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Friday Poem — ‘Self-Portrait with Monkey’, Pascale Petit

This week our Friday Poem is ‘Self-Portrait with Monkey’ by Pascale Petit, taken from her 2010 poetry collection, What the Water Gave Me: Poems After Frida Kahlo.

What the Water Gave Me Frida Kahlo Pascale PetitThe poems of What the Water Gave Me are narrated through the voice of the twentieth-century Mexican painter, Frida Kahlo. The collection features a diverse range of biographical verse poems: some are interpretations of Kahlo’s work; others are inspired by the painter but also draw on aspects of Petit’s own experience as a visual artist, where she can be seen to create art with words. Through her vivid style, which evokes a closeness to nature and an understanding of pain and redemption, Petit offers us a valuable insight into Kahlo’s life.
‘Self-Portrait with Monkey’ is inspired by Kahlo’s 1938 oil painting of the same name: the iconic Mexican artist sits with a monkey draped around her shoulder and ribbons in her hair, framed by a background of leaves.

 

Frida Kahlo poem Pascale Petit

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What the Water Gave Me: Poems After Frida Kahlo is available from the Seren website: £8.99

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Friday Poem – ‘Crisscross’, Lynne Hjelmgaard

Friday Poem Crisscross Lynne Hjelmgaard

This week our Friday Poem is ‘Crisscross’ by Lynne Hjelmgaard, taken from her most recent poetry collection, A Boat Called Annalise.

A Boat Called AnnaliseThe poems of A Boat Called Annalise recall a journey this much-travelled author took on a sailboat to the Caribbean and back to Europe with her husband. First we experience the tentative first months at sea, the author finding her ‘sea-legs’. As the book moves on, we find the author navigating not only the turbulent seascape, but also grief, healing, and nostalgia for the halcyon days of her marriage.
In ‘Crisscross’ we are post-voyage, and the mood is one of reflection. The author and her husband seem in stark contrast: one having gratefully retreated from the sea, and the other at a loss without its strangely comforting wildness.

 

Crisscross Lynne Hjelmgaard A Boat Called Annalise

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Friday Poem – ‘The Lovely Disciplines’, Martyn Crucefix

Friday Poem The Lovely Disciplines Martyn Crucefix

This week our Friday Poem is the title poem from Martyn Crucefix’s brand new collection, The Lovely Disciplines, which came out just yesterday.

Martyn Crucefix The Lovely DisciplinesDisplaying his characteristic flair, craft and intelligence, Crucefix’s new poems often begin with the visible, the tangible, the ordinary, yet through each act of attentiveness and the delicate fluidity of the language they re-discover the extraordinary in the everyday.
The book is split into three sections, and ‘The Lovely Disciplines’ appears in section two, which is not just the centre but the emotional heart of this new collection. It features a number of tender poems that recollect moments with ageing parents: a father, losing his memory, gets lost driving a familiar route, with such loss prefiguring wider and deeper losses to come; a childhood home is suddenly shorn of its reassuring familiarity. Here, aged figures in a hospital ward lean away from the lives they once knew, whilst loved ones ‘rest useless hands’ and wait, for a release.

 

The Lovely Disciplines Friday Poem

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Lovely Disciplines is available from the Seren website: £9.99

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Friday Poem – ‘The 2nd Razumovsky Quartet and the Reductionists’, Vuyelwa Carlin

Friday Poem Vuyelwa Carlin

Our Friday Poem this week is ‘The 2nd Razumovsky Quartet and the Reductionists’, from Vuyelwa Carlin’s fourth collection, The Solitary.

Vuyelwa Carlin The SolitaryKnown for her distinctive style that owes something to Emily Dickinson’s brevity, Carlin is a surprising and unusual voice in modern poetry. This fourth collection features four distinct sections: the first includes a series of poems dedicated to two young grandchildren and to an autistic son. The second concerns itself with music, art, ageing and dementia. The third section has poems that recall the landcscape and people of Africa; there are also vivid pieces about wartime Poland, the Third Reich and the Holocaust. The final, title section, ‘The Solitary’, is a long sonnet sequence inspired by the lives of religious solitaires.

