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Friday Poem – Soup

Soup by Tony Curtis

This week’s Friday Poem is Tony Curtis’ Arvon Prize-shortlisted ‘Soup’.

This is one of many poems on the subject of conflict in Tony’s War Voices (1995) and will also feature in the soon-to-be published From the Fortunate Isles: New and Selected Poems, out in October this year. Wednesday 27th January was Holocaust Remembrance Day and so this poem is an especially poignant choice.

Soup

One night our block leader set a competition:
two bowls of soup to the best teller of a tale.
That whole evening the hut filled with words –
tales from the old countries
of wolves and children
potions and love-sick herders
stupid woodsmen and crafty villagers.
Apple-blossom snowed from blue skies,
orphans discovered themselves royal.
Tales of greed and heroes and cunning survival,
soldiers of the Empires, the Church, the Reich.

And when they turned to me
I could not speak,
sunk in the horror of that place,
my throat a corridor of bones, my eyes
and nostrils clogged with self-pity.
‘Speak,’ they said, ‘everyone has a story to tell.’
And so I closed my eyes and said:
I have no hunger for your bowls of soup, you see
I have just risen from the Shabbat meal –
my father has filled our glasses with wine,
bread has been broken, the maid has served fish.
Grandfather has sung, tears in his eyes, the old songs.
My mother holds her glass by the stem, lifts
it to her mouth, the red glow reflecting on her throat.
I go to her side and she kisses me for bed.
My grandfather’s kiss is rough and soft like an apricot.
The sheets on my bed are crisp and flat
like the leaves of a book …

I carried my prizes back to my bunk: one bowl
I hid, the other I stirred
and smelt a long time, so long
that it filled the cauldron of my head,
drowning a family of memories.

Buy War Voices from our website, and look out for From the Fortunate Isles: New and Selected Poems, available October 2016.

 

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5 things to do for your loved one on St Dwynwen’s Day

5 things to do for your loved one on St Dwynwen's Day

On this day each year, people all over Wales celebrate St Dwynwen’s Day, named for the Welsh patron saint of lovers.

According to legend, Princess Dwynwen (who lived at around 400 AD) was the most beautiful and spirited of the many daughters of King Brychan Brycheiniog, founder of a medieval kingdom in what is today the Brecon Beacons of South Wales. She fell in love with a man named Maelon, yet her father had already promised her in marriage to another, so she prayed to God to be released from loving Maelon. Once asleep, an angel appeared and gave her a potion, which turned her ill-fated lover into a block of ice.

Upon waking, Dwynwen prayed again for the curse to be broken and God granted her three wishes: that Maelon be thawed, that Dwynwen herself never marry, and that the fate of all true lovers will be safeguarded through all time. As a mark of gratitude, Dwynwen devoted the rest of her life to God. Her reputation spread, and finally she became known as Santes (“Saint”) Dwynwen, paitron saint of lovers.

Here at Seren, we’ve been pondering how best to show your loved one how much they mean to you in the spirit of St Dwynwen. Here are five suggestions we’re sure will bring a smile to their face…

1. A simple cuppa
Wales can be a cold and rainy place (sometimes!), so what better to warm the heart of your S/O than a hot brew?

2. A private poetry reading
Select a poem or two to read to your special someone. We recommend ‘Making Love’ from David Foster-Morgan’s Masculine Happiness, and ‘The Love Songs of Davy Blackrock’ from Boy Running by Paul Henry.

3. A romantic walk
There are so many beautiful areas in Wales, so why not explore one of them with the person you love? Anglesey (St Dwynwen’s home) is the perfect choice, and there are lots of other outstanding areas.

4. A carefully chosen book
Show you know your partner’s interests and present them with a thoughtfully selected book to enjoy. Bonus points if it’s one of ours!

5. A home-cooked meal
Restaurants are romantic. But making something edible – nay, delicious – with your own two hands? Now that is a gesture of love.

