Sound Archive

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Friday Poem – ‘Loie Fuller’s Dancing School’ by Nerys Williams

Our Friday Poem this week is ‘Loie Fuller’s Dancing School’ by Nerys Williams from her collection Sound Archive. Nerys will be performing poems from her collection Cabaret at the Seren Cardiff Poetry Festival as part of the Cardiff Poetry Experiment.

Nerys Williams Sound ArchiveSound Archive by Nerys Williams uses formal strategies to conjure a complex music, intriguing narratives, and poems full of atmosphere that query identity, gender, and the dream of art as a vehicle for emotion and meaning. Williams confronts our preconceptions about what it might mean to be a woman writing against the background of two formidable traditions: that of Welsh-speaking Wales and of English literature. A thoughtful, subtle and fascinating collection.

Sound Archive is available from the Seren website: £8.99 (or £4.49 whilst our half-price sale is on, ends Sunday 19 Jan)

The Cardiff Poetry Experiment: Irish Women Poets event, hosted by Ailbhe Darcy, takes place at 6pm on Saturday 15 February as part of the Seren Cardiff Poetry Festival. Nerys Williams will read alongside Cherry Smyth and jazz singer Lauren Kinsella. Buy your tickets on the Seren Cardiff Poetry Festival website.

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Friday Poem – ‘Marilyn’s Auction House’, Nerys Williams

Friday Poem Marilyn's Auction House Nerys Williams

Our Friday Poem this week is ‘Marilyn’s Auction House’ by Nerys Williams, from her collection Sound Archive. 

Nerys Williams Sound ArchiveSound Archive is Williams’ strikingly original first collection, in which she conjures complex music, intriguing narratives, and poems full of atmosphere that query identity, gender, and the dream of art as a vehicle for emotion and meaning.
In ‘Marilyn’s Auction House’ we join the speaker and her partner as they’re ‘queuing for relics’, thumbing through the brochure for an auction of Marilyn Monroe’s belongings. The poem laces together the mythologised symbols of Marilyn’s image with modern desires and needs.
If you would like to discover more of Nerys Williams’ poetry, you can find several of her new poems in the new issue of Poetry Wales Magazine.

 

 

Nerys Williams Friday Poem Marilyn

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sound Archive is available from the Seren website: £8.99

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Friday Poem – ‘Penguin Love’, Nerys Williams

On Wednesday the world celebrated its cutest holiday, World Penguin Day, so in continued praise of these adorable birds our Friday Poem this week is ‘Penguin Love’ by Nerys Williams.

Nerys Williams Sound ArchiveTaken from Nerys’ 2011 collection Sound Archive, ‘Penguin Love’ is a vibrant and evocative portrait of black, white and yellow – of curiously wistful creatives who stand ‘angled at constellations’ and ache for the gift of a perfect smooth stone – the symbol of budding penguin romance.
Sound Archive was shortlisted for both the Forward Best First Collection Prize and the Michael Murphy Prize, and won the Poetry Now / Mountains to Sea DLR Strong Award. This is a strikingly original debut in which the poet conjures a complex music, intriguing narratives, and poems full of atmosphere that query identity, gender, and the dream of art as a vehicle for emotion and meaning.

 

 

World Penguin Day poem Penguin Love Nerys Williams

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sound Archive is available from the Seren website: £8.99

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Friday Poem – ‘Kinetic Melodies’, Nerys Williams

Kinetic Melodies Nerys Williams Friday Poem

This week our Friday Poem is Nerys Williams’ ‘Kinetic Melodies’, from her award-winning debut collection, Sound Archive.

Nerys Williams Sound ArchiveWinner of the DLR Strong Award and shortlisted for both the Forward Prize and the Michael Murphey Prize, Nerys Williams’ Sound Archive is a strikingly original and critically acclaimed first collection of poems. Using formal strategies similar to modernist painting: abstraction, dislocation, surrealist juxtaposition, Williams conjures a complex music, intriguing narratives, and poems full of atmosphere that query identity, gender, and the dream of art as a vehicle for emotion and meaning.
Look out for Nerys Williams’ new collection, Cabaret, out soon from New Dublin Press.

 

 

Kinetic Melodies

It is easy to speak of language as ownership,
your purring phonemes are not my right
nor any dialogic imagination.

It is like the time I mixed metaphors
and found myself nude, addressing a crowd
with no immediate

parallel or paradox to flail at.
An empty lectern, a thousand eyes.

Small inconsistencies alert us:
a time to find a colour of saying,
how dialect forms the melody of tall tales.

After storm fields have disappeared
sulphur fills the air where the tree stands.

Here it says I am branch
root and hollow, rub my charcal into clean hands,
serenade me with your speech,
curse the carrion crow below.

 

Sound Archive is available from the Seren website: £8.99

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

 

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Friday Poem – Sound Archive

Sound Archive

This week’s poem is from Nerys Williams’ debut collection, Sound Archive, which won the 2012 DLR Strong Award.

Sound Archive is the strikingly original first collection of poems from Nerys Williams. Using formal strategies similar to modernist painting: abstraction, dislocation, surrealist juxtaposition, the poet conjures a complex music, intriguing narratives, and poems full of atmosphere that query identity, gender, and the dream of art as a vehicle for emotion and meaning. There is a playful lightness of touch and tone and for every serious inquisition like ‘An Anatomy of Arguments’ or ‘Conversations with Cocteau’, there is a poem that will muse on ‘Canter’s Starstruck Diner, L.A.’ or on the ‘artifacts’ left by Marilyn Monroe, in ‘Marilyn’s Auction House’. Williams confronts our preconceptions about what it might mean to be a woman writing against the background of two formidable traditions: that of Welsh-speaking Wales and of English literature. A thoughtful, subtle and fascinating first collection.

Sound Archive
for Cliff Anderson

It takes patience this piecing
of noise in an archive for voices.

Chronicled on my silver-silicon
a focus of of gravity gone, scene unset.

Tempos in the unthreading
of flight beating.

Misremembered movement
the voice still says:

Do not package me
as an afterthought or a bulletin.

Though I have never been to Spain
I understand attachment theory
and have been told of thanatology.

Raise your glass to this last flourish
as I switch from Andante to Largo

I toast Dubrovnik, Elvis and Chopin
free the slaves of my imagination.

I will wear boaters in the rain
and fill one room with flowers.

I will raise hell in remaining chapels
never searching for injunctions nor pardons.

I will be the sage on the hill
filling in for memorial towers.

I will finish that string quartet
begun at twenty-five.

I will flirt with the ladies at the till
and get my groceries free.

I will smoke over the baby grand
turning to my right for a tumbler of gin.

I will mark a map of all colours felt
frame them into a continent.

There will be methods to my madness
which I will name kinetic imbalance.

On this day
thought is blown over the wall
over trees to the road,

jazzed up and jiving
a bouquet of spectral dandelions
for you to hold.

Order Sound Archive from our website.