The Solitary is half price (£3.99) on the Seren website until midnight, Sunday 23 July, as part of our summer sale.

 

The 2nd Razumovsky Quartet and the Reductionists

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Solitary is available from the Seren website: RRP £7.99 £3.99 (until midnight, Sunday 23 July)

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Friday Poem – ‘Brown Furniture’, Ellie Evans

Friday Poem Brown Furniture Ellie Evans

This week our Friday Poem is ‘Brown Furniture’ from The Ivy Hides the Fig-ripe Duchess by Ellie Evans.

Ellie Evans The Ivy Hides the Fig-ripe DuchessEllie Evans’ first and only collection, The Ivy Hides the Fig-ripe Duchess, was published in 2011, a year before Evans sadly passed away. In this exhilirating book, the author uses a surrealist palette of imagery and a tightly focused idiom, taking us on strange journeys: to the post-apocalyptic world of the title poem, or into a skewed 18th century Venice in ‘The Zograscope’. There is also a palpable delight in technique: you will find a sonnet, a villanelle, triolets and a concise free verse where she employs rhyme, half-rhyme, and subtle alliteration.
‘Brown Furniture’ doesn’t take us to strange worlds or uncanny places, but the personification of an old oak cupboard evokes the oddity of aging, its painful straining: ‘I dent the carpet … you shove and shove/ and your eyes pop.’ The surface simplicity of the poem veils deep wells of meaning.

 

 

Friday Poem Ellie Evans Brown Furniture

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Ivy Hides the Fig-ripe Duchess is availabe from the Seren website: £8.99

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Friday Poem – ‘Waking in Picardy’, Graham Mort

Friday Poem Graham Mort Waking in Picardy

This week we welcomed the publication of Graham Mort’s masterly tenth collection, Black Shiver Moss, and so today as Friday Poem we feature ‘Waking in Picardy’, the opening poem from this brand new collection.

New places are made familiar by the vivid descriptions and evocations in Black Shiver Moss. In ‘Waking in Picardy’ we see the intimacies of nature: ‘damselflies glisten, sex to sex/ promiscuously winged.’ Elsewhere in this startling collection, Mort moves us beyond the visible, towards spiritual and philosophical concerns. What really impresses is how Mort manages to create and sustain a darkly magnificent tone, reminiscent of Beethoven’s late quartets, of Shakespeare’s tragedies, of classical landscape painting, a tone suffused with seriousness and mortality.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Black Shiver Moss is available from the Seren website: £9.99

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Friday Poem – ‘Kinetic Melodies’, Nerys Williams

Kinetic Melodies Nerys Williams Friday Poem

This week our Friday Poem is Nerys Williams’ ‘Kinetic Melodies’, from her award-winning debut collection, Sound Archive.

Nerys Williams Sound ArchiveWinner of the DLR Strong Award and shortlisted for both the Forward Prize and the Michael Murphey Prize, Nerys Williams’ Sound Archive is a strikingly original and critically acclaimed first collection of poems. Using formal strategies similar to modernist painting: abstraction, dislocation, surrealist juxtaposition, Williams conjures a complex music, intriguing narratives, and poems full of atmosphere that query identity, gender, and the dream of art as a vehicle for emotion and meaning.
Look out for Nerys Williams’ new collection, Cabaret, out soon from New Dublin Press.

 

 

Kinetic Melodies

It is easy to speak of language as ownership,
your purring phonemes are not my right
nor any dialogic imagination.

It is like the time I mixed metaphors
and found myself nude, addressing a crowd
with no immediate

parallel or paradox to flail at.
An empty lectern, a thousand eyes.

Small inconsistencies alert us:
a time to find a colour of saying,
how dialect forms the melody of tall tales.

After storm fields have disappeared
sulphur fills the air where the tree stands.

Here it says I am branch
root and hollow, rub my charcal into clean hands,
serenade me with your speech,
curse the carrion crow below.