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Happy St Dwynwen’s Day, everyone.

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Friday Poem – Elegy for the Living

Friday Poem Elegy for the Living

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Elegy for the Living’ from Kathryn Simmonds’ insightful collection The Visitations.

In this book, Simmonds infuses with beauty the everyday phenomena that we often neglect: from fleeting moments with strangers on the street, to even that peculiar yet widely recognisable experience of forgetting what exactly we went upstairs to retrieve. Through an innovative and triumphant blend of humour and realism – complemented by its simple yet wonderfully rich language – the collection explores both the truths and the uncertainties of life in terms of faith, the self, and the familial. This creative ambiguity reaches a crescendo in the title poem ‘The Visitations’ in which the divine is effortlessly combined with the domestic. Yet even her more elegiac poems are rarely sombre, but abound with the imagery of homeliness, and an underlying sense of vigour and life.

Elegy for the Living

We wash up side by side
to find each other

 

in the speakable world,
and, lulled into sense,

 

inhabit our landscape;
the curve

 

of that chair draped
with your shirt;

 

my glass of  water
seeded overnight with air.

 

After this bed
there’ll be another,

 

so we’ll roll
and keep rolling

 

until one of  us
will roll alone and try to roll

 

the other back — a trick
no one’s yet pulled off —

 

and it’ll be
as if   I dreamed you, dear,

 

as if   I dreamed this bed,
our touching limbs,

 

this room, the tree outside alive
with new wet light.

 

Not now. Not yet.


Buy The Visitations on our website. 

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Friday Poem – Skeeter Syndrome

Clueless Dogs Rhian Edwards

For our Friday Poem this week we have ‘Skeeter Syndrome’ from Rhian Edwards’ dark and sensual debut collection Clueless Dogs.

Winner of Wales Book of the Year 2013
Winner of the Roland Mathias Prize for Poetry 2013
Winner of Wales Book of the Year People’s Choice 2013
Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2012

Full of verve and humour, with a spiky syntax featuring hard-edged consonants, Rhian Edwards’ language has a winning honesty and intensity. Poems like ‘The Welshman Who Couldn’t Sing’ chronicle a fraught childhood in Bridgend, south Wales, where the sensitive child escapes through imaginative games of ‘Playing Dead’ and ‘Broken Lifeboat’. Later poems confidently explore teenage lusts, student rivalries, damaged peers and tense situations. Although the author doesn’t flinch from ruthless depictions in which we are often implicated by her use of the second person ‘You’, there is an underlying sweetness, an elegiac thread most evident in the poems of maturity.

Skeeter Syndrome

I felt a tickle to my ankle,
saw her, dithering in the air
light as dandelion snow,
a winged needle, a mother-to-be
clumsy with the harvest of my blood.

I caught her dancing on the wall,
crushed her with a single applaud.
I opened my hand to a mangle of limbs,
a patch of my own blood – the stigma
of killing something full of me.

Buy Clueless Dogs on our website.

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Friday Poem — Making Love

Masculine happiness

This week’s poem is from Cardiff-based David Foster-Morgan’s provocative debut, Masculine Happiness. The collection is half price until midnight, Sunday 10th January. You can find the book here.

Born and based in Wales, Foster-Morgan has long been a presence in the poetry world, having had poems published widely in magazines and with appearances at workshops, festivals, and events including ‘slams’ where his quiet style and obvious integrity frequently beat louder and less subtle voices to a prize. His debut collection, some years in the making, is inspired in part by his reading of American literature: the conversational tone of Frank O’Hara (‘F’OH’) and the long-lined garrulity of Allen Ginsberg, (‘Allen Ginsberg returns to Llantony Priory’) as well as the models of masculinity handed out to us by Hollywood characters like John Wayne (‘Masculine Happiness’). His ambivalence toward the idea of the ‘hero’ and his observation of the fate of those who have been lauded, like the conflicted protagonist of ‘The City Legend’, is a fruitful area for exposition.

