Seren Archives - Page 10 of 11

Posted on April 24, 2015 by Simon appleby

Friday Poem – Finding a Fossil

Today’s poem is from John Ormond’s Collected Poems, edited by Rian Evans and introduced by Patrick McGuinness, which is due to be released next month.

John Ormond (1923-1990) is one of the remarkable generation of poets born in south Wales in the early 1920s which includes Dannie Abse and Leslie Norris. A journalist on Picture Post during its heyday in the 1940s, he was a friend of fellow Swansea writers Dylan Thomas and Vernon Watkins, both of whom were key influences on a poetry of consistently high standards. A significant number of his poems, many of them elegiac, probe his Welsh roots, demonstrating an abiding concern with family and locality. Others focus on particular aspects of the natural world, seeking to capture their elusive quiddities. Stylistically, they vary from the extremely plain to the highly-wrought; are witty and ironic, paradoxical and conceited. Typically unsentimental, shapely and meticulously crafted, his are the poems of a sensibility which delights in explorations, probes complex themes and problematical areas of feeling, and refuses to settle for easy answers.

In addition to his writing Ormond had a distinguished career with BBC Wales as a director and producer of documentary films, which include studies of Welsh painters and writers such as Ceri Richards, Kyffin Williams, Dylan Thomas, Alun Lewis and R.S. Thomas. The insight and visual awareness which mark his films also inform his poetry, a selection of which was published in the Penguin Modern Poets series.

This Collected Poems edited by Rian Evans, draws together all of Ormond’s work, including unpublished material. It includes an Introduction by poet, novelist and critic Patrick McGuinness, notes and commentary of the poems re their geneses, backgrounds, allusions and meanings, and a bibliography of Ormond’s prose writing, films and writing about him. An index of titles and first lines completes this essential book.

Finding a Fossil

Maidenhair fern in flint;
An ancient accident
Shows me time’s imprint.

A leaf preserved and pressed
Between leaves of stone; crossed
Rest and unrest.

An image that grew green
Took ground in the rock grain:
Dark; now light again.

Luck interlaced each line
And dying vein with stone.
They return to the same sun.

The casual life of fronds,
Air and the tongues of friends;
Green begins, grey ends;

Except that remembered shapes
Live, and that at one’s lips
Love speaks as loves lapse.

Graftings (so fused in chance
Among cold stars that dance
Gestures of permanence)

Persist and contrive to invent
From fragment and element
A mindful firmament.

Pre-order a copy of John Ormond’s Collected Poems from our website.

Posted on April 23, 2015 by Simon appleby

How Well Do You Know Your Independent Publishers?

When you go into a bookshop and see our signature star on one of the spines, we hope you immediately think of us and know that the book you’re about to pick up has been published by an independent publisher that prizes quality over quantity and individuality over hype.

But how well do you know your independent publishers? If you were given nothing but a logo, could you identify a specific publisher?

Below are the logos of six independent publishers – some of them are British, and some of them are international – how many of them do you know? Leave your guesses in the comments below. You have until next week!

Posted on April 17, 2015 by Simon appleby

Friday Poem – A Psalm for the Scaffolders

Today’s poem is from Kim Moore’s debut collection, The Art of Falling. Check out our interview with Kim here.

Kim Moore lives in Barrow, Cumbria. She has an MA from Manchester Metropolitan University. Her poems have been published in the TLS, Poetry Review, Poetry London, and elsewhere. She regularly appears at festivals and events, her prize-winning pamphlet, If We Could Speak Like Wolves (Smith-Doorstop) was chosen as an Independent Book of the Year in 2012 and was shortlisted for other prizes. Moore won an Eric Gregory Award in 2011 and the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2010. In 2014 she won a Northern Promise award. She writes a thoughtful blog and has a wide social media following. The Art of Falling (Seren 2015) is her debut collection.

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 shoes
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 the 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 the 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.

Order The Art of Falling from our website.

Posted on April 16, 2015 by Simon appleby

An Interview with Kim Moore

Today we’re talking to poet Kim Moore about her debut collection, The Art of Falling, which you can order from our website here.

Has the idea of falling, be it literally or metaphorically, always fascinated you, or did you find yourself writing about the many ways in which we fall purely for this collection?