 

Sound Archive is available from the Seren website: £8.99

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Friday Poem – ‘Blackbird’, Pascale Petit

Friday Poem Pascale Petit Blackbird

Our Friday Poem this week is ‘Blackbird’ by Pascale Petit, from her collection Fauverie.

Pascale Petit, FauverieWeaving together hardship and beauty, ‘Blackbird’ invokes the image of a bird’s feathers as an abstract comfort in the face of confinement: ‘each number / became a blackbird’s feather.’
This volume has childhood trauma and a dying father at its heart, and the poems skillfully transform painful experiences into expressions of grief. Fauverie redeems the darker forces of human nature while celebrating the ferocity and grace of endangered species: at its heart is the title’s name-sake: the big-cat house in the Jardin des Plantes zoo. Paris, too, takes centre stage – a city savage as the Amazon, haunted by Aramis the black jaguar and a menagerie of wild animals.

 

 

Blackbird

When they locked me
in the cellar

and told me to count
slowly to a hundred,

each number
became a blackbird’s feather

and all the darkness
sang

through the keyhole
of my yellow beak.

 

 

Fauverie is available from the Seren website: £9.99

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Friday Poem – ‘Song for the Unburied’, Carol Rumens

Carol Rumens Song for the Unburied Friday Poem

Our thoughts are with Manchester, and we don’t have words to express our sorrow. In tribute we feature Carol Rumens’ ‘Song for the Unburied’ as this week’s Friday Poem.

Blind Spots Carol Rumens‘Song for the Unburied’ is taken from Carol Rumens’ 2008 collection Blind Spots, a masterclass of inventive, intelligent, original, and relevant modern poetry. A major voice in contemporary verse, Rumens is admired as much for her technical brilliance as for the range, breadth and subtlety of her subject matter. You might find a sonnet, a sestina, a villanelle but you’ll also chance across a pantoum or a ghazal, or a fluid free verse poem where birdsong flickers off the edges of the page. Most uncommonly, these poems are informed by a consciousness that is as fiercely personal and tender as it is public-minded and political.

 

 

Carol Rumens Song for the Unburied

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Friday Poem – ‘Branwen’s starling’, Meirion Jordan

Meirion Jordan Branwen's starling Friday Poem

Lady Charlotte Guest, the first to publish a full collection of the Mabinogion legends in translation, was born on this day in 1812. In celebration, our Friday Poem is ‘Branwen’s starling’ from Meiron Jordan’s Mabinogion-inspired collection, Regeneration.

regeneration meirion jordan friday poemRegeneration is Welsh poet Meirion Jordan’s take on the medieval manuscripts known today as Llyfr Coch Hergest and Llyfr Gwyn Rhydderch (the Red Book of Hergest and the White Book of Rhydderch). This collection is a re-imagining, inspired by source material that includes the stories of the Mabinogion, and Malory’s version of King Arthur’s tales.
In ‘Red Book’ we meet characters drawn from the eleven stories of the Mabinogi, like ‘Arawn, lord of Annwn’; ‘Rhiannon’s gossips’ and ‘Blodauwedd (the woman made of flowers)’. These poems evoke what Meirion Jordan calls in his insightful preface ‘half-recalled heroic landscapes’; they capture the elusive essence of these characters, their mysterious passions and their sometimes violent and often strange adventures in Jordan’s distinctive poetic style. His pared-down pure lyricism and tightly enjambed free-verse lines bring brevity and clarity to these tales without subtracting their unsettling power to move us.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the Mabinogion story of Branwen, Daughter of Llŷr, the princess is married to Matholwch, King of Ireland. Enraged that he has not been consulted about the match, Branwen’s half-brother Efnysien mutilates the groom-to-be’s horses and Matholwch leaves with his bride, still bitter, but pacified by the gift of a magic couldron which can bring the dead back to life. Branwen endures much abuse after she arrives in Ireland and so tames a starling to fly to her brother Brân, King of Wales, so she may be saved. After a period of war and great devastation, Branwen is returned to Wales, and dies grieving over the destruction caused on her account.


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