poetry collection Archives - Page 14 of 17

Posted on June 3, 2016 by Simon appleby

Friday Poem – On Standby

This week’s Friday Poem is taken from Carol Rumens’ hot-off-the-press new collection, Animal People.

As the author says in her brief introduction, ‘the vertebrae of this collection are the seasons of a sometimes Welsh and sometimes English year.’ Rumens’ poems are frequently inspired by places, either wild landscapes as in ‘Fire, Stone, Snowdonia’ or urban scenes as in ‘March Morning, Pearson Park’. But just as often a setting will be a pretext for a theme that has a political, sociological, aesthetic, philosophical or even metaphysical focus. The striking ten-page title poem explores some of the effects and affects of Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD), focusing particularly on Asperger’s Syndrome and how it may be experienced by young women. Rumens opens up this topic with all her characteristic energy, empathy and curiosity.
This is a beautifully intelligent collection of poetry, sure to delight and inspire.

Buy your copy of Animal People now, 20% off on our website for Book Club members.

Posted on May 27, 2016 by Simon appleby

Friday Poem – Borderland

Yesterday marked the beginning of the week-long Hay Festival, where writers from around the world gather in the staggering beauty of the Welsh borders to debate, read, share stories and inspire – among them, Tom Bullough with his new novel, Addlands (Granta).

As a nod to Hay, our Friday poem is ‘Borderland’ from Air Histories by Christopher Meredith. ‘Borderland’ and Air Histories had a significant influence on Tom Bullough’s new Radnorshire-set novel, Addlands.

Christopher Meredith’s Air Histories starts in the Stone Age and ends in the future. It’s marked by formal diversity and a wide range of subjects, with the personal alongside the impersonal and the experimental alongside well-known forms, as well as including some translations from the Welsh. Throughout it engages the rich meanings of its title, touching on the elemental and on historical time, as well as music and story, meditating on human creativity and its fallibilities from knapping an arrowhead to playing the fiddle or making a guitar. Nature is a touchstone, particularly the Black Mountains, near the author’s home, but also often seen ‘aslant’ as in ‘Seeing the Birds’ where sparrows seem suddenly fierce as eagles.

Borderland

Ffin is the Welsh for border. It occurs inside diffiniad which means definition, and in Capel y Ffin, a place in the Black Mountains.

You’ll find a ffin inside each definition.
We see what is when we see what it’s not:
edges are where meanings happen.

On the black whaleback of this mountain
earth curves away so sky can start
to show a ffin’s a kind of definition

where skylarks climb across earth’s turn
to air and pulsing muscle turns to an art-
ful song the edge that lets a meaning happen.

Live rock can yield to mortared stone,
a city to a castle, then a shepherd’s hut,
where ffin’s contained inside a definition,

where the lithic turns into the human.
Here’s where things fall together, not apart
at edges that let meanings happen.

And self here blurs into annihilation.
Larkfall, earthfall, skyfall, manfall each create
the ffin that is the place of definition
the edges where we see our meanings happen.

Buy your copy of Air Histories now, 20% off for Book Club Members.

Posted on May 20, 2016 by Simon appleby

Friday Poem – Suturing Secrets

Ilse Pedler The Dogs that Chase Bicycle Wheels Mslexia pamphlet

This week’s Friday Poem is taken from Ilse Pedler’s new poetry pamphlet The Dogs that Chase Bicycle Wheels.

Ilse Pedler’s marvelous debut poetry booklet, The Dogs that Chase Bicycle Wheels, won the 2015 Mslexia Poetry Pamphlet Competition. Many of her poems are about animals and how they interact with humans, and reflect her working life as a Veterinary Surgeon. Pedler has a careful, empathetic eye for the characteristics of the animals she comes across. Humans and their secrets are also observed, with a sharp wryness but also with a characteristic gentleness.

Suturing Secrets

We are divided into compartments,
separated by taut membranes,

glistening planes of connective tissue,
resilient boundaries.

Today this is damaged,
anaesthetized, surgically explored

your diaphragm is a torn curtain hanging
and like a peep show I’m drawn to look behind.

In the absence of pressure lungs hesitate
to inflate, do their best to conceal

the frantic convulsions at your core,
the struggle for rebirth every second.

I look perhaps longer than I should
at the shuddering flesh, the labouring

beauty, then I pull the curtain back over
and suture the secret inside.

Buy your copy of The Dogs that Chase Bicycle Wheels now, 20% off for Book Club members.

Posted on May 13, 2016 by Simon appleby

Friday Poem – The New World

Tomorrow is International Dylan Thomas Day and we will be celebrating Swansea’s most famous son, so today our Friday Poem is by another Swansea native, Meirion Jordan.

Jordan was born in 1985 in Swansea. His début Moonrise was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and his pamphlet, Strangers Hall, was shortlisted for an East Anglia Book of the Year award.