The short answer is no, not consciously, but unconsciously. I think the concept of falling must have been something that has always been in the background. My father is a scaffolder and has had two serious falls – once when my twin sister and I were born and then again when I was twenty-one when he fell thirty feet from scaffolding and was lucky to survive. However, I didn’t realise I was writing about falling a lot until I wrote the title poem of the collection – and I only wrote that because David Tait, a good friend and wonderful poet set me a challenge to write a poem about falling. We used to take it in turns to do this – to set each other challenges – I didn’t even think at the time to ask him why, or what type of falling he meant. I actually forgot all about it and didn’t write the poem until six months later but looking back, the seed was definitely planted in that moment. Once I’d written the poem I realised that there were lots of poems about different types of falling throughout the collection – the book was maybe three quarters done by this point, so maybe I was just being very slow on the uptake.

In poems such as ‘My People’ and ‘A Psalm for the Scaffolders’ there’s a real sense of proud, working-class history. Is it fair to say you have a fondness for writing about the ‘every day’ hero?

‘My People’ is one of the poems I feel most guilty about writing because as well as hopefully communicating my pride, love and admiration for the people and background I came from, I’m being quite critical as well. It was an exhilarating poem to write, but it was also quite nerve-wracking. My people are ‘the type of people who would argue with their teacher if the child has detention’. Now I’m a teacher so I see it from both sides, of course. I actually wrote it when my husband started tracing his family tree and got quite far back and I realised I couldn’t. The poem was a way of finding out who my people were.

As for ‘A Psalm for the Scaffolders’ I definitely have a fondness for writing about my poor old dad! I think he likes it though – and to me it is really interesting because his life and the way he has worked, doing the same job since he left school is a way of working that is dying out, I think. I have a lot of admiration for that, for the physical hard graft of doing the same job for forty odd years.

I couldn’t help noticing the recurring animal imagery throughout The Art of Falling. There are plenty of wolves amongst your poems – ‘And the Soul’; ‘If We Could Speak Like Wolves’; ‘How Wolves Change Rivers’ – and also the incredibly powerful poems ‘The Language of Insects’ and ‘When I Was a Thing with Feathers’. In what way do animals help you to explore human nature through your writing?

I have never managed to answer this question about what the wolves mean in my poems, so I will skip over that one. Part of me also wants to duck out of answering it – I don’t really want to know. I like that they wander in and out of my poems when they feel like it though.

Halfway through writing the sequence which makes up the central sequence of this book, I got lost. I couldn’t find a way of saying what I wanted to say. I didn’t want to write a narrative sequence, with a beginning, a middle and an end. I started reading Ovid’s Metamorphoses and that is when everything shifted for me and I was able to carry on writing. The poems have a lot of animals in them, but perhaps more importantly, they have a lot of transformation in them, which was a way I found of writing about violence and the loss of not just identity, but of speech.

You play the trumpet, so I imagine there must be many musicians you admire. What is it about John Lennon and Wallace Hartley that made you want to write about them in particular?

It is actually obsessive people in general that I like writing about – and most musicians are obsessive – you have to be to practice enough to be good.

I actually wrote the John Lennon poem to take part in a competition to write a poem about John Lennon. It is what I call a research poem – I went to the library and read as many books about John Lennon as I could find and then wrote the poem, putting together the things that I read that interested me.

As for Wallace Hartley, I was helping to put together a project as part of my work as a music teacher. I read that he was found with his violin still with him and it was this that made me want to write something about him.

Congratulations on the publication of your debut collection! What are your future plans for your writing?

Thank you! My future plans are pretty simple – just to keep writing, and to always read more than I write. In September, I’ll only be working 2 days as a music teacher so this will hopefully give me a little bit more time. I haven’t written for the last six months – basically since I handed in the final proofs of the book, and then I’ve just started writing again last week, strangely coinciding with the book being delivered. I’ve started writing a few poems about scaffolding and a few poems about running which is my new obsession at the minute so I’m planning on carrying on with those.

Order The Art of Falling from our website.

Posted on April 10, 2015 by Simon appleby

Friday Poem – Edward Hopper on Long Island

Today’s poem is from Mara Bergman’s pamphlet The Tailor’s Three Sons & Other New York Poems, which won the 2014 Mslexia Women’s Poetry Pamphlet Competition!

