This week’s Friday Poem is ‘In Spring’ by Rhiannon Hooson from her collection The Other City. Rhiannon’s new collection Goliat was published in 2022.
Shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year,The Other City is full of sharply focused, beautifully resonant and deeply felt poems. The poet charts a course through real and imagined landscapes, where actions are done and undone, and the everyday made unfamiliar. Drawing on the personal and political histories of the Welsh countryside where she grew up, as well as more enigmatic mythologies, the poems map a journey through both the familiar and the foreign, giving us glimpses of unsettling spaces, where light falls “like silk pegged out to rot across the snow”.
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On Tuesday 11th April, hear Rhiannon reading from her new collection Goliat in the Seren Showcase at Waterstones Cardiff. Tickets £6. Starts at 7pm. Book via the Waterstones website.
An intelligent and beautiful book, Goliat offers absorbing stories of a precarious world on the brink of climate emergency. Employing startling imagery and a deep sense of history, these poems explore the irreplaceable beauty of a wild world, and the terrible damage that humans might do to each other and the earth.
This week’s Friday Poem is ‘For Natalia’ by Eric Ngalle Charles from his debut collection Homelands.
In Homelands Eric Ngalle Charles draws on his early life raised by the matriarchs of Cameroon, being sent to Moscow by human traffickers, and finding a new home in Wales. Rich in tone, subject and emotion, Charles’ poetry moves between the present and the past, between Africa and Europe, and between despair and hope. It discovers that historical injustices now play out in new forms, and that family tensions are as strong as the love within a family. Despite the difficulties Charles has faced, Homelands contains poems of fondness, warmth and humour and, as he returns to Cameroon to confront old ghosts, forgiveness.
You can catch up with all of series one by searching ‘The Seren Poetry Podcast’ in your favourite podcast app. Click like, follow or subscribe to have all future editions delivered straight to your podcast feed. Available on all platforms including Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts. Don’t forget to leave us a review if you like what you hear!
In anticipation of Mother’s Day and because today is St Patrick’s Day, this week’s Friday Poem is ‘Curating a space for anachronistic design’ by Welsh/Irish poet Nerys Williams from her new collectionRepublic.
In her explosive new poetry collection Republic Nerys Williams opens a window on life in rural west Wales during the 1980s and 90s. English and Welsh-language post-punk bands, politics, feminism and family life are thrown together on the page as she questions what makes a republic?
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Join us at Goldstone Books in Carmarthen tonight (17th March) to hear Nerys Williams in conversation with Menna Elfyn at the launch of Republic. All welcome. Find the full details and register via Eventbrite.
What the Water Gave Me contains fifty-two poems in the voice of the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. Some of the poems are close interpretations of Kahlo’s work, while others are parallels or version homages where Pascale Petit draws on her experience as a visual artist to create alternative ‘paintings’ with words. More than just a verse biography, this collection explores how Kahlo transformed trauma into art after the artist’s near-fatal bus accident. Petit, with her vivid style, her feel for nature and her understanding of pain and redemption, fully inhabits Kahlo’s world. Each poem is an evocation of “how art works on the pain spectrum”, laced with splashes of ferocious colour.
To celebrate International Women’s Day 2023, we’re highlighting a range of titles which explore various thoughts and experiences affecting women’s lives today. Find many more fantastic books written by women on our website.
This collection of lyric essays by Forward prize-winning poet Kim Moore explores at the relationship between poetry and everyday sexism. Moore examines the dynamics of performing poetry as a female poet – drawing on her PhD research and experiences of writing and performing the poems in her second collection All The Men I Never Marriedwhich won the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2022.
The essays tackle subjects that range from heckling at poetry readings, problems with the male gaze and explorations of what the female gaze might look like in poetry to discussions about complicity, guilt and objectification, the slipperiness of the word sexism and whether poetry can be part of transformational change.