Finely held moods and moments resonate throughout this unusually accomplished first book. The rich, complex history of Wales often crops up, sometimes in unexpected contexts: ‘The New World’ is a vision, a cross between Dylan Thomas’ ‘Under Milk Wood’ and an early J.G. Ballard novel, of post-global warming Wales, with a polyglot population: “Ronaldinho Davies/wowing the crowds at the Millennium Stadium” and swamped by tropical vegetation: “cobalt lizards and coral snakes/swallowing the cottages an Llandinam/ the mahoganies uprooting Carno’s hearths”.

The New World

Roll on global warming. The Maentwrog Junta
seizing power on a Sunday morning
just after chapel, the frenziedly moustachioed
General Gwydion Mendéz proclaiming martial law
after the third psalm of the evening service.
The Gorseinon drugs cartel expanding
to the Aberystwyth favelas, bringing the clash
of kalashnikovs to constitution hill.
Samba and harps. O Seion Fryn
bawled out at thirty in the shade
by sweating ministers. Cawl mango
and coconuts replacing lava bread. Ronaldinho Davies
wowing the crowds at the Millennium Stadium,
the Rhondda turning out in rainbows
of rippling cloth and streamers to see England lose
four-nil, Islwyn Marley at half time
shaking the stands with sounds from Ynys Mon.
Olwen Perón leading the mob in Marchog Iesu
at the Cwmdonkin bandstand, her voice
spreading like an angelus along
the Taff Fechan, along Cwm Tywi.
David Attenborough filming the fauna
of the Nantgwynant valley, eccentric Englishmen
looking for the lost city of Dolgellau
up Cwm Pennant, out behind Corris.
100 percent humidity at Rhandirmwyn.
Kurtz Jenkins on the shores of Llyn Clywedog,
and everything from Llanidloes to Rhaeadr
declared ‘the dark interior’. The rattan
wrapping itself around the spine of the A470,
the cobalt lizards and the coral snakes
swallowing the cottages at Llandinam,
the mahoganies uprooting Carno’s hearths.
The moon at Devil’s Bridge pulled earthwards
in a sail of vines, the sun
squinting in the eye of a bromeliad
that wields its universe of frogspawn out
from Carnedd Dafydd to the new world.

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Posted on May 6, 2016 by Simon appleby

Friday Poem – The woman on my National Library of Wales library card

This week our Friday Poem is ‘The woman on my National Library of Wales library card’ by Katherine Stansfield, which won the 2014 PENfro poetry competition. The poem is taken from Katherine’s humorous and distinctive debut collection, Playing House.

A concise wit and an unsettling view of the domestic characterise these poems whose subjects are the ordinary as viewed through the author’s satirical yet sympathetic eye. John Lennon’s tooth, an imaginary ‘Canada’, bees in Rhode Island, cats and office politics are all peculiar grist to this author’s mill. She presents both historical subjects such as Captain Scott of the Antarctic, and common objects, such as household bleach, from a skewed perspective, adding humour, drama and a quietly distinctive pathos.

The woman on my National Library of Wales library card

Her mouth says it all –
slack as a jellyfish. They made her

stand against the wall
with no time to pose or comb

the seagulls from her hair,
no time to dig her smile

from pockets of sand.
the Sea fret foaming at her hems

thickened once inside the dusty air
that seeps from books. See, she’s ghosting

under the card’s laminated skin. Almost
gone. She fogged the enquiry desk too.

The attendant lost his hands
in the mist, hence the wonky

shot. She’s looking at a horizon
beyond the frame. I can’t meet

her salt-stiff eye which asks
for silence from the waves

as if such a gift could be given.
She doesn’t get out much now for fear

of mackerel following her home
and wheezing to death in the road,

of mullet in the bath again.
Her doorstep is crunchy with limpets.

Can I take her something back?
She likes romance, set far inland.

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Posted on April 29, 2016 by Simon appleby

Friday Poem – White Clover

This week our Friday Poem is taken from Lynne Hjelmgaard’s new collection, A Boat Called Annalise.

Lynne Hjelmgaard was born in New York and has lived in Denmark, Rome, Paris and London. Her collection, A Boat Called Annalise, records the years she and her husband spent sailing on a boat to the Caribbean and back. The author beautifully evokes life at sea, the dream-like nature of the tropics, and the halcyon days of a marriage.
Hjelmgaard moves from scenes of risk and turbulence, of wild beauty on the open water, to visions of their dream-like destination in the West Indies. The author’s clear-eyed and tender observations are as insightful about the paradox of paradise: tropical splendor amidst local poverty, as they are about the challenges of relationships at close quarters.

White Clover
For Dannie

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Posted on April 22, 2016 by Simon appleby

Friday Poem – April

the visitations kathryn simmonds april friday poem

This week our Friday Poem is from The Visitations by Kathryn Simmonds.

