poet

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Seren Authors at the Hay Festival

A whole host of Seren authors will be appearing at this year’s Telegraph Hay Festival from 30th May to 4th June – Gwyneth Lewis, Niall Griffiths, Ken Elias, Ceri Thomas, Paul Henry, Mavis Nicholson, Peter J. Conradi and Grahame Davies. Book your tickets now on the Hay Festival website: www.hayfestival.com

Gwyneth Lewis and Niall Griffiths
New Stories from the Mabinogion
Event 146 • Monday 30 May 2011, 2.30pm • Venue: Summer House
Two more new versions of the Welsh mythologies. Lewis spins the tale of Blodeuwedd, the woman made of flowers, into a sci-fi setting in The Meat Tree. Griffiths conjures an Iraq-bound squaddie and a Cardiff gangsta in The Dreams of Max and Ronnie.
Price: £6.00

Ken Elias talks to Ceri Thomas
Thin Partitions
Event 178 • Tuesday 31 May 2011, 11:30am • Venue: Elmley Foundation Theatre
An illustrated conversation surveying forty years of the esteemed Glynneath artist’s work in painting, collage and photomontage.
Price: £5.00

Paul Henry & Patrick Jones
The Brittle Sea, Hafan Cymru
Event 257 • Thursday 2 June 2011, 1pm • Venue: The Moot
Paul Henry reads and discusses his New and Selected Poems. The individual human voice, the ragged vagaries of the heart and soul, the joys and sorrows of family life feature here but this poetry is personal without being confessional, preferring tender observation to sensationalism or didacticism. Jones reads writing arising from his work with victims of domestic abuse. Chaired by Benna Waites.
Price: £4.00

Mavis Nicholson talks to Sarah Crompton
What Did You Do in the War, Mummy?
Event 275 • Thursday 2 June 2011, 6.45pm • Venue: Sky Arts Studio
The broadcaster has interviewed women from lumber-jills and landgirls to undercover spies and entertainers about the new freedoms, the make-do and mend, the hopes and the fears, as well as the post-war adjustments they had to make.
Price: £6.00

Brenda Maddox, Peter J Conradi, Tom Bullough
At the Bright Hem of God: Radnorshire Pastoral
Event 291 • Friday 3 June 2011, 10am • Venue: Elmley Foundation Theatre
The authors discuss how the wild, rural landscape of Radnorshire inspires their work and that of others before them, from Gerald of Wales to Vaughan and Traherne, Francis Kilvert, Eric Gill, David Jones and Bruce Chatwin.
Price: £5.00

Grahame Davies talks to Merryl Wyn Davies
The Dragon and the Crescent
Event 340 • Saturday 4 June 2011, 10am • Venue: Elmley Foundation Theatre
Nine centuries of contact between Wales and Islam. Chaired by the Director of the Muslim Institute.
Price: £5.00

Seren hopes to see as many of you there as possible!

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Pascale Petit Exciting US Book Tour

Seren is proud to announce that Pascale Petit is touring What the Water Gave Me: Poems After Frida Kahlo in the US!
Petit’s collection of poetry was shortlisted for the T.S Eliot Prize 2010 and long listed for Wales Book of the Year 2011.

Petit’s itinerary is;

Saturday 30 April, 6.00pm.  Cornelia St Café, NYC.
Mark Doty & Pascale Petit
29 Cornelia Street, New York, NY 10014
Phone: 212 989 9319. Email: [email protected] Website: www.corneliastreetcafe.com

Thursday 5 May (tbc). Metta Theatre, Taos, New Mexico.
Veronica Golos, Andrea Watson and Pascale Petit reading for Cinco de Mayo
1470 Paseo Del Pueblo Sur, El Prado, New Mexico 87529

Monday 9 May, 7.30pm. Moonday Poetry at Village Books, LA.
Lois P. Jones & Pascale Petit (illustrated reading)
1049 Swarthmore Ave., Pacific Palisades, California
Phone: (310) 454 4063 Email: [email protected] Website: www.moondaypoetry.com

Tuesday 10 May, 7.30pm. Poetry Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, California.
Rebecca Forest and Pascale Petit
Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Ave., Santa Cruz
Phone: (831) 464-8983 Email: [email protected] Website: www.baymoon.com/~poetrysantacruz

For more information on Pascale Petit and her poetry collection click the tag ‘Pascale Petit’ or read more on our website www.serenbooks.com

Good luck and congratulations to Pascale Petit!