With over 250 contributors, this generous selection of poetry by women features poets from the USA, Canada, England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Australia, and New Zealand. Arranged by thematic chapters that touch on various aspects of modern life, this anthology aims to be a touchstone of women’s thoughts and experiences; to be entertaining and relevant as well as inclusive and representative of some of the best poetry published now.
In these ‘Post-Feminist’ times, is there a need for such a book? Is the literary establishment still as dominated by men as it once was? Who gets to decide the canon? Eva Salzman opens Women’s Work with a lively polemic, making the case for the women-only anthology with characteristic wit and flair.
Maggie Harris’ short story collection Writing on Water is informed by the Caribbean, where she was born, and Britain where she has lived as an adult, and through them, the wider world. Issues of belonging and migration feature, but alongside these are growing interests in voice, narrative, gardening and botany, music and family. There are both UK and Caribbean voices in these tales, told by children, migrants, mothers, and grandparents.
Republic is about class, culture and community. It recounts the story of a young woman growing in west Wales up listening to the post-punk music of the 1980s and indie labels of the 1990s, decades which culminated in the explosion of “Cŵl Cymru” and new devolutionary powers in Wales.
Offering stories that are overheard, handed down, magnified, often translated from Welsh, this sequence of 80 prose poems creates a patchwork of narratives which share the challenges faced by women, Welsh-speakers, and other marginalised groups. This volume arose from the need to tell an alternative social history, one that commits an oral history to paper.
Vividly told, The Amazingly Astonishing Story is a classic story of a working-class girl growing up in the fifties and sixties, where dreams and reality seem irreconcilable. Her Catholic upbringing, a father torn between his daughter and his new wife, her irreverent imagination and stubborn determination to enjoy life, all mean that Lucy Gannon really does have an amazing story (including meeting the Beatles in her school grounds) as she finds her place in the world.
Lucy Gannon is the author of 8 plays and 18 TV dramas or series, including The Best of Men, Soldier Soldier, Peak Practice, Bramwell, and Dad. She won the Richard Burton Award for New Playwrights and has been writer in residence at the Royal Shakespeare Company.
1994, Iris and Victoria are pen friends. Iris writes about her life with her family in Paris. Victoria is in a refugee camp in Goma having fled the genocide in Rwanda in which thousands are being killed. One day Victoria’s letters stop, and Iris is told she has been moved.
Twenty years later Iris, a new mother, is working as a journalist in London. As she prepares to return to work, her thoughts turn to Victoria and what might have happened to her. She pitches a story to her editor which sets her on a journey to find her pen friend. But as she follows the story, things emerge that make her question her own past. Was her father, a French government official, somehow involved in the genocide? Are her childhood memories more fiction than fact?
How have the lives of these two women, who shared a moment in time, changed in the past twenty years? As the pressure of long-kept family secrets builds, will they ever find each other?
Winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2022
Kim Moore’s award-winning second collection All The Men I Never Married is pointedly feminist, challenging and keenly aware of the contradictions and complexities of desire. The 48 numbered poems take us through a gallery of exes and significant others where we encounter rage, pain, guilt, and love. A powerful collection of deeply thoughtful and deeply felt poetry.
Longlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize 2021
A city burns in a crisis − because the status quo has collapsed and change must come. Every value, relationship and belief is shaken and the future is uncertain.
In the twenty-six stories in A City Burning, set in Wales, Northern Ireland and Italy, children and adults face, in the flames of personal tragedy, moments of potential transformation. On the threshold of their futures each must make a choice: how to live in this new ‘now’. With a virtuoso control of tone, by turns elegiac, comic, lyrical, philosophical, A City Burning examines power of all types, exploring conflicts between political allegiances; between autonomy and intimacy; emotional display and concealment; resistance versus acceptance. The result is a deeply human book full of hauntingly memorable characters and narratives.
