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Friday Poem – ‘I know I’ve gone too far when I think of pappardelle with broccoli’, Rosie Shepperd

Friday Poem Pappardelle with Brocolli Rosie Shepperd

Today we’re celebrating National Cheese Lovers’ Day with Rosie Shepperd’s gloriously gourmet poem, ‘I know I’ve gone too far when I think of pappardelle with broccoli’, from The Man at the Corner Table.

the man at the corner table rosie shepperdRosie Shepperd’s debut collection, The Man at the Corner Table is an evocative and intimate celebration of food and place, with poems that posess a stunning intensity and a winning insistence on detail. ‘I know I’ve gone too far when I think of pappardelle with broccoli’ conjures the speaker’s deliberately precise ritual of food preparation – the broccoli ‘diagonally cut’, the knowledge that ‘steam holds the flavour’ – staging it against loneliness and loss, the depth of emotion making itself known like a subtle flavour in a delicate dish.
In Rosie’s words:

The poem is the product of a little “opposition research” into the link between the perception and conception of feeling. So the grief of the speaker has certain concrete particulars that she doesn’t understand. The process of making the dish with (Alpine) cheese and vivid broccoli is her way of exploring that grief. Fontina (cheese that is made high in the clouds) is a way in to this poem. The way out is an acceptance of the “bitterness” in the herbs and black pepper and in the resolution of making sense of what was and is no longer – through the universal – “sand” or “gravel” or “ash”. The semiotic turn comes with the acknowledged need for comfort – maybe nutmeg or butter. Next time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Poetry Picks: what to buy in the half price sale

poetry picks sale

If your bookshelves are looking a bit bare (or even if they’re full to bursting – who are we to judge?) then we hope our half price sale helps you discover new and intriguing collections to add to your ‘must read’ pile.

Until midnight this Friday (13th January), all books on the Seren website are 50% off. This includes hundreds of poetry books – and in an effort to help you with your decision-making, we’ve picked out a few of our favourites.

Carrie Etter’s Imagined Sons is visceral and emotionally intense, a reflection on the experience of a birthmother who imagined Sons Carrie Ettergave up her son when she was seventeen. These haunting, psalm-like prose poems are bursting with courage and insight. She describes possible encounters with this son, now in his late twenties, expressing how ‘sometimes the melancholy arrives before the remembering’. These poems leave a mark upon the reader, and explore with profound skill the aching agony of displaced motherhood.
The Museum of Disappearing Sounds by Zoë Skoulding is a collection of the_museum_of_disappearing_soundsdensely intellectual poems, experimental, rich and resonant. Rather than aspiring to reach beyond language, these poems focus on the spaces that words occupy, looking at how ‘a sentence reverses itself between two pairs of eyes’ or noting ‘the distance drifted by a word shaken loose from border controls’. Exploratory and alive to the senses, these poems create new perspectives on language and the world in which it exists.
Jonathan Edwards’ My Family and Other Superheroes is (in contrast) utterly my family and other superheroes jonathan edwardsjoyful and hilarious, and introduces the reader to a mishmash of odd characters, including Evel Knievel, Sophia Loren, Ian Rush, Marty McFly, a bicycling nun and a recalcitrant hippo. Winner of the Costa Poetry Prize, and shortlisted for the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize, Jonathan Edwards’ debut has charmed the masses, and is a must-read – if you haven’t already.
Kim Moore’s The Art of Falling twists and manipulates the idea of falling into The Art of Falling Kim Moorean abundance of meanings, and weaves this central theme alongside vivid and unabashedly realistic descriptions of the North and ‘My People’: ‘who swear without knowing they are swearing… scaffolders and plasterers and shoemakers and carers’. Blisteringly raw poems appear in the central sequence, ‘How I Abandoned My Body To His Keeping’: the story of a woman embroiled in a relationship marked by coercion and violence. These are poems that confront the reader, steeped in realism, not designed to soothe or beguile. Midnight, Dhaka is the debut collection by Mir Mahfuz Ali. As a boy, Mahfuz Midnight, Dhaka Mir Mahfuz Aliwitnessed atrocities and writes about them with a searing directness in poems like ‘My Salma’: ‘They brought Salma into the yard, / asked me to watch how they would explode / a bullet into her’. His trauma becomes transformative, and his poetry the key to unlocking memories of a childhood that are rich in nuance, gorgeous in detail and evocative of a beautiful country. Influenced by Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) and Jibanananda Das (1899-1954), as well as modern British poets, Mahfuz brings his own unique voice in these poems, which celebrate the human capacity for love, survival and renewal.