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Ruth Bidgood wins the Roland Mathias Prize 2011

Ruth Bidgood wins the Roland Mathias Prize 2011 with her collection of poetry Time Being, published by Seren (2009).

The £3,000 prize was awarded to Ruth Bidgood at ceremony in Roland Mathias’ home town of Brecon, supported by BBC Wales and hosted by Nicola Heywood Thomas, presenter of Radio Wales’ Arts Show.

In future years, it is to be incorporated into the Wales Book of the Year.

Congratulations Ruth!

Ruth Bidgood with editor Amy Wack at the prize giving event in Brecon.


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Pascale Petit Published in the US

Pascale Petit’s latest collection of poetry What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo has now been published by Black Lawrence Press in the US (April, 2011). Pascale Petit is currently touring the US, she is reading at the Bowery Poetry Club, New York City – Saturday 16th April 6pm. Pascale’s collection is still available to buy in the UK.

For more information about Petit’s poetry collection and Petit the author, read ‘Seren Authors’ on our blog or  check out the Seren website.

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‘What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Khalo’

Author: Pascale Petit

SHORTLISTED FOR THE T.S ELIOT PRIZE 2010

LONG LISTED FOR WALES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2011

“Pascale’s poems are as fresh as paint, and make you look all over again at Frida and her brilliant and tragic life.” Jackie Kay,  The Observer

“Poems about paintings rarely set off fireworks, but this is ekphrasis with a difference: Petit speaks in Kahlo’s voice with eerie believability, animating her paintings with a behind-the-scenes narrative of romantic and reproductive woes, chronic pain after a bus crash, and the occasional moment of joy. ‘Whenever we make love, you say/it’s like fucking a crash –/I bring the bus with me into the bedroom’ (‘Remembrance of an Open Wound’)” Time Out London

What the Water Gave Me contains fifty-two poems in the voice of the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. Some of the poems are close interpretations of Kahlo’s work, while others are parallels or version homages where Petit draws on her experience as a visual artist to create alternative ‘paintings’ with words. More than just a verse biography, this collection explores how Kahlo transformed trauma into art after the artist’s near-fatal bus accident. Petit, with her vivid style, her feel for nature and her understanding of pain and redemption, fully inhabits Kahlo’s world. Each poem is an evocation of “how art works on the pain spectrum”, laced with splashes of ferocious colour.

“Their apparent shared sensibility makes the ventriloquism of these poems entirely unforced, and while Kahlo’s voice is subtly distinguished from Petit’s own, both women have a way of taking painful, private experiences and transmuting them, through imagery, into something that has the power of folklore. They capture the unsettling spirit of Frida Kahlo and her work perfectly.”Poetry London

“No other British poet I am aware of can match the powerful mythic imagination of Pascale Petit.” Les Murray, Times Literary Supplement

Pascale Petit’s latest collection of poetry ‘What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo’ has now been published by Black Lawrence Press in the US (April, 2011). 

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‘Understudies: New and Selected Poems’

Anne-Marie Fyfe – as is apparent in her Understudies: New and Selected Poems – is a subtle and engaging poet. She has developed much like a painter, spare themes moving towards a deeper complexity. Her earlier work includes quite a few domestic interiors; rooms recalled from an Irish childhood and stories told by parents and grandparents. Later poems often feature crucial or pitvotal moments in her life and the imagined lives of others: a significant conversation, the look a woman gives herself in the mirror when she’s about to leave her husband, the odour left in the air by a certain perfume. All this eventually evolves into her characteristic poem, a cityscape wrought with careful observation and melded with flashbacks of memory, both her own and including her family, and others, beautifully imagined. Her voice is direct, with a conversational tone that invites you into the narrative. This volume includes selections from her previous books:Late Crossing (1999), Tickets from a Blank Window (2002) – both from Rockingham Press, and The Ghost Twin (Peterloo, 2005).

Published by Seren in September 2010.