poetry Archives - Page 43 of 61

Posted on March 8, 2017 by Simon appleby

A treat for International Women’s Day

Treat for International Women's Day Women's Work half price

Today is International Women’s Day, a worldwide celebration of women’s achievements and a call for gender equality.

We can’t think of a better book to treat yourself to than Women’s Work: Modern Women Poets Writing in English, so for today only, you can buy your copy at half price on our website.

With over 250 contributors, this generous selection of poetry by women features poets from the USA, Canada, England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Australia, and New Zealand. You will find familiar names as well as new discoveries amongst the contributors: Margaret Atwood, Sujata Bhatt, Colette Bryce, Siobhán Campbell, Amy Clampitt, Polly Clark, Wendy Cope (and many others). Some may ask: is the literary establishment still as dominated by men as it once was? Who gets to decide the canon? Eva Salzman opens Women’s Work with a lively polemic, making the case for the women-only anthology with characteristic wit and flair.

Buy your copy of Women’s Work today:
~~£14.99~~
£7.49

Offer ends midnight, 08/03/2017

Posted on March 3, 2017 by Simon appleby

Friday Poem – ‘The shame of our island’, Siobhán Campbell

Friday Poem The shame of our island Siobhan Campbell

This week our Friday Poem is ‘The shame of our island’ from Siobhán Campbell’s brand new collection, Heat Signature.

In ‘The shame of our island’ we are confronted with a sense of contested history, in which the hunter’s tongue-in-cheek aim is to ‘see the steaming innards’ of his almost-extinct prey. The ‘shame’ of the title permeates the poem, with the speaker’s questions demanding justification, yet receiving no answer.
Heat Signature is Siobhán Campbell’s fourth full collection, and is composed in her characteristically spikey voice: infused with an intelligence that resists easy answers to the conundrums that have faced her Irish homeland, but also suffused with a grudging admiration for the citizens who have survived their tumultuous history. The blend of dark comedy, tragedy and politics is entirely typical of Campbell’s complex, thoughtful and profoundly entertaining poetry.

The shame of our island

is that we killed the wolf.
Not just the last
but the two before that.

I knew a man who met a man
who was the cousin removed
of the great-grandson of the man
who killed the third-last wolf
on the island.

Slit it he did,
to see the steaming innards –
how long they were, how tightly wound.

Had it a white paw to the fore?
That gene would have been recessive.
Was there a black bar across the yellow eye?
No time to notice its différence.

Is this a wolf with its bared teeth
and its lairy smell
and its fetlock tipped with white?

Is this wolfish?

Heat Signature is available from the Seren website: £9.99
Join our free, no-purchase-necessary Book Club for a 20% discount every time you shop with us

Attend the Heat Signature book launch in London

Join us at The Flying Horse on Wednesday 15 March, 7:30pm, where we will be celebrating the launch of Heat Signature with a poetry reading by the author and book signing opportunity. Refreshments will be provided and entry is free, so bring your friends for an evening of poetry and merriment.
Find out more

Save

Posted on March 2, 2017 by Simon appleby

Find a free Seren book this World Book Day

Today we are celebrating all things literary for World Book Day, now in its 20th year. We want the world to discover our fantastic authors, and to help a few of you do just that, we’ve left a selection of our books all over Cardiff for lucky people to find and keep.

If you’re out in Cardiff today, stop for a coffee in one of the lovely independent cafés and you might well find a Seren book hiding somewhere near you! Take it, enjoy it, and pass it on to someone new to enjoy afterwards to spread the World Book Day love.

Can you guess which books we’ve hidden? Poetry, fiction, non-fiction – there’s a real mix out there, just waiting to be found.

Happy World Book Day, and happy book hunting…

Posted on February 24, 2017 by Simon appleby

Friday Poem – ‘Big Sky’, Sheenagh Pugh

This week our Friday Poem is ‘Big Sky’, from Short Days, Long Shadows by Sheenagh Pugh.

In ‘Big Sky’ the overwhelming vastness of the sky is viewed as if for the first time, at a distance from the claustrophobic trappings of the everyday. We are catapulted to the ‘great ragged brush-strokes of cirrus’ and further still, to the ‘cluster and prickle’ of planets.
Short Days, Long Shadows is Sheenagh Pugh’s twelth collection, and takes her into a new, northern landscape, the Shetland Islands, with poems steeped in the wilder weathers and views of rugged coastlines, sweeping sea-vistas and the hardy historical characters who have inhabited these lands.

Big Sky

Unbroken by forest or town, this skyline
all hills and ocean: you look up
and your gaze, stopped by no branch, no office block,
overflows with sky, too much to take in
even when you turn slowly in the circle
of green and blue. Who knew how vast
cumulus could boil over, or how sweeping
the great ragged brush-strokes of cirrus,
or, at night, how many bright worlds,
hundreds of years away, cluster and prickle
above our heads? It is as if,
having lived all your life in the jewelled oval
of a miniature, you stepped into a frame
the size of a gallery wall, a landscape
where a few small figures, lost against distance,
seem to be looking for the way out.

Short Days, Long Shadows is available from the Seren website: £9.99

Join our free, no-purchase-necessary Book Club for a 20% discount every time you shop with us

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

Join our free, no-purchase-necessary Book Club for a 20% discount every time you shop with us

Save

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

Join our free, no-purchase-necessary Book Club for 20% off every time you shop with us

Save

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

Join our free, no-purchase-necessary Book Club for 20% discount every time you shop with us

Save

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.

Buy your copy of Animal People from the Seren website: £9.99
Join our free Book Club for 20% off every time you shop with us

Save

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.

Buy your copy of The Man at the Corner Table from the Seren website: £9.99

Join our free, no-purchase necessary Book Club for 20% off every time you shop with us

Save

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.

Sign up to our newsletter

Sign up to our newsletter