poetry Archives - Page 50 of 61

Posted on March 18, 2016 by Simon appleby

Friday Poem – ‘Campbell’ by Siobhán Campbell

St Patrick’s Day has just passed and fittingly, our Friday Poem this week comes from Irish poet Siobhán Campbell’s collection, Cross-Talk.

Acerbic, cool, controlled, this is poetry with attitude. Many of the stories in this collection start in Ireland and although the cadences are sweetly lyrical, the narratives are otherwise. Politics here is intrinsic to the tales of the sly, the warped, the landlady “Mean as Ireland in the 50’s”. Nature is deftly invoked as a counterpoint to human illusions. The apparently personal poems here are cast in a more tender, yet characteristically unsentimental light. Campbell brings the lyric close to the conflicts that spur our passions, both personal and political. While full of wit, this collection challenges the reader by dealing with fundamental questions of borders, identity, violence and responsibility.

Siobhán’s poem ‘Framed’ has just won the Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition 2016, and ‘The same people living in the same place’ was just the featured reading at the launch of The Stinging Fly’s In the Wake of the Rising edition, edited by Sean O’Reilly.

Campbell

“I shall never deny those who came to this gnarled coast
with a skinful of sopped hope and started with their brood
this trail that would become the family you call yours.

You know in Ulster Scots they don’t use the word ‘lane’
but have to say ‘wee road’. The laming of a tongue
will map it out of mind unless it has a name.

Raymond, Ursula, the two Hughs, who laid on betting sheets,
knew when to settle odds and how to be discreet,
paid blind to the sidelong flutter of small groups.

They each made one more shift from anything that marked,
though wondered through two wars what way to stream a lay
for those who come home in droves from fights that were not ours.

I am the last.

Though you are from the south, you need to find the will
to hold a vowel too long. Tell people by their heed
and know who must be paid. Keep always your own name.
It takes a softened tongue to fill a twisted mouth.”

Buy your copy now.

Posted on March 17, 2016 by Simon appleby

Happy St Patrick’s Day 2016

Happy St Patrick’s Day to every one of you, far and wide.

And here’s our bookish Irish flag in honour of the day, pieced together using just a few of our green, white and orange books.

Here is the full list of titles featured in our St Patrick’s Day ‘flag’:

Poetry and Privacy: Questioning Public Interpretations of Contemporary British and Irish Poetry;
The Ivy Hides the Fig-Ripe Duchess;
The Scattering;
The Dragon and the Crescent;
Crossing Over;
Masculine Happiness;
Bilbao – New York – Bilbao;
The Woman at the Window;
All the Souls;
The Hitting Game;
Dirt Roads;
Big Low Tide;
Zen-Cymru;
Christmas in Wales;
The Shop;
If You Fall I Will Catch You;
Midas’ Daughter;
Eros Proposes a Toast;
The Visitations;
Playing House;
Midnight, Dhaka;
Daniel’s Beetles.

We have been lucky enough to add some great Irish and Ireland-based authors to our list over the years who have written some gorgeous books.

Of special mention (and visible in the ‘flag’, above) is Jaki McCarrick’s The Scattering, a collection of nineteen stories, many of which are set on the Irish border. One of the stories ‘The Visit’ won the Wasafiri Prize for new fiction, and many have been published to much acclaim in literary magazines.

Another Irish voice that has recently appeared is Helen Blackhurst. Her debut novel Swimming on Dry Land, which follows a family’s quest for a new life in the Australian outback (as well as their search for missing 4-year-old daughter Georgie), was released just before Christmas.

In Liam Carson’s family memoir Call Mother a Lonely Field, the author’s Irish-speaking, West Belfast childhood is described through still-present echoes of the Second World War, dystopian science fiction, American comic books and punk rock. The memoir was shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2013.

We hope you enjoy St Patrick’s Day!

Posted on March 11, 2016 by Simon appleby

Friday Poem | My Father’s Wardrobe

This week, our Friday Poem is ‘My Father’s Wardrobe’, from Pascale Petit’s Fauverie, which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2014.

The Fauverie of this book is the big-cat house in the Jardin des Plantes zoo. But the word also evokes the Fauves, ‘primitive’ painters who used raw colour straight from the tube. Like The Zoo Father, Petit’s acclaimed second collection, this volume has childhood trauma and a dying father at its heart, while Paris takes centre stage – a city savage as the Amazon, haunted by Aramis the black jaguar and a menagerie of wild animals. Transforming childhood horrors to ultimately mourn a lost parent, Fauverie redeems the darker forces of human nature while celebrating the ferocity and grace of endangered species. Five poems from Fauverie won the 2013 Manchester Poetry Prize and the manuscript in progress was awarded an Arts Council England Grant for the Arts.