Making Love

I think that we were meant to…
Is it treat as if we were nations
or better meet as friends.
To have no buts
and simply wait ’til fate instructs.
Fate though never interrupts.
Oh: sighs, eyes, easy, thighs.

Oh: find, kind, miss, bliss.

In exquisite orbit on your…
Is it rim
or better promise held within.
Both pleasure and pain
in equal measure, at once the same.
With no words the meaning plain.
Oh: insane, flame, be, flee.

Oh: quest, rest, crux, stuck.

You are…
Is it everything I lack
or better welcome heart and hurry back.
Your soft magnetic air sublime,
wraps me in an ecstasy so kind.
That is I like your style.
Oh: start, apart, qualm, charm.

Oh: light, flight, sun, undone.

I fear you sense my…
Is it following cloud
or better stubborn doubt.
It is a flinching habit to say no
and pinch new love before it can grow.
Give no the elbow.
Oh: aloud, shroud, spite, blight.

Oh: cruel, duel, bequeathed, heed.

Banish fear with…
Is it yes
nothing better than yes.
Defeat strange love with a yes,
fate and doubt distress with a yes.
I would really like you to say yes.
Oh: finesse, mistress, conquest, bless.

Oh: fair, dare, rare, flare.

I watch your hair…
Is it coil like a snake
or better hang at your nape.
High on oblivion’s plain,
a wordless freedom we will claim.
Enjoy the moment, don’t explain.
Oh: arms, charms, find, unconfined
Oh: sublime, entwine, sun, outdone.
Oh: me, thee, we.

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Order David Foster-Morgan’s Masculine Happiness from our website (half-price until midnight, Sunday 10th January).
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50% Off All Books: Editors’ Picks

50% off all books this week

2016 has arrived and with it, our January sale. For one week only, enjoy 50% off all books available on our website!

That being said, we know choosing which books to buy can be a little tricky so our three editors are on hand to give their book recommendations. Be it poetry, fiction or non-fiction that tickles your fancy, we have suggestions for one and all.

Mick Felton Non-Fiction Editor
Mick Felton – Non-Fiction Editor

As our non-fiction editor, Mick sees a wide variety of books each year, including everything from history, crime, autobiography, music and sport. So which two books does Mick think you need most on your shelf?

 

The Road to Zagora by Richard Collins
The Road to Zagora

After being diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease, Richard Collins sets off with his partner Flic on a once-in-a-lifetime adventure. The Road to Zagora is a singular travel book which takes in India, Nepal, Turkey, Morocco, Peru, Equador and Wales.
Though not shy about the hardships of the disease, any sentiment of self-pity is denied through Collins’s resolute and independent-mindedness and the quality of writing.
£9.99  £5.00

Losing Israel by Jasmine Donahaye
Losing Israel

After discovering by chance that her family had colluded in the eviction of Palestinians in 1948, Jasmine Donahaye set out to learn the story of what happened. Her discoveries challenged everything she thought she knew about the country and her family. Losing Israel is a moving and honest account which spans travel writing, nature writing and memoir. Jasmine explores the powerful and competing attachments people feel for their country and its history, by attempting to understand and reconcile her conflicted attachments, rooted in her family story – and in a love of Israel’s birds.
£12.99 £6.50

 

Amy Wack Poetry Editor
Amy Wack – Poetry Editor

Amy has read and enjoyed a dazzling array of poetry over the twenty-plus years she’s been with us. Trying to narrow down her choices to just two books was hard, but here goes…

 

A Formula for Night: New and Selected Poems by Tamar YoseloffTamar_quicksand cover

The eagerly awaited summation of Tamar’ work, encompassing selections from four published print volumes: Sweetheart, Barnard’s Star, Fetch and The City with Horns; and poems from her collaborations with artists: Formerly, Marks and Desire Paths.
The book also includes a generous selection of beautiful new poems, which are often artful explorations of paradox: death/birth, dark/light, clarity/mystery.
£12.99 £6.50

