poetry collection Archives - Page 10 of 17

Posted on February 17, 2017 by Simon appleby

Friday Poem – ‘Questions’, Kate Bingham

This week our Friday Poem is ‘Questions’, from Infragreen by Kate Bingham.

‘Questions’ unpicks the intricate imagined details behind moments of silence, as the speaker interrogates ‘your mouth’s unstated strategy / for the avoidance of speech’. The poem gives voice to the part inside us all that pleads for communication.
Infragreen is Kate Bingham’s third collection, with poems that are perceptive, persuasive and intricately made. Bingham takes the reader on a startling and unfamiliar journey through everyday experiences and phenomena. Her keen eye, reflectiveness and quiet wit endow her subjects with a shimmering freshness.

Infragreen is available from the Seren website: £9.99

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Posted on February 10, 2017 by Simon appleby

Friday Poem – ‘Love Birds’, Paul Henry

As an early celebration of Saint Valentine’s Day, this week’s Friday Poem is ‘Love Birds’ from Paul Henry’s The Brittle Sea: New and Selected Poems.

The ritualistic moments of connection in ‘Love Birds’ defy the couple’s physical separation, and we see a resilience and unification almost comical in its persistence. ‘The screws must laugh’ at this display, yet it is sombre and essential, an anchor against ‘the difficult, unreal dawns’ faced alone.

The Brittle Sea contains a substantial selection of Paul Henry’s beautifully crafted poems from the last two decades, plus new material. 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.

Love Birds

They rendezvous each night, at ten,
for ten minutes, behind closed eyes,
he in his cell, she in the brown rocker.
And once a fortnight, for half an hour,
their fingers form a desperate nest,
remembering the robin he’d fed
that misses him at the back door,
its freedom disorientated.

The screws must laugh at these love birds,
each week’s confetti of letters,
or secretly gain faith from matching
her sentences to his.

He hears her singing Porgi Amor
in the difficult, unreal dawns
when the walls barge further into him
and terrible lights flash in his mind.
When the bars of his hands close tightly on
what might prove the last breath
of some precious, invisible creature.

She knows all this, waiting
in the early kitchen, lovingly timing
two cracked eggs in a saucepan.

Get your copy of The Brittle Sea: New and Selected Poems from the Seren website: £9.99

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Posted on February 3, 2017 by Simon appleby

Friday Poem – ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Motherhood’, Carolyn Jess-Cooke

This week our Friday Poem comes from Carolyn Jess-Cooke’s poetry collection Boom!.

Boom! is a brilliant contribution to the evolving archive of women’s experience, and its poems range from free-verse riffs on essential moments of joy and blame, to artful sonnets on the physical act of childbirth, to meditative and discursive pieces on the way that love for a child suffuses your being. The collection serves as an exploration into the profound impact motherhood can have upon creativity. Carolyn has continued to explore the relationship between motherhood and creativity as editor of Writing Motherhood, an anthology of poetry, interviews and essays, which is publishing 09 March, and is available for pre-order from our website (£12.99).

Boom! is available from the Seren website: £9.99

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Posted on January 27, 2017 by Simon appleby

Friday Poem – ‘Her to Apollo’, Carol Rumens

Image credit http://www.jwwaterhouse.com/view.cfm?recordid=93

Our Friday Poem this week is ‘Her to Apollo’ by Carol Rumens from her latest collection, Animal People.

‘The title, ‘Her to Apollo’, contains a pun on Hymn to Apollo. I don’t have a particular Hymn in mind; it’s simply an allusion the classical genre. I wanted to signal a feminist ‘take’ on the theme. The speaker is a woman addressing the Sun God as her lover, though with no great reverence towards him.’ says Carol Rumens.
A power struggle sits at the heart of this poem, the spiky female voice biting back against the god figure’s assumed importance. Their dialogue, hard and violent in nature, breaks apart the classical base of the poem, and so although it opens with a mythological premise, ‘Her to Apollo’ instead turns out to be a sort of modern morality tale.

Her to Apollo

I fall in love and sunbathe less these days –
I must be old, the bark-legged woman says.
Stuff your Olympics. I’ll be in my black,
pissing on you, Apollo. But the star
that spikes earth’s drinks and rapes her slow, sings back,
my face is all you got, bitch, all you are.
The woman spreads her thighs. Such green light beckons,
and gods, however cracked, must claim their tokens

from flesh that knows it’s trees and cloud and slate,
and not too tall to stretch a prayer. Gold pieces
wink in her eyes like birch-leaves, ripple out
like baby cephalopods. And still he lies,
that god – I’m all you need, I’m all you are;
your genesis, baby, and your nemesis.
He oils her richly, and turns up the power;
she’s barbecued, and calls it paradise.

Iron insouciance that dawns with love’s
self-love, and gilds earth’s have-nots into haves,
you win, she thinks, and sees next autumn scatter
the little, light-stunned faces, plain as scars,
and as unique – each leaf uniquely spoiled
by cell-death, yet each death the same. Who’ll matter?
Apollo, know yourself – you’re gas, not gold,
and one of around two-hundred billion stars.

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Posted on January 20, 2017 by Simon appleby

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.

Rosie 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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Posted on January 10, 2017 by Simon appleby

Poetry Picks: what to buy in the half price 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 gave 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 densely 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 joyful 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 an 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 witnessed 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.

Posted on January 9, 2017 by Simon appleby

January Giveaway: win a copy of The Other City by Rhiannon Hooson

This month we are giving away a copy of Rhiannon Hooson’s ‘beguiling’ debut poetry collection, The Other City.

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

About The Other City:
Rhiannon Hooson is a gifted young poet born in mid-Wales and currently living in the Welsh Marches. The Other City is her debut collection of poems.
Sharply focused, beautifully resonant, deeply felt, these poems tend to travel in distinct streams: some reference and re-make narratives from classical Greek myth; others explore the idea of otherness and the uncanny, where actions are done and undone, and the familiar made unfamiliar.
‘This is a beguiling debut from a poet who already has a recognizable voice and emotional register. Sensuous, musical, darkly involved, the poems make and confound their own realities.’ – Graham Mort

The winner of this giveaway will be chosen at random from all our email subscribers on 1st February 2017, so if you haven’t already, hurry and sign up for our newsletter before the end of the month!

Posted on January 6, 2017 by Simon appleby

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.

Posted on December 30, 2016 by Simon appleby

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.

Crowd 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.

Crowd Sensations is available from the Seren website: £9.99

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Posted on December 23, 2016 by Simon appleby

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.

‘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.

The Immigration Handbook is available from the Seren website: £9.99

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