My Father’s Wardrobe
after Peter Redgrove

In the late afternoon he begins his toilette –
he has limestone pyjamas threaded with fossils,
a nightshirt of catacombs through which his dreams drip.
He has a dressing gown woven with petrol fumes, between its folds
echo car-horns and the murmur of tourists.
He tries on the long rail of awakening suits.
He dresses from the quarries that built Paris.
He wears a cathedral cloak with chimera eyes.
His raincoat is stuccoed with spouting gargoyles.
He has trousers that are stained-glass windows,
casting shadows like candied fruit as he walks.
His cravat is a knotted métro train,
one tie is an escalator, another a fountain
with Saint-Michel fighting Satan.
A carousel turns silently between his knees
and in it a boy is singing on a lacquered foal.
He has a shirt of hotel fronts
and a waistcoat of bridges under which bateaux mouches glide.
He emerges from the trapdoors of nightclubs
in a wedding suit of pavements that steam in the sun
and in it he marries the dawn.
He has a jacket made of wind-blown newspapers
and a cocktail suit of cigarette smoke
with balconies for pockets. Sometimes
he wears a suit of ash that scatters when he moves.

Buy your copy now.

Pascale Petit will be at Tŷ Newydd Writing Centre, March 14-19, along with Robert Minhinnick for Writing the Wild: A Poetry Course. To book tickets, visit the Tŷ Newydd website.

Posted on March 8, 2016 by Simon appleby

International Women’s Day: celebrating Seren’s female poets

International Women’s Day 2016 has arrived. We celebrate this year by highlighting just a few of the talented women we’ve been fortunate enough to publish. There will always be more names to mention and more works to appreciate, and you can find countless gorgeous books written by women on our website. But none-the-less, we hope you enjoy hearing about just a few of the Seren women writers and their achievements.

In this blog post, the first of two, we focus on the Seren female poets. Poetry Editor Amy Wack has been with us at Seren for over twenty years, publishing countless collections by women. The gender balance of most UK publishers favours men but in our case, with Amy at the helm, the balance is far more even.

Amy: Seren has a very good record for promoting, and bringing forth women writers and we owe this both to the Seren Board, and the forward-looking people at the Welsh Books Council, as well as the skill of my co-commissioner: Fiction Editor at Seren, Penny Thomas.

Women’s Work, edited by Eva Salzman and Amy Wack
March 2016, £14.99
Featuring over 100 poets, Women’s Work: Women Poets Writing in English, has been re-printed. The 2016 edition features a revised introduction and updated author biographies.
Women’s Work contains classic poems by famous poets as well as lesser-known works. Editor Eva Salzman has provided an opening essay that artfully picks apart the statistics involving women’s work in anthologies and points out, with her characteristically vigorous wit, just who gets to choose the canon, and why. Along with co-Editor Amy Wack (Seren poetry editor), they’ve both ranged broadly over the English-speaking world, and aimed to represent women of colour as well as those from the more esoteric wings of the style spectrum.

Poets published by Seren included in Women’s Work:

Kate Bingham
Jean Earle
Carrie Etter
Catherine Fisher
Hilary Menos
Deryn Rees-Jones
Vuylwa Carlin
Pascale Petit
Carolyn Jess-Cooke
Anne-Marie Fyfe
Kathryn Gray
Siobhan Campbell
Kathryn Maris
Anne Cluysenaar
Hilary Llewellyn-Williams
Tamar Yoseloff
Kathryn Simmonds
Zoe Skoulding
Christine Evans
Sarah Corbett
Carol Rumens

Collections published in the last few years include Kim Moore’s critically acclaimed debut The Art of Falling, Tamar Yoseloff’s A Formula for Night: New and Selected Poems, Rosie Shepperd’s The Man at the Corner Table, and Katherine Stansfield’s debut, Playing House.

Hot off the press, we have Crowd Sensations by Judy Brown, which is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and Lynne Hjelmgaard’s A Boat Called Annalise, which recalls a journey the author took with her late husband on a sailboat, to the Caribbean and back.

You can look forward to many more collections by female poets, and on the horizon we have Mslexia Poetry Pamphlet Competition winner The Dogs that Chase Bicycle Wheels by Ilse Pedler (available to pre-order), Katrina Naomi’s hard-hitting The Way the Crocodile Taught Me (April), and Animal People by Carol Rumens (April).

