Welsh

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‘Real Newport’

Released 12th December 2006 by Ann Drysdale.

Britain’s youngest city as you’ve never seen it before. Just another Victorian port or an Elizabethan maritime centre? A featureless South Wales town or a growing city on the verge of massive and original redevelopment? The “new Seattle” (Paul Flynn) or a haven for single mothers working the system (John Redwood)?

From the splendour of Tredegar House to the towering presence of the Celtic Manor Resort, from the bland sixties shopping centre to the bizarre centenarian Transporter Bridge, from the decline of the football team to the continuing proud tradition at Rodney Parade, it’s a place full of contradictions and characters. Join Ann Drysdale in her offbeat exploration of Newport – old and new – and its people.

“The prose is often laugh-out –loud, the poetry is always excellently crafted. Versatile in traditional forms, Drysdale has some great pastiche and some wryly moving pieces; it’s a successful contrast with the experimental poetry in Peter Finch’s Real Cardiff books … Drysdale’s book is so essential for anyone wanting to know anything at all about Newport, and such an enjoyable read, that some may hesitate to go there, lest their sojourn prove less amusing and instructive. To Newportians it must be a revelation.”

Tom Cheesman, New Welsh Review, December 07

‘Real’ Series Editor: Peter Finch

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‘Real Cardiff Two: The Greater City’

Published 14th November 2004 by Peter Finch.

In the sequel to the hugely popular Real Cardiff, Peter Finch explores the city further, hunts for the legendary peripherique and discovers rubbish dumps, walled housing estates and dead-end lanes. He walks the coast around Penarth Head and on to Lavernock to find the terminal beach at Sully. With poet Grahame Davies he hunts for the mythical river Canna and uncovers what makes Cardiff Pontcanna media-land tick. With Architect Jonathan Adams he trails where the walls of Cardiff once ran, looking for time vaults and gaps in the city’s space-time continuum.

How did Penarth’s Billy Banks get their name? Why are there so many pubs in Pontcanna? Is it Victoria Park or Canton? Who knows? Not Finch’s mother, that’s for sure. With John Briggs he walks the route of the Glamorgan Canal, mourning the city’s loss. Russell Goodway agrees with him. But he’s lost too, now. In Roath, the real capital of Wales, he finds the Goosler, lost tennis courts and the old road to Cardiff Gate. In the Bay he looks at what went before the new Wales Millennium Centre and what might have been.

Out at Creigiau he finds cromlechau and extant past in a city full of trees and slopes. The Welsh Office is surrounded with salt to keep the demons out. John Tripp has his wake at the Gower in Cathays. There’s a folk-club in the Locomotive along Broadway. Queen Street Station has passages you can’t get to where the Taff Valley Railway still steams.

There are other secrets running inside the overbuilt city. Finch tells us what they are. In Real Cardiff #2 Finch no longer has his nose pressed against the glass. This time he’s inside.

‘Real’ Series Editor: Peter Finch

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‘Real Cardiff’

Released 22nd July 2004.

Peter Finch’s hugely popular alternative guide to the capital of Wales: “One of the best books I have ever read about a city.” Jan Morris.

Peter Finch discovers the real Cardiff – lost rivers, itinerant poets, the old race courses, the revitalised city centre, the redeveloped Cardiff Bay – as he travels the city from east to west and north to south. This is offbeat topographical writing, guaranteed to enthrall the native, the visitor and the armchair traveller alike.

‘Real’ Series Editor: Peter Finch


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The Real Series

“Well-written and passionate, they’re all intriguing and full of offbeat observations… if you’re looking to get inside the character of any of these places, you’ll find the series perfect.” — Time Out

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‘The Ivy Hides the Fig-ripe Duchess’

Seren is pleased to announce the newest poetry collection by Welsh writer Ellie Evans is released on 13th June 2011, head to the Seren website to get your copy today!

The Ivy Hides the Fig-ripe Duchess is an exhilarating first collection of poems from Ellie Evans. Using a surrealist palette of imagery and a tightly focused idiom, the author takes us on strange journeys:to the post-apocalyptic world of the title poem, or into a skewed 18th century Venice in ‘The Zograscope’. These strange worlds are always to the purpose, they are, as Marianne Moore famously said of poetry ‘imaginary gardens with real toads in them.’ We obliquely unearth childhood trauma, fraught or intense relationships and also a singular (and perhaps also Welsh?) delight in rebellion, and in escape through the imagination. Poems like ‘Picnic with Earthquakes’ and ‘Jekyl Island, Georgia’ deftly align exotic locales (Eastern Europe, South East Asia, Greece and the USA,) with intimate states of mind. A fascination with art and history emerge in: ‘A Brief History of Topiary’ and ‘Two Monologues from The Odyssey’. There is also a palpable delight in technique: you will find a sonnet, a villanelle, triolets and a concise free verse where she employs rhyme, half-rhyme, and subtle alliteration.

Seren will keep you posted on reviews and comments on Evans’s poetry collection.

To find out more about Seren and Ellie Evans search our blog or go to our website http://www.serenbooks.com/

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Ellie Evans

Ellie Evans was born in Carmarthen and was educated in Llandeilo and Cardiff. After reading English at Oxford, she worked in publishing and for the Medical Research Council, before living in Hong Kong, teaching English.  She has spent most of her adult life teaching  in London, but now is based in Powys. She began writing poetry six years ago, and has an M.A. in Creative Writing from Bath Spa where she is finishing a Ph.D.  Her poems have been published in several anthologies and in magazines including PNR, Poetry Wales, New Welsh Review, Red Poets, The Rialto and Acumen .Evans has given readings at the Bath Literature Festival, Bath Poetry Cafe, Dartington’s ‘Ways with Words’ and ‘The Muses’ Workshop’  on the island of Spetses, Greece.

Books by Ellie Evans
The Ivy Hides the Fig-Ripe Duchess

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Nerys Williams Reads From ‘Sound Archive’

Nerys Williams will read from her first poetry collection, Sound Archive, at The Boar House, Laugharne, Monday 23rd May 2011 7pm.

To find out more about Nerys Williams the author and her first poetry collection published by Seren, click the tagged ‘Nerys Williams’ or go to our website – www.serenbooks.com – to find out more!

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Nia Williams, ‘The Colour of Grass’, Book Signing

Nia Williams author of new fantastic novel, The Colour of Grass, is holding a book signing at Waterstones in Cardiff on Saturday 21st May 2011 at 1pm. 

To find out more about Nia Williams the author or the novel’s synopsis, there is information on her if you click the tagged ‘Nia Williams’ or check the seren site – www.serenbooks.com – to read more about her and her work.