Seren Books Archives - Page 4 of 20

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

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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
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Posted on January 12, 2017 by Simon appleby

Top of the Non-Fiction: what to buy in the half price sale

Top of the Non Fiction Seren half price sale

There’s still time to take advantage of our big January sale – which ends midnight, Friday 13th (not such an unlucky day, after all!)
All our books are half price, and that includes a gloriously diverse range of non-fiction: everything from biography to art, history to criticism. Here we pick a few of our favourites.

The Girl who Lived on Air by Stephen Wade examines the strange story of Sarah Jacob, ‘the Welsh fasting girl’. Though not the first anorexic, she was arguably the first to cause a national furore, and was made to be the centre of a lucrative and also media-hungry ‘spin’ on the nineteenth century nexus of knowledge between science and superstition, folk-belief and religious asceticism. Stephen Wade covers new ground in examining the medical issues surrounding the case, the legal complexities, the prison life of Sarah’s parents, and the significance of folklore and superstition.
Alun Lewis biographer John Pikoulis covers new ground in Alun, Gweno & Freda, which examines Lewis’ life and writing through the particular prism of his relationships with his wife, Gweno, and Freda Aykroyd, an ex-patriot in India whose house provided respite for British officers on leave. The book argues that Lewis’s charged relationships with these two women were the key to both his writing and his mental health, and goes on to explore the circumstances surrounding Lewis’ sudden death, and weigh into the ongoing debate over whether it was accidental, or suicide.
Losing Israel by Jasmine Donahaye is more than biography. This moving and honest memoir, which won the Wales Book of the Year, Non-Fiction Category (2016), recounts the author’s struggles with identity and history after she stumbles upon the collusion of her family in the displacement of Palestinians in 1948. Biography, travel writing and birdwatching are all weaved together in this fascinating re-evaluation of memory, family and cultural identity.
Robert Minhinnick’s Watching the Fire Eater, newly back in stock, takes us from Copacabana to urban Yorkshire, from New Mexico to a Welsh funfair, from The Netherlands to the Clare coast. Minhinnick’s essays cover a variety of subjects – sunbathing, third world poverty, the demise of Margaret Thatcher, to name a few – but at the core this is a vivid series of attempts to strip away the exhausted mythologies of the writer’s own country and the increasingly-packaged places he visits.
The Roots of Rock, from Cardiff to Mississippi and Back is Peter Finch’s serenade to rock and popular music, and an infectiously nostalgic trip from the 1950s onwards that is guaranteed to enthrall music lovers. From an old valve radio playing in the Cardiff suburbs in the ’50s to live music today in America and beyond, Peter Finch tours countries and decades to illustrate how rock and pop has evolved, giving us sharp-eyed accounts of gigs from Champion Jack Dupree to the Garth Mountain Boys, visits to musical shrines and theme parks – Dollywood, Grand Ole Opry, Graceland, Stax – and music, lots and lots of music.

See our full Non-Fiction list on the Seren website, and hurry – sale ends midnight, Friday 13 January.

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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.

Posted on January 6, 2017 by Simon appleby

Friday Poem – ‘Boredom: An Appreciation’, Katrina Naomi

The Way the Crocodile Taught Me Katrina Naomi

This week’s Friday Poem is taken from Katrina Naomi’s The Way the Crocodile Taught Me.

‘Boredom: An Appreciation’ perfectly captures the glory of days lazily spent. In stark contrast to the darker themes present in this collection, Katrina Naomi here paints a luxurious portrait of the strange joys mundane activities can provide.

The Way the Crocodile Taught Me is Katrina Naomi’s second collection, and paints a heartfelt and tragi-comic picture of a fraught childhood and adolescence. The tone of the work is as much tender as turbulent, reflecting the protagonist’s travails. Interspersed with the awful there are moments of humour, of contemplation, redemption, realisation: these are pointed, lively and always entertaining poems.

Boredom: An Appreciation

The heavy-shouldered clock of morning,
those slender hands never reaching
past the hours of brown wallpaper.

