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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.


Regeneration by Merion Jordan is available on our website: £8.99
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Friday Poem – ‘Selfridges’, Tamar Yoseloff

Friday Poem Selfridges Tamar Yoseloff

This week our Friday Poem is ‘Selfridges’, the opening number from Tamar Yoseloff’s A Formula for Night: New and Selected Poems.

Tamar Yoseloff A Formula for NightFirst published in Sweetheart (Slow Dancer Press, 1998), ‘Selfridges’ portrays an intermingling of awe and repulsion as the speaker, in her youth, stumbles upon the meat counter whilst shopping with her mother.
A Formula for Night: New and Selected Poems encompasses selections from four of Yoseloff’s published print volumes: Sweetheart, Barnard’s Star, Fetch and The City with Horns; and poems from her collaborations with artists: Formerly, Marks and Desire Paths, as well as a generous selection of beautiful new poems.

 

 

Selfridges

My mother held a wire basket in one hand,
my hand in the other. Occasionally she’d pause
to cross an item from her list as she plucked it
from the shelf. For a brief moment she released
her grip and I must have wandered off,
realised I was lost near the butcher’s counter.
The full odour of fresh meat, blood and sawdust
hit me suddenly; I looked up to see hares, headless,
strung from metal hooks. I don’t think I’d even seen
a hare alive. The butcher was hacking a flank into steaks,
the first cut opening the bright pink of the leg,
the second negotiating bone. But what stopped me
in my tracks was the offal, displayed lovingly on a bed
of lettuce and ice – lambs’ kidneys, calves’ livers,
sweetbreads, hearts – all the vitals without function.
Just then I felt my mother yank me by the wrist;
she must have scolded me for drifting away
in a strange store, a foreign country, I can’t recall.
Twenty-five years later I can still see
those visceral hunks, served up like a delicacy,
indelicate, hearty, more real laid out there
than anything that beat inside me.

 

A Formula for Night: New and Selected Poems is available from the Seren website: £12.99
Join our free, no-purchase-necessary Book Club for a 20% discount every time you shop with us

 

 

 

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Friday Poem – ‘This Is Not A Rescue’, Emily Blewitt

Friday Poem Emily Blewitt This Is Not A Rescue

Last night we squeezed into packed Waterstones Cardiff to hear Emily Blewitt read from her brand new collection, This Is Not A Rescue. Today we are thrilled to feature the title poem here on the blog as this week’s Friday Poem.

Emily Blewitt This Is Not A Rescue Waterstones

 

This Is Not A Rescue Emily BlewittIn This Is Not A Rescue Emily Blewitt writes both forcefully and tenderly about refusing to be rescued, rescuing oneself, and rescuing others. This book is about finding love and keeping it, negotiating difficult family and personal struggles, and looking at the world with a lively, sardonic eye.
The title poem reconfigures the hurt and healing relationships can offer in terms of fire and water. Swimming grants a strange, beautiful freedom, shot through with hidden dangers, such as ‘the pebbles that in secret you have sewn into your skirts’. An exploration of human connection, this poem gently stirs up feelings of adventurousness, daring, love.

 

 

Friday Poem This Is Not A Rescue Emily Blewitt

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This Is Not A Rescue is available from the Seren website: £9.99
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Friday Poem – ‘The Birds of Rhiannon’, Rhian Edwards

Friday Poem The Birds of Rhiannon Brood

Our Friday Poem this week is ‘The Birds of Rhiannon’, the opening number from Rhian Edwards’ new pamphlet, Brood.

Brood Rhian EdwardsThis poem introduces us (via a nod to the famous medieval Mabinogion story where magic birds, said to bring people back from the dead, console the heartbroken Celtic princess Rhiannon) to a darkly resonant tone that echoes from the myth.
Birds are at all times present in these vivid, acutely personal poems: hovering, chattering, casting their shadows, they are both tricksters and familiars. At the centre of Brood is a ten-part poem based upon the rhyme ‘One for Sorrow, Two for Joy…’ which charts the progression of a troubling relationship from infatuation to disillusionment, alongside the birth of a much-loved daughter. Welsh artist Paul Edwards’ charcoal magpie drawings, inspired by this sequence, feature throughout the pamphlet.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


Brood is available from the Seren website: £6.00
Join our free, no-purchase-necessary Book Club for a 20% discount every time you shop with us

 

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Friday Poem: ‘Chinese Lacquer Egg’, Deryn Rees-Jones

Friday Poem Chinese Lacquer Egg Deryn Rees-Jones

We’d like to wish you a very happy Easter, and in celebration our Friday Poem today is ‘Chinese Lacquer Egg’ by Deryn Rees-Jones.

Deryn Rees-Jones What It's Like To Be Alive Selected Poems‘Chinese Lacquer Egg’ first featured in TS Eliot Prize-shortlisted Burying the Wren, and more recently in What It’s Like to Be Alive: Selected Poems. ‘Something is beginning’, it starts: there is a change, in outlook as well as nature. With intense lyricism the poet calls on the Roethkean ‘small things’ of the universe – birds, flowers, eggs – mysterious, and magical as well as ordinary.
What It’s Like to Be Alive features poems from Burying the Wren and four other collections, showcasing the arc of development in her writing over twenty-five years as she visits and revisits the concerns that are the mainstay of her writing: memory, love, desire, and heartbreak in all its manifestations.