Posted on March 4, 2016 by Simon appleby

Friday Poem – Different Water

Happy Friday one and all. This week’s Friday Poem is an exploration of the significance and power of motherhood, taken from Carolyn Jess-Cooke’s collection, Boom!, as a little early celebration of Mother’s Day this coming Sunday.

‘Becoming a mother changed me in every single way,’ says the author, ‘my first child – born in October 2006 – just about knocked me sideways. There were many reasons for this, but here’s the biggest one: I could not believe how public and political the (hugely personal) experience of motherhood was.’

Jess-Cooke found, as many parents do, that the juggling act required to raise young children and continue a professional and creative life, is both exhausting and fulfilling. Viewing motherhood from a multiplicity of artful angles, the author says, ‘Coupled with all this was the love I had for my children. It completely and utterly blew me away, how much I could love another human being.’

Different Water

When a girl becomes a mother there is no fanfare.
No government re-elections, no erupting volcanoes.
The baby mops up the praise. But quietly
there are earthquakes, realigning planets.
When you ask to hold her newborn you are
addressing someone who just became a tiger,
so be careful.When she soothes the child that has
shrieked for three hours she is the Matador,
sunlit with relief. Sometimes, at around 2am,
she is the only woman ever to have given birth.
At the supermarket she is a calm strong oak
dragging a thrashing child past the strawberries.
At the school gates she’s autumn weeping leaves
of every hue for the loss of summer. Often
she spies the girl she once was and thinks, wimp.
Like grass trees after fire, like crops in new weather,
like a river clasping different water, there is
no fanfare when a girl becomes a mother.

Buy your copy here.

Posted on March 1, 2016 by Simon appleby

Happy St David’s Day 2016

Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Hapus! Happy St David’s Day to one and all.

This is a day to celebrate Welshness, so that means warm Welsh cakes, bunches of fresh daffodils and one or two good Welsh books to read.

Why not celebrate this St David’s Day by investing in a new book published by one of the fabulous Welsh publishers? Visit your local bookshop or gwales.com to see the great selection of Welsh books out there.

Want to know more about our Welsh publishing friends? Read a little about each of them below.

Parthian’s long list of gorgeous titles include Rebecca F. John’s award-winning short story collection Clown’s Shoes.

Firefly Press have loads of great children’s books including Branford Boase-longlisted Aubrey and the Terrible Yoot.

Honno has a well-deserved reputation for publishing some of the best women’s literature in Wales.

Gwasg Carreg Gwalch publishes an astounding range of Welsh interest books for adults, children and visitors to Wales in both Welsh and English language.

Cinnamon are an innovative press, publishing fiction, poetry and non-fiction books, not defined by genre but by their ability to be thought-provoking and to say something new.

Gomer is the oldest publisher still running in Wales and publishes across the board with children’s titles, plays, poetry, bilingual books and more.

Graffeg have produced and published over 100 illustrated books since 2003, with titles about food, arts, culture, heritage and architecture, gardens, landscapes, photography, sport and lifestyle.

Y Lolfa started out as unofficial printers to the new, activist Welsh Language Society in the ’60s, and have evolved to produce an ever-widening range of popular books in both Welsh and English.

University of Wales Press publishes around 70 new books and journals a year, primarily in the fields of European studies, philosophy, literature, history, Welsh and Celtic studies.

And lastly there’s us here at Seren, bringing new poetry, fiction and non-fiction to you each year. From our list we suggest Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize-winner Significance, Man Booker Prize-longlisted The Last Hundred Days or Costa Poetry Award-winner My Family and Other Superheroes for some extra-special St David’s Day reading.

There is an astounding amount of literature produced in Wales each year, everything from fiction, to guide books, to scholarly material. We hope you find a new book to fall in love with this St David’s Day. Support Welsh publishing, because #WelshBooksMatter.

Posted on February 26, 2016 by Simon appleby

Friday Poem – Elterwater Rain

This week our Friday Poem is taken from the brand new, beautiful Crowd Sensations by Judy Brown. A Poetry Book Society Recommendation, Crowd Sensations is the worthy follow-up to Judy’s Forward Prize-nominated debut, Loudness.