 

See our full Poetry list on the Seren website, and hurry – sale ends midnight, Friday 13 January.

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Friday Poem – ‘Boredom: An Appreciation’, Katrina Naomi

The Way the Crocodile Taught Me Katrina Naomi

This week’s Friday Poem is taken from Katrina Naomi’s The Way the Crocodile Taught Me.

‘Boredom: An Appreciation’ perfectly captures the glory of days lazily spent. In stark contrast to the darker themes present in this collection, Katrina Naomi here paints a luxurious portrait of the strange joys mundane activities can provide.

The Way the Crocodile Taught Me is Katrina Naomi’s second collection, and paints a heartfelt and tragi-comic picture of a fraught childhood and adolescence. The tone of the work is as much tender as turbulent, reflecting the protagonist’s travails. Interspersed with the awful there are moments of humour, of contemplation, redemption, realisation: these are pointed, lively and always entertaining poems.

 

Boredom: An Appreciation

The heavy-shouldered clock of morning,
those slender hands never reaching
past the hours of brown wallpaper.

I don’t have time for boredom now,
to stare at the gas in the fire,
as if I could study flames,

to let my thoughts drift on their thermal,
unharnessed, as if they were never mine –
never could be.

Might I long for a Westgate afternoon,
waiting for the yellow lights
of evening, knowing day had melted –

the dark toffee of it – to listen
to the hiss, the end of the cassette,
re-reading my diary, its brief entries.

And if I sit here long enough,
could I wonder where that jet goes
with its teatime, pinkish trail,

imagine being a passenger,
the tedium of that life,
while I bite the ends of my hair.

 

Buy your copy of The Way the Crocodile Taught Me now: only £4.99 (half price) until 13 January in the Seren January Sale.

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Friday Poem – ‘The Things She Burned That Year’ , Judy Brown

It’s almost time to ring in the New Year, and in keeping with the theme of leaving the past behind, our Friday Poem is ‘The Things She Burned That Year’ by Judy Brown, from her Poetry Book Society recommended collection, Crowd Sensations.

Elterwater Rain Crowd Sensations Judy BrownCrowd Sensations is a worthy follow-up to Judy Brown’s Forward-prize nominated debut, Loudness.
Brown is a poet of dazzling contrasts, of thoughtful paradox, intimate confidences and precise evocations. Her titles and first lines both draw you right into a poem and then quite often surprise you with a narrative that you hadn’t quite expected.

 

 

The Things She Burned That Year

Whole nights claimed her on sooty knees,
worshipping the heat of a first open fire.
She tended it with the caution of a mistress,

offered her past and part of her future.
She kindled her half-filled diary; each curling
page exposed the inky, unburned next.

All afternoon it read itself to the blaze,
settled down at dusk to a soft grey bed.
She was watching someone she knew grow old.

Then she’d fed the fire a banquet of porn
that she no longer had an attic to store.
The printed bodies, the breasts and cocks

were nibbled off by a bright green flame
before the paper charred in the usual way.
And the final text that lanterned out

in the beige-tiled fireplace flared so fast
that the thing she wanted to erase
was lost: even its capsicum name is dust.

 

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Friday Poem – ‘Nativity’, Caroline Smith

Our Friday Poem this week is a modern-day parallel to the Nativity story, where we see the hardships faced by a migrant couple upon the birth of their child.

The Immigration Handbook Caroline Smith‘Nativity’ is taken from Caroline Smith’s collection, The Immigration Handbook, which tells the stories of immigrants seeking citizenship in the UK – their hopes, their anguish, the bureaucracy they face, and their small moments of triumph. In these strikingly moving poems, the characters step vividly off the page, and we listen to their often harrowing stories as if first-hand. Caroline Smith’s poems are a moving record of global people movement, the story of our time.