 

A Chinese Lacquer Egg

Something is beginning. We feel it in the raw edges
of our dreams, our bodies hostage to light, to weather.
It is filling us with the weight of summer
which floats like helium through our wintered bones.
We wonder at it all, surprised by warmth, a sudden downpour –
the ruffled line of birdsong, a forgotten bulb
forcing its way through sodden earth towards the sun.
Or this Chinese lacquer egg, which appeared one morning
in my outstretched palm. Beyond the sound
of aeroplane or train, as we drift asleep, hands cupped
to the pillow, it shares its oval mysteries. Listen!
Between breath and silence it is showing itself.
In these shortened nights it is not unlike rapture,
an unworded prayer its indelible hum.

 

 

What It’s Like to Be Alive is available from the Seren website: £12.99
Join our free, no-purchase-necessary Book Club for a 20% discount every time you shop with us

 

 

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Win a copy of Heat Signature by Siobhán Campbell

Win Heat Signature by Siobhan Campbell

Enter our monthly giveaway to win April’s prize: a copy of Siobhán Campbell’s new poetry collection, Heat Signature.

To enter, simply sign up to the Seren newsletter before 1st May:
https://www.serenbooks.com/newsletter/signup

Heat Signature Siobhan Campbell giveaway

Siobhán Campbell has won awards in the National Poetry Competition, the Troubadour International Poetry Competition, the Templar Poetry Prize and most recently was awarded the Oxford Brookes International Poetry Prize. Heat Signature is her fourth full collection and follows Cross-Talk (Seren, 2009).

About Heat Signature:
Siobhán Campbell’s new collection is packed full of her lively, frequently provocative poems. An Irish poet, Campbell has inherited a rich vocabulary, the necessary ‘slant’ point of view, and a store of lively anecdotes. This is a poetry that resists rapture and/or easy solutions, it rather glories in difficulty: the cussed, intractable nature of humanity, of a natural world beset with swarming bees, weeds and feral horses. This is a poetic voice that once encountered, is never forgotten.

 

The winner of this giveaway will be chosen at random from all our email subscribers on 1st May 2017, so make sure you sign up to Seren News before this deadline to be in with a chance of winning.

Feeling generous? Why not invite your friends to enter, by signing up using the link below:
http://serenbooks.com/newsletter/signup

 

 

 

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Legend of the Month: Ruth Bidgood

Legend of the Month Ruth Bidgood

Each month we are shining the spotlight on one fantastic Seren author in honour of Wales’ Year of Legends. Our selection for April is the poet Ruth Bidgood.

Ruth Bidgood turns 95 this year, and her poetry career spans over five decades. She was born in Blaendulais, near Neath, educated at Oxford, and worked as a coder in Alexandria, Egypt in World War Two. She has lived in mid-Wales since the mid-sixties.

Legend of the Month Ruth Bidgood

She has published fourteen books of poetry, including The Fluent Moment (Seren, 1996), Singing to Wolves (Seren, 2000), and her New and Selected Poems (Seren, 2004). Her twelfth collection, Time Being (Seren, 2009), won the Roland Mathias Prize and was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her most recent collection is Land Music (Cinnamon, 2016). As well as poetry, she has written a prose book about Wales, Parishes of the Buzzard (Goldleaf, 2000), and published many articles in country historical journals.

Matthew Jarvis writes of Bidgood’s achievement: ‘The heart of Ruth Bidgood’s poetry is her varied and intertwined rendition of the mid-Wales area that she has made her home… Artistically, what she has achieved in such material is nothing less than a mid Wales epic.’

Here is ‘Legacy’, from New and Selected Poems, which featured as our Poem of the Month in the April edition of Seren News:

Ruth Bidgood 'Legacy' New and Selected Poems

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Find more of Ruth Bidgood’s poetry on the Year of Legends page, alongside books by March’s featured author, Dannie Abse.

 

 

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Friday Poem – ‘Newborn’, Graham Clifford

Friday Poem 'Newborn' Graham Clifford

Our Friday Poem this week is ‘Newborn’ from The Hitting Game by Graham Clifford.

The Hitting Game, Graham Clifford

‘Newborn’ is a disarmingly intimate poem which tenderly describes the ‘unfurling’ of a precious new life,  the minute changes in her being, and her otherwordly fragility.
The Hitting Game is Graham Clifford’s debut collection, ‘inventive and grounded, witty and vulnerable’ (Michael Laskey). There is a gentleness and empathy, humour and pathos, with poems full of unexpected dramas and fresh enxhantments which provoke as well as delight.

 

 

Newborn

She nearly isn’t here. So soft
I have to watch to know
I’ve touched this pink steam
somehow holding her shape.

Dimmer switch screwed almost shut
we are stock-still
nocturnal desert-mammals, saucer-eyed,
cramping in thunder-struck poses.
Her spider-leg eyelashes
rest on a web that has us while she dreams
the leaf-edge of her country.

Unfurling by millimetres in spiked air,
anemone fingers splay then clench
as she tunes herself in,
becomes herself minutely, frost
fringing the shore of the cleanest puddle.

 

The Hitting Game is available from the Seren website: £9.99
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