The Tailor’s Three Sons & Other New York Poems, the Mslexia magazine prize-winning pamphlet published by Seren, is the fruit of author Mara Bergman’s rich memories of her childhood on Long Island and Manhattan. Now living in the UK, she looks back and assembles an appealing cast of characters for us: a grandmother who lives with precarious memories of war-torn Europe in a ‘railroad apartment’ where passing trains make ‘a whole room shake’; a cousin Sharon who makes a weekly pilgrimage to a nail salon, the bottles of nail varnish, ‘lined up like sweets’. There is the ghost of an uncle, spotted in the likeness of a man on the London-Hastings train. We meet an ‘Englishman in New York’ and experience, along with the author, ‘East 13th Street or How I Met My Husband’.

The title poem is inspired by the author’s visit to the Tenement Museum in New York’s Lower East Side, where Bergman vividly imagines the lives of immigrants when many thousands docked in ships at Ellis Island and the Lower East Side was ‘the most crowded place on the planet’. She envisions the lives of the tailor’s three sons she learns about during a museum tour: ‘afternoons they’d elbow through the teeming streets’, come home to a bowl of soup and share a single sofa for a bed. These poems are written with a great deal of warmth and empathy and with a quietly deceptive casual tone. We can see the author, as a small ‘Girl with a Pen’ entranced by her reading a biography of Charlotte Brontë.

Mara Bergman says: ‘I am fascinated by people and their stories. Having lived in England for many years, I often think, What if… and have tried, in my writing, somehow to meld my life in England with the one I left in New York. Here are poems about people, the process of work and art, and distance, in time and place.’

Edward Hopper on Long Island

He left the neon-lit cafés and deserted stations
for a winter of snow, mounds of it,
steeped on decks through a neighbourhood
where he didn’t know a soul.
He had given up city lights, city life,
to see the sun rise from a corner of a garden,
a flock of geese pummel across clouds.
At last the chance to study the filaments
of a squirrel’s tail, the shock of red cardinal.
He’d go to bed later and later,
wake up earlier until
there was no discernible difference
between darkness and light.
Three a.m., looking out on the snow
when a plane passed over the row of split-
levels, he spotted that thin divide
where streetlight met houselight – light
on the side of a building his favourite thing.
Maybe he wasn’t so far from his life,
maybe it was then he stopped questioning
what he was doing amid the snowlight
and a pale orange glow
over the telephone wire, heat steaming.

Order The Tailor’s Three Sons & Other New York Poems from our website.

Posted on April 9, 2015 by Simon appleby

Why Short Stories Are Worth Reading

In the publishing world, there’s one thing that’s almost always guaranteed: short stories don’t sell. But why?

Short stories are the first stories we’re ever introduced to, they’re our stepping stone into the world of storytelling. Whether they were told around campfires, painted on cave walls or sewn into tapestries, short stories have been passed down throughout the generations for as long as we’ve been able to tell them. From the Brothers Grimm to the Mabinogion to the many voices that make up the 1001 Nights, the short tales and fables our ancestors leave us are some of our first teachers: lessons such as ‘don’t stray off the path’ and ‘slow and steady wins the race’ are the product of short stories, not epic novels.

As adults we don’t need these kinds of stories – or so we might like to tell ourselves – we move on, quite literally, to bigger things, and yet nowhere does it say that short stories are only meant for children. After all, the Grimm’s Fairy Tales were initially meant for everyone, not just younger readers. To tell a story both well and concisely takes real skill, which is one of the many reasons why short story collections are so worth reading. Here at Seren we’ve published several collections, from Mary-Ann Constantine’s haunting All the Souls to Graham Mort’s upcoming Terroir, and they’re an ideal way to get a taste of an author’s style before you dip into their longer fiction.

Short story anthologies can be even better. With the recent publication of New Welsh Short Stories, we released a collection of stories by both new and established Welsh authors such as Jo Mazelis, Robert Minhinnick, and Stevie Davies just to name a few. Anthologies are the perfect way to read widely within one book, to try out new authors or revisit old favourites, meaning there’s always a story for everyone. They might even teach us the odd lesson or two.

By limiting ourselves to novels we miss out not only on some of the world’s most finely crafted fiction, but on the chance to discover new authors we may never have stumbled upon otherwise.

Order New Welsh Short Stories from our website.

Posted on April 3, 2015 by Simon appleby

Friday Poem – Corpus

An Easter themed poem for this week’s installment. ‘Corpus’ comes from Damian Walford Davies’ latest collection, Judas.

A shattered Judas Iscariot – that byword for betrayal – tells his own story in Damian Walford Davies’ compelling and finely wrought new collection from Seren.

