith, the self, and the familial. This creative ambiguity reaches a crescendo in the title poem ‘The Visitations’ in which the divine is effortlessly combined with the domestic. Yet even her more elegiac poems are rarely sombre, but abound with the imagery of homeliness, and an underlying sense of vigour and life.

Elegy for the Living

We wash up side by side
to find each other

 

in the speakable world,
and, lulled into sense,

 

inhabit our landscape;
the curve

 

of that chair draped
with your shirt;

 

my glass of  water
seeded overnight with air.

 

After this bed
there’ll be another,

 

so we’ll roll
and keep rolling

 

until one of  us
will roll alone and try to roll

 

the other back — a trick
no one’s yet pulled off —

 

and it’ll be
as if   I dreamed you, dear,

 

as if   I dreamed this bed,
our touching limbs,

 

this room, the tree outside alive
with new wet light.

 

Not now. Not yet.


Buy The Visitations on our website. 

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Friday Poem – Skeeter Syndrome

Clueless Dogs Rhian Edwards

For our Friday Poem this week we have ‘Skeeter Syndrome’ 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.

Skeeter Syndrome

I felt a tickle to my ankle,
saw her, dithering in the air
light as dandelion snow,
a winged needle, a mother-to-be
clumsy with the harvest of my blood.

I caught her dancing on the wall,
crushed her with a single applaud.
I opened my hand to a mangle of limbs,
a patch of my own blood – the stigma
of killing something full of me.

Buy Clueless Dogs on our website.

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Friday Poem — Making Love

Masculine happiness

This week’s poem is from Cardiff-based David Foster-Morgan’s provocative debut, Masculine Happiness. The collection is half price until midnight, Sunday 10th January. You can find the book here.

Born and based in Wales, Foster-Morgan has long been a presence in the poetry world, having had poems published widely in magazines and with appearances at workshops, festivals, and events including ‘slams’ where his quiet style and obvious integrity frequently beat louder and less subtle voices to a prize. His debut collection, some years in the making, is inspired in part by his reading of American literature: the conversational tone of Frank O’Hara (‘F’OH’) and the long-lined garrulity of Allen Ginsberg, (‘Allen Ginsberg returns to Llantony Priory’) as well as the models of masculinity handed out to us by Hollywood characters like John Wayne (‘Masculine Happiness’). His ambivalence toward the idea of the ‘hero’ and his observation of the fate of those who have been lauded, like the conflicted protagonist of ‘The City Legend’, is a fruitful area for exposition.

Making Love

I think that we were meant to…
Is it treat as if we were nations
or better meet as friends.
To have no buts
and simply wait ’til fate instructs.
Fate though never interrupts.
Oh: sighs, eyes, easy, thighs.

Oh: find, kind, miss, bliss.

In exquisite orbit on your…
Is it rim
or better promise held within.
Both pleasure and pain
in equal measure, at once the same.
With no words the meaning plain.
Oh: insane, flame, be, flee.

Oh: quest, rest, crux, stuck.

You are…
Is it everything I lack
or better welcome heart and hurry back.
Your soft magnetic air sublime,
wraps me in an ecstasy so kind.
That is I like your style.
Oh: start, apart, qualm, charm.

Oh: light, flight, sun, undone.

I fear you sense my…
Is it following cloud
or better stubborn doubt.
It is a flinching habit to say no
and pinch new love before it can grow.
Give no the elbow.
Oh: aloud, shroud, spite, blight.

Oh: cruel, duel, bequeathed, heed.

Banish fear with…
Is it yes
nothing better than yes.
Defeat strange love with a yes,
fate and doubt distress with a yes.
I would really like you to say yes.
Oh: finesse, mistress, conquest, bless.

Oh: fair, dare, rare, flare.

I watch your hair…
Is it coil like a snake
or better hang at your nape.
High on oblivion’s plain,
a wordless freedom we will claim.
Enjoy the moment, don’t explain.
Oh: arms, charms, find, unconfined
Oh: sublime, entwine, sun, outdone.
Oh: me, thee, we.
Masculine_happiness_72dpirgb
Order David Foster-Morgan’s Masculine Happiness from our website (half-price until midnight, Sunday 10th January).
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Friday Poem – The Red Aeroplane

house of small absences

Our first Friday Poem of 2016 is from Anne-Marie Fyfe’s new collection, House of Small Absences. We hope you enjoy it, and happy New Year!

Anne-Marie Fyfe’s poems have long dwelt on the role that the spaces we inhabit, the places in which we find security, play in our lives: House of Small Absences is an observation window into strange, unsettling spaces—a deserted stage-set, our own personalised ‘museum’, a Piedmont albergo, underground cities, Midtown roof-gardens, convent orchards, houseboats, a foldaway circus, a Romanian sleeper-carriage—the familiar rendered uncanny through the distorting lenses of distance and life’s exigencies, its inevitable lettings-go…

The book opens with ‘The Red Aeroplane’ where witnessing an apparent plane crash sparks a vertiginous sequence of image and memory. We will follow the author in exploring not just specific places and memories but the ‘exponential function of tangents’, all that is implied and suggested.