 

Nativity

She lay on the sofa
its hard cushions
squashed down into the corner
under the heavy paisley quilt
she’d found there.
There was nothing
left to eat in the fridge,
its door nudged open
swollen with ice,
the fibrous cold
stealing into the room.
Just ice and knots of sweetcorn
heaped in a corner
like rancid yellow straw,
and a bottle of baby milk
left by the Kosovan family
housed there before her.
She’d heard they’d been allowed to stay.
Baby John Harris Farruku
brother to Adriatuk, Flutura and Etmir,
born three days inside the amnesty.
His birth had allowed
the family to begin again
given them the hope
of an ordinary life.

 

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Friday Poem – ‘The Infants’ Christmas Concert’, Tony Curtis

Christmas is fast approaching, so our Friday Poem this week is a festive one from Tony Curtis, originally published in Letting Go (1983) and again, just recently, in Tony’s new From the Fortunate Isles: New & Selected Poems.

From the Fortunate Isles: New and Selected Poems, Tony CurtisFrom the Fortunate Isles features poems from ten of Tony’s published collections, as well as a substantial number of new poems. This is a poet whose themes and variations remain consistent: a deep affection for his roots in West Wales, tender attachments to family, a profound interest in the wars of the last century, and an abiding fascination for all art forms, particularly painting and poetry.

 

The Infants’ Christmas Concert

A moment of hush, held breath –
the fairies and robbers, the soldiers
and dancers are in position
– then the piano begins.
This sounds otherworldly,
each note a drop of water falling distantly.

Angels swallow trumpets,
a robot trips and turtles in his cardboard shell;
the ballerina crumples and cries.
They may not know why, but still
perform for us the pattern of sentiment,
superstition and love: we sigh,
smile, laugh and applaud.

“The Rich Man gave them a bag of gold
and everyone cheered on the day
the church had a new bell.”
The couple are starched in best white –
as the singing swells, they marry
and claim their gold.
It is intensely sad and fleetingly
realises the ghosts of our innocence.

Flashlights – the year’s frozen
for this instant.
Keep that – don’t move – stay there,
stay somewhere like that for ever.

It all builds to The Nativity:
Joseph, Mary and the three glittering Kings
change without age, time after time.
Only the baby Jesus doll remains,

a scarred and worn wooden face held magically
fresh each year in the laundered swaddling.
The audience – parents and children in arms,
grandparents and neighbours, point and giggle,
there’s a glow and, finally, we all sing.

This has worked some sort of renewal,
some sort of an ending.

 

From the Fortunate Isles: New & Selected Poems is available from our website: £9.99
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Friday Poem – ‘Without Narcissus’, Rhiannon Hooson

without narcissus rhiannon hooson

Last night, we welcomed a chilly December in Chapter Arts, with Rhiannon Hooson reading poems from her debut collection, The Other City. It seemed appropriate to have Friday’s Poem from this beguiling new release, for those who missed out.

screenshot-2016-12-02-12-02-07
Rhiannon reading to a full house at December’s First Thursday event

the-other-city_quicksand-cover-copyWith a sharp focus and beautiful resonance, the deeply felt poems from The Other City  tend to travel in distinct streams: some reference and re-make narratives from classical Greek myth; some rework elements of Welsh history, both ancient, and modern. There are also a number of poems exploring the idea of otherness and the uncanny, where actions are done and undone, and the familiar made unfamiliar.

 

Without Narcissus

The lack of his blindness shocks the silver water black.
Your palm’s slap against its surface is looped silence:
bare shoulders with their heron stoop,
the wet ropes of your black hair, the empty water
and the stiff-leafed lilies which break for sharp fingers,
their pink throats silent and smiling. Speak.

Over the water the red rock leans and watches.
Your nails like fish-scales break against
the cool shadow of its noon, and the silence. Speak.
Even the fish have voices, even the rough
hush of the trees, even the birds.You press your body
to the dark-loomed sediment and learn its silence, touch the red
heat of your mouth to the rock and learn the syllables
of its unspeech. Speak.

Birds watch you writing the mangled sign of your name
wet hair strung across the tangled mats of cress,
white fingers and their fish-belly pallor, your white lips
kissed against the petals of the lilies.You can speak
their silence back to them so well, so well.

