poet 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.’

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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