House of Small Absences by Anne-Marie Fyfe
House of small absences
Anne-Marie Fyfe’s poems have long dwelt on the role that the spaces we inhabit, the places in which we find security, play in our lives: House of Small Absences is an observation window into strange, unsettling spaces—a deserted stage-set, our own personalised ‘museum’, a Piedmont albergo, underground cities, Midtown roof-gardens, convent orchards, houseboats, a foldaway circus, a Romanian sleeper-carriage—the familiar rendered uncanny through the distorting lenses of distance and life’s exigencies, its inevitable lettings-go.
£9.99 £5.00
Penny Thomas

 

Penny Thomas – Fiction Editor

Which fictional words would Penny have you delve into first? We’ve published a beautifully varied range of books, and below are just two of Penny’s favourites.

Swimming on Dry Land by Helen Blackhurst
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Twelve-year-old Monica Harvey is looking for her sister Georgie, who has disappeared. The Harvey family has recently moved to Akarula, south-west Australia, having been persuaded to set out in search of a new life by their rich Uncle Eddie, who owns the town. Unbeknownst to them, Georgie isn’t the first person to vanish.
As their dream-like vision of life in outback Australia begins to be tainted my mystery and deceit, the history of the land unfolds and answers to the strange disappearances slowly suggest themselves.
£9.99 £5.00

Foreign Bodies by Candy Neubert
foreign bodies
Fresh from the UK, Emma thinks she has fallen in love with a place, a person, and pursues the man of her dreams with a colonial zeal. But for all her poetic sensibilities, she seems unaware of the destruction she is capable of leaving in her wake.

A beautifully written first novel, Foreign Bodies explores the spaces between people, and the nature of encounters in romantic idylls on the other side of the world.
£7.99 £4.00

 

Don’t forget, absolutely everything on our website is 50% off– so if you’re eager to see beyond our suggestions, then go forth and discover a new read for the New Year on our website.

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Half price offer ends midnight, Sunday 10th January. Happy book hunting!

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Friday Poem – Christmas Holiday

This week’s poem is from Alun Lewis’ Collected Poems. Merry Christmas!

Alun Lewis (1915-1944), the remarkable poet and story writer, died, aged 28, in Burma during the Second World War. Some critics see him as the last of the great Romantic poets, a twentieth century Keats. Others view him as the bridge between pre-war poets like Auden and Yeats to post-war poets such as Hughes and Gunn. He was born and raised in Depression-struck south Wales and, following degrees in history at Aberystwyth and Manchester, became a teacher there. Early in 1940, despite his pacifist inclinations he enlisted and, after long periods of training, joined the war in India.

Becoming a soldier galvanised Lewis’s writing. By 1944 he had written two collections of poems and one of short stories, all published to considerable acclaim. Firmly established with Keith Douglas as the leading writer of the Second World War, Lewis’s death in an accident while on active service was huge loss to English literature. This Collected Poems comprises a body of work which has endured and which transcends the label ‘war poetry’; it is complete in itself and full of promise of greater things.

Christmas Holiday

Big-uddered piebald cattle low
The shivering chestnut stallion dozes
The fat wife sighs in her chair
Her lap is filled with paper roses
The poacher sleeps in the goose-girl’s arms
Incurious after so much eating
All human beings are replete.

But the cock upon the dunghill feels
God’s needle quiver in his brain
And thrice he crows: and at the sound
The sober and the tipsy men
Jump out of the bed with one accord
And start the war again.

The fat wife comfortably sleeping
Sighs and licks her lips and smiles

But the goose-girl is weeping.

Order Alun Lewis’ Collected Poems from our website.

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Friday Poem – Snow

This week’s poem is by the National Poet of Wales, Gillian Clarke, and is taken from the Seren anthology, Christmas in Wales. If you order two books from our website you’ll get a copy of Christmas in Wales for free! Offer ends Midnight, 24th December.

