Rhiannon Hooson Archives

Posted on March 31, 2023May 17, 2023 by Seren Books

Friday Poem – ‘In Spring’ by Rhiannon Hooson

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘In Spring’ by Rhiannon Hooson from her collection The Other City. Rhiannon’s new collection Goliat was published in 2022.

In Spring
There are leaves like hands opening
and the old queen in her rotten palanquin
teetering along the road, stones
in the black ground opening like eyes
you open your mouth to sing
the road bursts into blossom
ticks fall from the backs of horses
nests from the eaves.
In attic rooms fanfared with creaking ropes
poets hanging quietly sift into insects,
find cracks, escape
and burrow into the bronze shock
of the sky. Those pinkly newborn children
uncurl on their pillows and speak new words
to their mothers, new soft words
from their soft palates
and soak up sun on all the windowsills
like fat hairless cats, watching.
What gods come, come stalking on all fours,
lean, and hungry, and afraid.

Posted on February 10, 2023 by Simon appleby

Friday Poem – ‘You and I are ghosts in the future’s forest’ by Rhiannon Hooson

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘You and I are ghosts in the future’s forest’ by Rhiannon Hooson from her latest collection Goliat.

This cover shows a ghost-like figure wrapped in a sheet standing in a field at dusk. The text reads: Goliat Rhiannon Hooson

Goliat is the second collection by Rhiannon Hooson, a follow-up to her Wales Book of the Year shortlisted debut, The Other City. An intelligent and beautiful book, Goliat offers absorbing stories of a precarious world on the brink of climate emergency. Employing startling imagery and a deep sense of history, these poems explore the irreplaceable beauty of a wild world, and the terrible damage that humans might do to each other and the earth.

You and I are ghosts in the future’s forest
It is a gentle, haunted world. Circumstance
has thrown it far into the future,
but there are things in it you and I
would understand: the way silence settles
across a wet morning and the roe deer
raise their heads. Perhaps, also,
a sense of things that need not find
their equilibrium. Our sighs are vapours:
no myth exists to hold us like a heart in aspic.
Again and again the sun sets, swings
under the earth’s belly, lifts a worn edge
of cloud come morning. Perhaps we grieve
for language, realising our fluency was false. Words
are a closed loop. A tight knot.
The roe deer raise their heads, move
between the trees, listening for wolves.
Pale moths and the moon’s white light.
Where once we walked, water rises.
You and I are ghosts in the future’s forest.

Goliat is available on the Seren website: £9.99

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Posted on September 30, 2022 by Simon appleby

Friday Poem – ‘The Leech House’ by Rhiannon Hooson

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘The Leech House’ by Rhiannon Hooson from her forthcoming collection Goliat.

Goliat is the second collection by Rhiannon Hooson, a follow-up to her Wales Book of the Year nominated debut, The Other City. An intelligent and beautiful book, Goliat offers absorbing stories of a precarious world on the brink of climate emergency. Employing startling imagery and a deep sense of history, these poems explore the irreplaceable beauty of a wild world, and the terrible damage that humans might do to each other and the earth.

The Leech House
She says he is older than me. I think it is a lie,
but in his tank (round, like a chalice), he moves
like an eel; he moves like a dream. Come winter
someone must stoke the fire in the leech house,
bring fresh moss, sweep out the channel in the floor
where the river sends its emissary, while behind their glass
the leeches dance. My lady has me mark on little labels
when each leech has last been fed: a leech
can live a year without blood, but each dark moon
when the fever comes for her, he lies across her calf,
or sometimes the smooth warm skin at the crook
of her elbow. I scrub his tank clean while he is out of it.
She says a leech is her true companion: the only thing
that knows blood as well as a woman. Is it strange
she has a favourite? Fresh earth for him, and cold clean
water, and green pond moss. I do not like to look
when he is feeding, but she smiles, and it is relief
in her face, not fondness, as if as he drank he took from her
the knowledge of a thing so painful she could not bear
to know it.

Goliat is available on the Seren website: £9.99

Create your free Seren account and enjoy 20% off every book you buy direct from us.

Join us at 7:30pm at Chapter in Cardiff on National Poetry Day Thursday 6th October to see Rhiannon launch Goliat at Seren First Thursday alongside Hilary Llewellyn-Williams. If you can’t join us in person, we’re also streaming via Facebook live. Find the details on our website.

Seren First Thursday October. Hilary Llewellyn-Williams and Rhiannon Hooson. In person and streamed online. Thursday 6 October 7:30pm BST. Tickets £3 on the door or watch live on Facebook for free.

Posted on November 12, 2021 by Simon appleby

Friday Poem – ‘Thirlmere’ by Rhiannon Hooson

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Thirlmere’ by Rhiannon Hooson from 100 Poems to Save the Earth.

100 Poems to Save the Earth edited by Zoe Brigley and Kristian Evans.

Our climate is on the brink of catastrophic change. 100 Poems to Save the Earth invites us to fine-tune our senses, to listen to the world around us, pay attention to what we have been missing. The defining crisis of our time is revealed to be fundamentally a crisis of perception. For too long, the earth has been exploited. With its incisive Foreword from editors Zoë Brigley and Kristian Evans, this landmark anthology is a call to action to fight the threat facing the only planet we have.