 

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Friday Poem – ‘Bluetit Feeding’, Ruth Bidgood

friday poem bluetit feeding ruth bidgood

Our Friday Poem this week is a careful portrayal of the fragility and beauty of nature. So take some time away from the Black Friday madness, and enjoy Ruth Bidgood’s ‘Bluetit Feeding’.

New & Selected Ruth Bidgood Friday Poem Bluetit Feeding‘Bluetit Feeding’ is taken from New and Selected Poems. This generous selection of work highlights the steady accumulation of a significant oeuvre. Bidgood’s ostensible subjects are the storied landscape and history of her region of mid-Wales, the hills and valleys of Powys and Breconshire, but her themes frequently have a wider reach, a spiritual depth that is often darkly suggestive and mysterious.

 

Bluetit Feeding

Early at the window in starved winter
a little knot of energies, a beaky hunger
fluffed and sleeked, taps, prises
unsucculent scraps of cracked putty,
swallows with a ripple of tiny throat.

Behind it climbs a bleak pale hill
stained with ruts of December bracken.
White morning moon is barely seen
on hardly darker sky that seems
opaque, a barrier against pressure
of immensities. Imperceptibly
the chill day flows out to black deeps.

The bluetit pauses in its arid feeding,
flirts a crisp wing. Half-handful of warmth,
it stays for a moment sill,
compellingly centre-stage, diminishing
to a backdrop the hill, dull morning sky,
pale echo of moon, black vertiginous
trenches of space-ocean, myriads
of molten and frozen, dying and rising worlds.

 

 

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Friday Poem – ‘On the Sudden Passing of a Crow’, Eoghan Walls

Friday Poem On the Sudden Passing of a Crow Eoghan Walls

Happy Friday, everyone. This week our Friday Poem is taken from Eoghan Walls’ debut collection, The Salt Harvest. Eoghan has just been shortlisted for the prestigious Manchester Poetry Prize – so do send all your good luck his way.

the_salt_harvest72Dark and evocative, the poems in The Salt Harvest involve rich, multi-layered descriptions of the natural world, and cast a sardonic and tender eye on the human condition. The climates of Walls’ native Ireland inspire both the muscular imagery and the complex forms of work. Also apparent is an ambivalent, often deeply ironic attitude towards a culture once steeped in religion, whilst threads of humour and an imaginative playfulness run throughout.

 

on the sudden passing of a crow eoghan walls

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Salt Harvest is available from the Seren website: £8.99 (£7.19 for Book Club members)

 

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Friday Poem – ‘Armistice Day ’77, Honiton’, John Tripp

John Tripp Friday Poem Armistice Day

Today, to mark Armistice Day, our Friday Poem is one of remembrance and silence from John Tripp’s Selected Poems.

John Tripp Selected PoemsA well known and popular figure on the poetry scene, John Tripp’s untimely death in 1986 meant the loss of a ’devoted and passionate poet’, as John Ormond calls him in the Introduction to this book. Pithy, regretful, bitter, angry, at times tender, John Tripp’s poetry was always engaged with the issues which most mattered to him.

Selected Poems draws on all John Tripp’s books, together with work published since the last of those collections, Passing Through (1984), and previously unpublished poems.

 

Armistice Day ’77, Honiton

The two minutes’ silence was cut to one
that November day; it was a busy world.
By chance, on my way to a gig
I walked into a ceremony of six
in the rain: crosses in a ring, and the poppies soaked.

Down two sides of the slab were names
linked to this piece of England – the sound
of country stock grown old in duty
and the acceptance of pointless loss.
Names going back to Minden and before.

(Were these the only ones left
to remember their dead?
Already sixty seconds were lopped
off any dignity. Would their children
forget, as I had forgotten?)

No more came. On some other day
I might have felt an interloper
marring their ritual. At eleven o’clock
the men took off their hats
and we all bowed our heads.

A minute in the rain in a country town
may whisper the whole grief of history.
Picture a knot of seven around that block,
the red wet poppies, and just for a moment
a complete and utter silence in the world.

 

John Tripp: Selected Poems is available from the Seren website: £4.95