The Red Aeroplane

From the oratory window I witness
mid-air doom, a slew of concentric
swirls, a trail of forge-sparks,
and that’s it. A vermilion two-seater
stagger-wing loops earthbound,
so much depending upon centrifugal
drive. Slivers of toughened glass
spangle the outer stone sill,
the vacant co-pilot seat
is plummeted deep in rosebed mulch.

I question now if the red bi-plane
ever was, the way sureties tilt
and untangle from any one freezeframe
to its sequel. Maybe I was glimpsing
that two-seater red pedal car
– injection-moulded plastic –
collected one Christmas Eve night
for a fevered child? Or conflating
the replica cherry-red sixty-three
we’d toyed with, tinkered with, briefly
on a tinsmith’s covered stall
that drenched Saturday?
What can’t be
cast in any doubt is the wreckage,
a fragmentary scattering,
the mangledness on the far side
of glass. And how a Galway blue
skyscape proves ineluctably
the exponential function of tangents.

Order Anne-Marie Fyfe’s House of Small Absences from our website.

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Friday Poem – Snow

This week’s poem is by the National Poet of Wales, Gillian Clarke, and is taken from the Seren anthology, Christmas in Wales. If you order two books from our website you’ll get a copy of Christmas in Wales for free! Offer ends Midnight, 24th December.

Celebrate Christmas the Welsh way in the company of some of the country’s leading writers, past and present. Christmas mass, the nativity play, turkey and plum pudding, the Mari Lwyd, presents, the weather, the shopping and post-festive blues are among the many subjects drawn from stories, poems, diaries and letters. Wartime Christmases in Swansea and the Rhondda – and home thoughts from India and Italy – pantomime characters, Christmas cards and New Year Resolutions; R.S. Thomas, Dylan Thomas, Dannie Abse, Gillian Clarke, Catherine Fisher, Bruce Chatwin, Sian James, Kate Roberts and Leslie Norris, Christmas in Wales has all the ingredients for the complete experience of the season of celebration.

Snow

The dreamed Christmas,
flakes shaken out of silences so far
and starry we can’t sleep for listening
for papery rustles out there in the night
and wake to find our ceiling glimmering,
the day a psaltery of light.

So we’re out over the snow fields
before it’s all seen off with a salt-lick
of Atlantic air, then home at dusk, snow-blind
from following chains of fox and crow and hare,
to a fire, a roasting bird, a ringing phone,
and voices wondering where we are.

A day foretold by images
of glassy pond, peasant and snowy roof
over the holy child iconed in gold.
Or women shawled against the goosedown air
pleading with soldiers at a shifting frontier
in the snows of television,

while in the secret dark a fresh snow falls
filling our tracks with stars.

Order Christmas in Wales from our website.

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Friday Poem – For Christmas

This week’s poem is from Christine Evans’ 2007 Wales Book of the Year shortlisted collection, Growth Rings, published in 2006.

This collection from Christine Evans follows well-received Selected Poems.  Hers is a sensitive and 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.

For Christmas

Hubble shows us this:
the star factory in Sagittarius
where time’s a flying strand
looping from a furnace

where, out of the flux, out of the fire,
a boilover of hydrogen and sulphur,
cobalt and vermilion
from the radiant debris,

a scatter of new stars
streams out, seeds of light.
Pinpricks in our darkness:
guides as good as any for the journey.

Order Growth Rings from our website.

 

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Friday Poem – The Snow Dome

This week’s poem is from Paul Henry’s fifth collection, Ingrid’s Husband, first published in 2007.

Here is a book of ghosts, from the mysterious traveller in the title poem who, mistaken for another man, starts to crave his new alter ego, to the first person of ‘Between Two Bridges’, Henry’s long poem on Newport, who follows his teenage ghost across the city for a night:

He pulls away. The wind puts its lips to an arcade.
A seagull on a barber’s pole waits to open its blades.

How the living haunt themselves is the concern of Ingrid’s Husband, and the author discovers his spirits through an imagery of absences: a child’s signature in the dust of an old guitar; the stone plinth where a cafe once stood; a white balloon drifting down a shopping arcade; a chateau, still furnished with belongings of its vanished owner…. Love continues to underscore the commonplace in Paul Henry’s fifth collection and this lyric poet’s distinctive voice continues to haunt its readers.

The Snow Dome

First sun, then snow … my father floats up the lane
in white jeans, a white rose in his claw.
He cuts a Lear-like figure, drifting alone
through the sun and snow.

Wherever you mother goes, I follow
he mutters, brushing the icing from her stone,
its doorstep to a colder house. It snows

and shines about the ornamental scene.
We can’t see for the petals of the rose.
He says she kissed his bald head in the lane,
first with sun, then snow.

Order Ingrid’s Husband from our website.