I don’t have time for boredom now,
to stare at the gas in the fire,
as if I could study flames,

to let my thoughts drift on their thermal,
unharnessed, as if they were never mine –
never could be.

Might I long for a Westgate afternoon,
waiting for the yellow lights
of evening, knowing day had melted –

the dark toffee of it – to listen
to the hiss, the end of the cassette,
re-reading my diary, its brief entries.

And if I sit here long enough,
could I wonder where that jet goes
with its teatime, pinkish trail,

imagine being a passenger,
the tedium of that life,
while I bite the ends of my hair.

Buy your copy of The Way the Crocodile Taught Me now: only £4.99 (half price) until 13 January in the Seren January Sale.

Posted on January 6, 2017 by Simon appleby

January Sale: 50% off all Seren books

The big January sale has now begun – all our books are 50% off for one week only.

The time for gift giving might be over but all that means is you have the perfect excuse to treat yourself instead.

If you’re looking for a new novel to grip you, we suggest Jayne Joso’s critically acclaimed My Falling Down House, a story of modern Japanese identity.

Tony Curtis’ New & Selected collection, From the Fortunate Isles, is a must-read for poetry lovers, and The Other Tiger, the new bilingual anthology of South and Latin American poetry translated by Richard Gwyn, will open up a new continent of undiscovered riches for you.

For nature lovers we recommend Iolo Williams’ Wild Places: Wales’ Top 40 Nature Sites – this is a book to get you out of the house, making the most of the beautiful wildlife sites within reach.

Explore our Poetry, Fiction and Non-Fiction categories, where all our books are half price until midnight on Friday 13th January.

Posted on December 30, 2016 by Simon appleby

Friday Poem – ‘The Things She Burned That Year’ , Judy Brown

It’s almost time to ring in the New Year, and in keeping with the theme of leaving the past behind, our Friday Poem is ‘The Things She Burned That Year’ by Judy Brown, from her Poetry Book Society recommended collection, Crowd Sensations.

Crowd Sensations is a worthy follow-up to Judy Brown’s Forward-prize nominated debut, Loudness.
Brown is a poet of dazzling contrasts, of thoughtful paradox, intimate confidences and precise evocations. Her titles and first lines both draw you right into a poem and then quite often surprise you with a narrative that you hadn’t quite expected.

The Things She Burned That Year

Whole nights claimed her on sooty knees,
worshipping the heat of a first open fire.
She tended it with the caution of a mistress,

offered her past and part of her future.
She kindled her half-filled diary; each curling
page exposed the inky, unburned next.

All afternoon it read itself to the blaze,
settled down at dusk to a soft grey bed.
She was watching someone she knew grow old.

Then she’d fed the fire a banquet of porn
that she no longer had an attic to store.
The printed bodies, the breasts and cocks

were nibbled off by a bright green flame
before the paper charred in the usual way.
And the final text that lanterned out

in the beige-tiled fireplace flared so fast
that the thing she wanted to erase
was lost: even its capsicum name is dust.

Crowd Sensations is available from the Seren website: £9.99

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Posted on December 23, 2016 by Simon appleby

Friday Poem – ‘Nativity’, Caroline Smith

Our Friday Poem this week is a modern-day parallel to the Nativity story, where we see the hardships faced by a migrant couple upon the birth of their child.

‘Nativity’ is taken from Caroline Smith’s collection, The Immigration Handbook, which tells the stories of immigrants seeking citizenship in the UK – their hopes, their anguish, the bureaucracy they face, and their small moments of triumph. In these strikingly moving poems, the characters step vividly off the page, and we listen to their often harrowing stories as if first-hand. Caroline Smith’s poems are a moving record of global people movement, the story of our time.