In her debut collection 163 Days Hannah Hodgson uses a panoply of medical, legal, and personal vocabularies to explore what illness, death and dying does to a person as both patient and witness. In her long poem ‘163 Days’, her longest period of hospitalisation to date, she probes various truths which clash like a tray of dropped instruments in a silent operating theatre. The mundanity of hospital life is marbled by a changing landscape of mood, hope and loss. A gap yawns between the person she is, and the person in her medical notes. In ‘Aftercare’, Hannah navigates the worlds of both nightclubs and hospice care as she embarks on a new version of her life as a disabled adult. An important collection, in which Hodgson’s true voice takes poetry into difficult places.
This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Antipodes’ by Glyn Edwards from his new collectionIn Orbit.
Glyn Edwards’s new collection In Orbit is a sustained narrative of love, loss and longing. Using a variety of innovative forms, these poems explore grief and how we come to terms with losing someone close to us. The natural world offers sustenance and a new perspective in the face of intense emotions as a man struggles to come to terms with news of a beloved teacher’s death.
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Join us at Providero Coffeehouse in Llandudno on Thursday 16th March for the launch of In Orbit. Register for free here www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/549134123947.
Introduced and edited by Cary Archard, Welsh Retrospective collects poems from the across the career of renowned Welsh writer Dannie Abse. Well-loved poems such as ’Return to Cardiff’ and ’In the Theatre’, sit alongside many previously uncollected poems. Vivid character portraits of Aunt Alice and Cousin Sidney sit next to tributes to poet predecessors, Dylan Thomas and Vernon Watkins. Some poems draw on Jewish writings, others on Welsh language literature. This collection is a fascinating insight into Dannie Abse’s Wales and his versatility as a poet. His Wales was anything but parochial, his poems effortlessly universal. As we approach his centenary in 2023, readers of this collection will once again be struck by Abse’s gift for accepting mortality with wise optimism.
In Homelands, his debut collection, Eric Ngalle Charles draws on his early life raised by the matriarchs of Cameroon, being sent to Moscow by human traffickers, and finding a new home in Wales. Rich in tone, subject and emotion, Charles’ poetry moves between the present and the past, between Africa and Europe, and between despair and hope. It discovers that historical injustices now play out in new forms, and that family tensions are as strong as the love within a family. Despite the difficulties Charles has faced, Homelands contains poems of fondness, warmth and humour and, as he returns to Cameroon to confront old ghosts, forgiveness.
When Miriam fell in love with Padraig life seemed simple. But soon she discovered that love is a treacherous business. Everything changed when she met Daniel. She was taken down an unexpected path which would dictate and dominate the rest of her life.
Spanning three generations of a North Wales family in a Welsh-speaking community, Miriam,Daniel and Me is an absorbing and compelling story of family discord, political turmoil, poetry, jealousy… and football.
The Edge of Cymru is the story of Julie Brominicks’ walk around Wales in the course of a year. As an educator she knew a lot about the country’s natural resources. But as a long established incomer from England and more recent Welsh learner, she wanted to know more about its history, about Wales today, and her place in it.
As her walk unwinds the history of Wales is also unwound, from the twenty-first century back to pre-human times, often viewed through an environmental lens. Brominicksʼ observations of the places and people she meets on her journey make a fascinating alternative travelogue about Wales and the lives its people live. Her writing is lyrical, with engaging and striking coinages and images which carry the reader along too, entertained and informed. A quest of personal discovery, the narrative of The Edge of Cymruis also a refreshingly different way of looking at place, identity, memory and belonging.
A Last Respect – Ed. Glyn Mathias and Daniel G. Williams
A Last Respect celebrates the Roland Mathias Prize, awarded to outstanding poetry books by authors from Wales. It presents a selection of work from all eleven prize-winning books, by Dannie Abse, Tiffany Atkinson, Ruth Bidgood, Ailbhe Darcy, Rhian Edwards, Christine Evans, John Freeman, Philip Gross, Gwyneth Lewis, Robert Minhinnick, and Owen Sheers. It is a who’s who of contemporary poetry which shows the form in good health in Wales.