The Visitations is the follow-up to Kathryn’s Forward Prize-winning debut, Sunday at the Skin Launderette. As with her previous collection, an appealing voice prevails, though this simplicity is something of a veil, through which the author, with subtle shifts of language and perspective, manages to imply darker themes and worlds unseen. The tone is often simultaneously satirical and elegiac and the collection abounds with sudden moments of strange illumination: a lime tree strikes up a conversation; a life coach finds an old passport; an infant teeters on the brink of speech. Here are poems where the physical and metaphysical meet, where questions of new motherhood are set against those of faith, and the larger conundrum of how to live.

April

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Posted on April 15, 2016 by Simon appleby

Friday Poem – Yellow Dahlias

The Way the Crocodile Taught Me Katrina Naomi

Yesterday saw us at the Admiral Benbow in Penzance for the launch of Katrina Naomi’s The Way the Crocodile Taught Me, and so this week’s Friday Poem is taken from this gorgeous new collection. If you missed Katrina in Penzance, you have another chance to hear her read on 17 May, when we will be at The Yorkshire Grey, London, for a second launch event. You can find the full details on our website.

The Way the Crocodile Taught Me Penzance launch — Katrina Naomi’s book launch, Admiral Benbow, 14 April

The Way the Crocodile Taught Me is a heartfelt and tragi-comic portrayal of a fraught childhood and adolescence. Central to the book are two sequences: one about an awful stepfather, and the other about a kindly but also comically old-fashioned grandmother. A mother appears, distant, glamorous as a film star. An absent father is also a dream: “After my father left, I grew/ a battery of hearts,/ felt each of them beat,/ like doves in a casket/”. These family poems are both heartbreaking and often hilarious, sometimes both at once.

Yellow Dahlias

This is the image that sticks:
my married mother, her costume cut
low and high, one foot below

the impossible blue of a honeymoon pool,
the other poised on the metal step;
her face, fresh of make-up,

brows plucked in static surprise,
eyes wide with the rubber pull
of yellow dahlias, her new ring and bracelet.

A triumph. My mother emerging
from the water as I’d never seen her before.
Her head, a belisha beacon of hope.

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Posted on April 8, 2016 by Simon appleby

Friday Poem – Spring ’72

To celebrate the coming of spring, our Friday Poem this week is from Sheenagh Pugh’s Selected Poems and is entitled ‘Spring ’72’. This poem is the first Sheenagh ever had published, in one of the 1972 issues of Poetry Wales.

Published in 1990, Sheenagh Pugh’s Selected Poems is the best of her early work: a generous and wide-ranging selection from her first four collections, together with two dozen previously unpublished pieces. Notable inclusions are the prize-winning ‘M.S.A’ and ‘Intercity Lullaby’, and the much-anthologised ‘Sometimes.’ Throughout, a lively and enquiring mind is brought to bear on how we live and die, and how we might live more equitably. Sheenagh Pugh approaches her subject unpredictably, through Norse saga and snooker, apartheid and falling tortoises, in a poetry of invention and conviction.

Spring ’72

Now open flowers on the shirts of boys;
now mica glistens, asphalt’s morning dew,
from pavements up. Now all the girls look pregnant,
and small red sports cars blossom on the streets.

Now all birds are not sparrows; now all women
unwrap their shapes from winter. Now the man
who thought it might be fun to walk to work
find all sight aches, all touch troubles his blood.

Now all the state of opening, upspring, bud’s
soft burst, a green grenade, scrapes at his grief;
now all the many dead dress him in black
for what they had and what he cannot keep.

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Posted on April 1, 2016 by Simon appleby

Friday Poem – Flamingos

Our Friday poem is from the Costa Award-winning book of poetry, My Family and Other Superheroes, by Jonathan Edwards. It is titled ‘Flamingos’ and is being turned into a dance! The humor of the poem makes for an ideal April Fools’ Day piece for all to enjoy.

My Family and Other Superheroes introduces a vibrant and unique new voice from Wales. The superheroes in question are a motley crew. Evel Knievel, Sophia Loren, Ian Rush, Marty McFly, a bicycling nun and a recalcitrant hippo – all leap from these pages and jostle for position, alongside valleys mams, dads and bamps, described with great warmth. Other poems focus on the crammed terraces and abandoned high streets where a working-class and Welsh nationalist politics is hammered out. This is a post-industrial valleys upbringing re-imagined through the prism of pop culture and surrealism.

Flamingos

Who spray-painted the swans? You dilly–dally, 
       shilly-shally in the shallow end
on Meccano legs, your day a foot massage, 
       curve your neck into a clothes hanger
            for your rose-hue tutu and your feather boa.

You’re every little girl’s dream, a shock, a flock 
       of neon signs, advertising candyfloss.
Why do you blush so much? Each time you eat,
       you have to kiss the you-shaped bird who floats
            in the lake surface, steal food from its throat.

February. Outside’s a place of grey
       line managers, timetabled rain, the bus.
But with your silly-billy,Vegas waitress, 
       camouflage-for-a-world-of-joy body,
            Fuck that, you say, let’s all be fabulous.


Buy your copy now.

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