Judy Brown is a poet of vivid contrasts, of thoughtful paradox, intimate confidences and precise evocations. Her titles and first lines draw readers into a poem then often surprise with an unexpected narrative. A key theme in this new collection is the contrast between living in the city and the countryside; her take on landscape is original and characteristically unnerving: ‘Elterwater Rain’, ‘Dove Cottage Ferns’ and ‘One of the Summer People’ reflect on nature and the place of the traveller, the incomer, the tourist.

Elterwater Rain

When I came to write of it there was no rain,
just the last of its ectoplasm shivering
in a pool on the terrace’s lowest slate.

No sky winks in the left-behind liquid,
only the garden table’s black metal underside –
all is prediction, absence, an oracle’s glum vigil –

whilst the air, hyperactive, holds more weather:
weather folded in weather, the rest of the day
remains to be dealt like a deck of wet cards.

Town rain splits and skids but this land accepts
what is given. Foliage moves against foliage;
water drains down the conifers’ inner ladders.

Something thirsts for each substance spilled
but this liquid is neighbourly, a local’s drink.
Outside Ambleside’s tourist shops, dog-bowls

brim with downpour. Here the last shower
hangs about too, old drops slung like bats
from the bird-feeder and the patio chairs.

Buy your copy now.

Posted on February 19, 2016 by Simon appleby

Friday Poem – A Psalm for the Scaffolders

A Psalm for the Scaffolders Kim Moore The Art of Falling

This week’s Friday Poem comes from Kim Moore’s acclaimed debut, The Art of Falling.

These are poems that confront the reader, steeped in realism, they are not designed to soothe or beguile. They are not designed with careful overlays of irony and although frequently clever, they are not pretentious but vigorously alive and often quite funny.

Already a winner of multiple prizes, such as the Northern Promise Award (2014), Moore writes poems that are both moving and memorable.

A Psalm for the Scaffolders

who balanced like tightrope walkers,
who could run up the bracing
faster than you or I could climb
a ladder, who wore red shorts
and worked bare-chested,
who cut their safety vests in half,
a psalm for the scaffolders
and their vans, their steel
toe-capped boots, their coffee mugs,
a psalm for those who learnt
to put up a scaffold standing
on just one board, a psalm
for the scaffolder who could put
a six-inch nail in a piece of wood
with just his palm, a psalm
for those who don’t like rules
or things taking too long, who now
mustn’t go to work uncovered,
who mustn’t cut their safety vests
or climb without ladders, who must
use three boards at all times,
a psalm for the scaffolders
who fall with a harness on,
who have ten minutes to be rescued,
a psalm for the scaffolder who fell
in a clear area, a tube giving way,
that long slow fall, a psalm for him,
who fell thirty feet and survived,
a psalm for the scaffolder
who saw him fall, a psalm for those
at the top of buildings, the wind whistling
in their ears, the sky in their voices,
for those who lift and carry
and shout and swear, for those
who can recite the lengths of boards
and tubes like a song, a psalm for them,
the ones who don’t like heights
but spent their whole life hiding it,
a psalm for those who work too long,
a psalm for my father, a psalm for him.

Buy your copy now.

Posted on February 14, 2016 by Simon appleby

Happy Valentine’s Day

Love is all around and we here at Seren would like to wish you all a happy Valentine’s Day.

Whether you spend the day in the arms of a loved one or in the pages of your favourite book, we hope you enjoy it.

And as an extra treat for you on this most hallowed day, we have taken 35% off selected poetry titles (ending midnight tonight).

Love yo’self! Find captivating poetry in our Valentine’s poetry sale.

Posted on February 12, 2016 by Simon appleby

Friday Poem – Love

This week, our Friday Poem is taken from Cohabitation by Kate Bingham.

Until midnight on February 14th, claim 35% off this beautiful collection in our Valentine’s poetry sale.

A brisk wit and intelligence characterises these poems by Kate Bingham. Her subjects are friends, family, work, the experiences of any day, but her keen and compassionate focus brings these moments vividly to life. Her gift is a point of view that is startling, moving and humorous.

Reflective and playful, intimate and exuberant, these poems have a wry, deliberate logic of their own which makes Cohabitation an engaging as well as an illuminating first collection.

Love

There were so many flies we spoke in sign language
and wore long socks and sun-glasses for protection.

Just thinking of them as eggs or creamy worms
writhing, unseen, in the flower heads
could make you sick,

but it was a kind of torture, with the grasses deep
and the air so soft,
not to go out into the haze.

A kind of ecstasy to risk bare skin
in the profusion.

Buy your copy of Cohabitation now, and discover the other treasures in our Valentine’s poetry sale.

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