Nativity

She lay on the sofa
its hard cushions
squashed down into the corner
under the heavy paisley quilt
she’d found there.
There was nothing
left to eat in the fridge,
its door nudged open
swollen with ice,
the fibrous cold
stealing into the room.
Just ice and knots of sweetcorn
heaped in a corner
like rancid yellow straw,
and a bottle of baby milk
left by the Kosovan family
housed there before her.
She’d heard they’d been allowed to stay.
Baby John Harris Farruku
brother to Adriatuk, Flutura and Etmir,
born three days inside the amnesty.
His birth had allowed
the family to begin again
given them the hope
of an ordinary life.

The Immigration Handbook is available from the Seren website: £9.99

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

Posted on December 20, 2016 by Simon appleby

Get your books in time for Christmas: last recommended posting date

5 days ‘til Christmas – where has the time gone? If you’re still sorting out your presents then never fear, you can still order our books and receive them before Christmas day.

Today is the last recommended posting date for our postage service on www.serenbooks.com. If you’re searching for last-minute literary gifts then don’t delay – orders placed any later than 5pm today can’t be guaranteed for Christmas.

Top gift ideas:

An un-put-downable novel
RRP £9.99
£4.99 (today only!)
Helen Blackhurst’s tense and atmospheric debut novel, Swimming on Dry Land, is half price today (20/12/16) as our featured Advent Calendar offer. Set in outback Australia, the book follows the Harvey family’s search for a dream life, and the dark turn it takes after daughter Georgie disappears.

A glimpse at stunning history and craft
£12.99
Jen Jones’ authoritative guide to the history of quilting in Wales is visually stunning, and a truly fascinating insight into traditional Welsh quilting methods and styles. Welsh Quilts is the ideal gift for the quilter, crafter, or heritage lover in your life.

A glorious wildlife and nature eye-opener
£19.99
Iolo Williams’ new guide book, Wild Places, will take you and your loved ones off the beaten track for your Christmas walks, with 40 wildlife sites across Wales to choose from. Make the most of the great outdoors with this informative and lavishly illustrated guide that, if used properly, will be crumpled from much use in the years to come.

See our full literary list – everything from fiction, to biography, poetry, art and more – on the Seren website, and have a lovely literary Christmas.

Posted on December 16, 2016 by Simon appleby

Friday Poem – ‘The Infants’ Christmas Concert’, Tony Curtis

Christmas is fast approaching, so our Friday Poem this week is a festive one from Tony Curtis, originally published in Letting Go (1983) and again, just recently, in Tony’s new From the Fortunate Isles: New & Selected Poems.

From the Fortunate Isles features poems from ten of Tony’s published collections, as well as a substantial number of new poems. This is a poet whose themes and variations remain consistent: a deep affection for his roots in West Wales, tender attachments to family, a profound interest in the wars of the last century, and an abiding fascination for all art forms, particularly painting and poetry.

The Infants’ Christmas Concert

A moment of hush, held breath –
the fairies and robbers, the soldiers
and dancers are in position
– then the piano begins.
This sounds otherworldly,
each note a drop of water falling distantly.

Angels swallow trumpets,
a robot trips and turtles in his cardboard shell;
the ballerina crumples and cries.
They may not know why, but still
perform for us the pattern of sentiment,
superstition and love: we sigh,
smile, laugh and applaud.

“The Rich Man gave them a bag of gold
and everyone cheered on the day
the church had a new bell.”
The couple are starched in best white –
as the singing swells, they marry
and claim their gold.
It is intensely sad and fleetingly
realises the ghosts of our innocence.

Flashlights – the year’s frozen
for this instant.
Keep that – don’t move – stay there,
stay somewhere like that for ever.

It all builds to The Nativity:
Joseph, Mary and the three glittering Kings
change without age, time after time.
Only the baby Jesus doll remains,

a scarred and worn wooden face held magically
fresh each year in the laundered swaddling.
The audience – parents and children in arms,
grandparents and neighbours, point and giggle,
there’s a glow and, finally, we all sing.

This has worked some sort of renewal,
some sort of an ending.

From the Fortunate Isles: New & Selected Poems is available from our website: £9.99
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