Celebrate Christmas the Welsh way in the company of some of the country’s leading writers, past and present. Christmas mass, the nativity play, turkey and plum pudding, the Mari Lwyd, presents, the weather, the shopping and post-festive blues are among the many subjects drawn from stories, poems, diaries and letters. Wartime Christmases in Swansea and the Rhondda – and home thoughts from India and Italy – pantomime characters, Christmas cards and New Year Resolutions; R.S. Thomas, Dylan Thomas, Dannie Abse, Gillian Clarke, Catherine Fisher, Bruce Chatwin, Sian James, Kate Roberts and Leslie Norris, Christmas in Wales has all the ingredients for the complete experience of the season of celebration.

Snow

The dreamed Christmas,
flakes shaken out of silences so far
and starry we can’t sleep for listening
for papery rustles out there in the night
and wake to find our ceiling glimmering,
the day a psaltery of light.

So we’re out over the snow fields
before it’s all seen off with a salt-lick
of Atlantic air, then home at dusk, snow-blind
from following chains of fox and crow and hare,
to a fire, a roasting bird, a ringing phone,
and voices wondering where we are.

A day foretold by images
of glassy pond, peasant and snowy roof
over the holy child iconed in gold.
Or women shawled against the goosedown air
pleading with soldiers at a shifting frontier
in the snows of television,

while in the secret dark a fresh snow falls
filling our tracks with stars.

Order Christmas in Wales from our website.

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Santa Baby, Slip a Story Under the Tree

Christmas is on its way, and we have some recommendations for you whether you’re looking for a present for someone else, or you’re looking for something to ask Santa for this Christmas!

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For Thriller Lovers:

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If you or someone you know loves a good crime story, why not try Jo Mazelis’ Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize-winning Significance, or Anne Lauppe-Dunbar’s debut Dark Mermaids?

For Historical Fiction Lovers:

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Francesca Rhydderch’s debut, The Rice Paper Diaries, which won the 2014 Wales Book of the Year Award and Tiffany Murray’s chilling Sugar Hall are perfect for readers who like their stories old school. So old school they’re practically history.

For Sci-Fi/Fantasy Lovers:

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If you’re after something weird and wonderful for you or a friend this festive season, then you can’t go wrong with one of our New Stories from The Mabinogion; The Meat Tree is a brilliantly bizarre sci-fi retelling of the Blodeuwedd myth, perfect for readers who love stories that are literally out of this world. But if you’re after something a little closer to home, why not pick up a copy of Mary-Ann Constantine’s fable-esque debut, Star-Shot? This novel is a real treat for readers who are familiar with Cardiff.

For Short Story Lovers:

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For lovers of the oft forgotten art form that is the short story, why not pick up New Welsh Short Stories, an anthology featuring a wide range of Welsh authors from Carys Davies to Jo Mazelis, or Graham Mort’s latest collection, Terroir. These two look quite charming together, so if I were you I’d get both.

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For Non-Fiction Lovers:

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Jasmine Donahaye’s memoir, Losing Israel, has been stunning readers since its publication earlier this year; part memoir, part travel writing, part nature writing, it’s the perfect gift for any non-fiction connoisseur. Mike Rees’ Men Who Played the Game is the ideal book for any sports fan, and as we commemorate one hundred years since the First World War there’s no better time to read it than right now.

For Poetry Lovers:

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Here at Seren we’d be nothing without our poetry, so why not pick up a copy of Kim Moore’s hugely popular debut collection, The Art of Falling, or Jonathan Edwards’ Costa Award-winning debut collection, My Family and Other Superheroes – we promise they won’t disappoint you! Or if someone you know likes to keep on top of the latest poetry, a subscription to Poetry Wales magazine would make for a fine Christmas present, if you ask me. And I suppose you must be asking me if you’re reading this…

You can find all these books and more on our website, so treat the readers you know to some well-chosen words this Christmas!

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