We follow Judas over the course of five days as he moves through first-century Jerusalem trying to make sense of the bewildering events surrounding the life and execution of Jesus. But this is a man for whom the future is as real as his anguished and traumatized present, and for whom the Arab-Israeli conflict is as urgent as the tension between the Romans and Jews. Emphasising our compulsion to create, and challenge, gospel truths, Judas gives voice to man caught up in the promise and violence of history.

In short-lined, intensely suggestive dramatic monologues, Damian Walford Davies vividly summons moments of fear and swagger, doubt and passion, despair and nonchalance as an outlaw Judas finds himself haunted by his chequered and extraordinary past. Familiar stories are rendered strange and uncanny as the reader is caught in multiple ironies. As striking as the unnerving images on the news loops of our TV and computer screens, these poems locate us on the hazardous streets of a divided city with a companion-guide who shares with us his own troubling and troubled version of history.

Drawing on conflicting representations of Judas spanning twenty centuries, this chain of poems sets out to challenge orthodoxies and easy pieties. Judas offers an imaginative map of ancient enmities – and dares to hint at resolutions – in the form of a dramatic autobiography of the man whose most famous act (they say) was a kiss in the dark.

Corpus

What can I say? I wasn’t there:
neither ready to relieve him
of the transom’s heft

at Via Dolorosa, Station number five;
nor standing with his mother
on the quarry’s scree

to watch his wrists
spiked expertly
between electric nerve

and bone, and hear him
gurgle, drowning in the liquor
of his lungs. I could have tracked

the trail of blood
from here to where the last gob
hit the ground. The morning

had an air of perfect
commonplace. I howled,
so silently I know he heard.

Order Judas from our website.

Posted on April 2, 2015 by Simon appleby

Friday Poem – Fireweed

Today’s poem – and painting! – is from A Fold in the River by Philip Gross and Valerie Coffin Price, due to be released at the end of the month.

A Fold in the River is the fruit of collaboration between T.S. Eliot prize-winning poet Philip Gross and the visual artist Valerie Coffin Price. Philip Gross once lived on the banks of the River Taff in Wales and his journals are the source for the powerful poems. Valerie Price revisited the walking route along the river and evolved the beautiful prints and drawings that accompany the poems.

Fireweed

a tipsy pink, a night out
on the palette – mixing

Bloody Marys, lipstick,
a hint of the flare-up to come

as kids we played on bombsites,
the badlands of railway lines,

untimely places – back then
there was no such thing as waste

always first on the scene,
a bit too soon, after disasters

see us in the background
of the newsreel, inappropriately
dressed

one day, all this will be wisps
of white, of seed like grown smoke

forgetting ourselves into the future
wildly, willy-nilly, with a will

Pre-order A Fold in the River from our website.

Posted on March 21, 2015 by Simon appleby

Happy Indie Book Day!

Our Marketing Assistant, Jess, shares her thoughts on why it’s worth supporting our independent publishers.

Today it’s Indie Book Day!

In a world where the big names in publishing are producing bestsellers and you can sit back and wait for an online store to deliver them to your house, why should we support our independent businesses?

The first thing we must remember about publishing is that it’s a business like any other. Businesses succeed when they make money, and they make money by producing products that sell. When something is successful in the publishing world, it appears in everything; would vampires have been everywhere were it not for the commercial success of Twilight? No. Would dystopia have made a comeback were it not for the popularity of The Hunger Games? Definitely not.

This isn’t bad by any means. Publishers will only produce what is selling, and if a particular genre or sub-genre is selling then we can assume that it’s also being read and enjoyed because, ultimately, publishers wouldn’t exist without their readers. However, for the readers out there who aren’t interested in the hype – the readers who don’t like vampires and have enough problems with their own government to worry about anyone else’s – it’s easy to get a little lost when it comes to finding what you want to read next. How are you supposed to find those hidden gems when they’re rarely being talked about?

For the independent publisher, however, the hidden gem is their specialty. The independent publisher can watch the hype, even support it, and then publish books that they believe are worth reading, regardless of whether or not they fit into what’s currently most popular. When you support your independent publisher, what you’re also supporting is individuality. You’re supporting books that might not otherwise get the attention they deserve because they don’t include male leads who sparkle.

I won’t go so far as to say independent publishers are ‘better’, because frankly I think that’s petty, but they are businesses that produce content for the readers out there who want something just a little different. It’s for that reason that I’m proud to work for an independent publisher, and I hope you’re proud to support them.

Happy Indie Book Day!

Sign up to our newsletter

Sign up to our newsletter