Thirlmere
After we lit the last candle
the gales couldn't hold us any more.
Along the lane the walls had begin
to slump, water sluicing through them
green as grass, but we drove
through anyway and out into the valley.
The fields were polished flat.
Trees were hung with drooping ropes
of fleece that caught in the breeze like kudzu.
Banks of shale sprawled
draining across the roads, and the sky
was open, dizzying and blue, tall into the air
above the crowns of our heads,
and the slate face of the lake
was the same as always. Lakes survive
any flood, lie oblique in their hollows,
streaked with the half-truths of glimpsed reflections.
The birds were only then beginning to sound.
All across the fields the fallen trees were burning.

100 Poems to Save the Earth is available on the Seren website: £12.99

Rhiannon Hooson’s collection The Other City is available on the Seren website: £9.99

Create your free Seren account and enjoy 20% off every book you buy from us.

Posted on October 16, 2020 by Simon appleby

Friday Poem – ‘Autumn’ by Rhiannon Hooson

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Autumn’ by Rhiannon Hooson from her collection The Other City.

Rhiannon Hooson’s debut collection The Other City was shortlisted for the Roland Mathias Prize. Sharply focused, beautifully resonant, and deeply felt, these poems reference and re-make narratives from classical Greek myth, while others rework elements of Welsh history, ancient and modern.

Rhiannon runs workshops and courses throughout the year, visit www.inkandoaktree.com for more details.

The Other City is available on the Seren website: £9.99

Create your free Seren account and enjoy 20% off every book you buy from us.

Posted on January 3, 2020 by Simon appleby

Friday Poem – ‘Weathering’ by Rhiannon Hooson

Our Friday Poem this week is ‘Weathering’, a new poem by Rhiannon Hooson. Rhiannon’s collection The Other City is available from Seren.

Rhiannon Hooson is a gifted young poet born in mid-Wales and currently living in the Welsh Marches. The Other City, her debut collection of poems, was shortlisted for the Roland Mathias Prize.

Sharply focused, beautifully resonant, and deeply felt, these poems reference and re-make narratives from classical Greek myth, while others rework elements of Welsh history, ancient and modern.

The Other City is available from the Seren website: £9.99

Create your free Seren account and enjoy 20% off every book you buy from us.

Posted on May 24, 2019 by Simon appleby

Friday Poem – ‘Luminosity’ by Rhiannon Hooson

Our Friday Poem this week is ‘Luminosity’ by Rhiannon Hooson, which appears in her collection The Other City, and Poems from the Borders pamphlet.

Rhiannon Hooson is a gifted young poet born in mid-Wales and currently living in the Welsh Marches. The Other City, her debut collection of poems, was shortlisted for the Roland Mathias Prize.

Sharply focused, beautifully resonant, deeply felt, some poems reference and re-make narratives from classical Greek myth, some rework elements of Welsh history, ancient and modern.

‘Luminosity’ contemplates Alfred Watkins’ moment of inspiration in Herefordshire, when he proposed the existence of ley lines.

The Other City is available from the Seren website: £9.99

Poems from the Borders is available from the Seren website: £5.00

Create your free Seren account and enjoy 20% off every book you buy from us.

Posted on November 9, 2018 by Simon appleby

Friday Poem – ‘How Women Are Not The Same’, Rhiannon Hooson

Our Friday Poem this week is Rhiannon Hooson’s ‘How Women Are Not The Same’, from her debut poetry collection, The Other City.

‘Hooson’s style is thoughtful, questioning, reflective, and consistently restrained. Her collection gives the impression of having come together over a long period, with each piece earning its place’ – Orbis

The Other City offers us elegant, artful verse of precision and insight. This is a poet that can re-imagine scenes from Greek myth, from Welsh history, and make them as urgent and compelling as her poems about personal relationships. ‘How Women Are Not The Same’ is one such personal poem – in which memories are conjured, and intimacies wound tight around strands of hair.

The Other City is available from the Seren website: £9.99

Create your free Seren account and enjoy 20% off every book you buy from us.

Posted on October 20, 2017 by Simon appleby

Friday Poem – ‘Wintering’, Rhiannon Hooson

Rhiannon Hooson’s incredible debut collection, The Other City, has just appeared on the Wales Book of the Year shortlist – and this week our Friday Poem is one from its pages: the seasonally-appropriate ‘Wintering’.

The Other City offers us elegant, artful verse of precision and insight. Sharply focused, beautifully resonant, deeply felt, these poems tend to travel in distinct streams: characters like Zeus, Narcissus, Ariadne, and Ganymede sit alongside reworkings of Welsh history, both ancient and modern. Other poems explore the idea of otherness and the uncanny, where actions are done and undone, and the familiar made unfamiliar.
This is a poet who can re-imagine scenes from Greek myth, from Welsh history, and make them as urgent and compelling as her poems about personal relationships.

The Other City is available from the Seren website: £9.99

Join our free Book Club for 20% off every book you buy from us.

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!

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