The fifty-four poems included are wide-ranging in style and subject – relationships, nature, environmental issues, mortality, time, war, Wales, poetry itself, even the minefield of parents’ evenings. They are inventive, experimental, formal, original and, as prize-winners, of the highest quality.
This combination of prizewinning poems and informative commentary makesA Last Respect a must-have book of writing from Wales.
Wales is full of wildlife sites and in Wild Placestelevision naturalist Iolo Williams picks his favourite forty from the many nature reserves scattered around the country. From Cemlyn on Anglesey to the Newport Wetlands, from Stackpole in Pembrokeshire to the Dee Estuary, Williams criss-crosses Wales. His list takes in coastal sites from marshes to towering cliffs – plus Skomer and other islands – mountains, valleys, bogs, meadows, woods and land reclaimed from industry. These wild places vary in size from the vastness of bog at Tregaron to the hidden gem that is the daffodil wood at Coed-y-Bwl. They include sites of international significance, like Skomer Island, and the managed beauty of the former open cast site, Parc Slip.
The short story has long been a popular form with writers and readers in Wales. The Green Bridge collects work by 25 of the country’s foremost writers of the twentieth century in an entertaining and varied anthology. Horror, satire, humour, war, tales of the aristocracy, of navvies, love, and madness, industry the countryside, politics and sport: these stories provide insight into the changing values of Wales and the world. This is enjoyable reading for those who know Wales and its authors, and for newcomers to both.
A city burns in a crisis − because the status quo has collapsed and change must come. Every value, relationship and belief is shaken and the future is uncertain.
In the twenty-six stories in A City Burning, set in Wales, Northern Ireland and Italy, children and adults face, in the flames of personal tragedy, moments of potential transformation. On the threshold of their futures each must make a choice: how to live in this new ‘now’. Some of these moments occur in mundane circumstances, others amidst tragedy or drama.
Over the past two centuries the South Wales Valleys have gone from idyllic rural landscape to the engine room of the British Empire to post industrial decline. Building on the success of their book Walking Cardiff, Peter Finch and John Briggs explore how the Valleys have changed, and how they are evolving for the twenty-first centuries in their new book Walking the Valleys.
The informative texts can be used as both a route finder and a literary entertainment in themselves. John Briggs’s lively photographs provide further detail and each walk is illustrated with a map. Armchair walkers will find the book as interesting and as useful as those actually pull on their boots. And natives and visitors alike will find a new discovery around every corner.
As we publish her new collection Republic, poet Nerys Williams gives us an insight into the music which accompanied its writing.
Listening to Republic
Writing Republic I found that post punk music of the 80s and 90s became key in an attempt to articulate a relationship between community, language and culture. Given the current preponderance of School Disco compilations, initially it might seem that retreating to the music of the 80s and 90s is another variant in communal nostalgia. This is not the intention of Republic. I believe that music carries an energy for future action and desire for change. What you learn over the years changes how you listen to those important early albums. Context shifts meaning.
Republic is an anti-memoir, it came from a need to transcribe the voices of a community (as opposed to a single voice) and a refutation of the easy and often predictable epiphanies of some memoirs. Music has a voice throughout this volume. Music is not a soundtrack or sonic wallpaper. Some of the lyrics I cite are just as beloved to me as Emily Dickinson’s poetry.
The sounds in this discography list are eclectic – moving from SKA, 80s pop, Welsh language electronica and rave to 90s shoegazing, jazz samba and classical minimalism.
I grew up in a part of West Wales which in the early 80s had an ambivalent relationship to the Welsh language. Welsh bilingual education was still an experiment. The 11+ existed to partition kids. English language music culture was king. Crucially Welsh language post punk music gave me a love of language that no primer could ever do.
In the late 1980s Fideo 9 on S4C, with is wonderful presenter Eddie Ladd, pushed boundaries. It was a relief to watch bands with strong female leads like Fiona Owen of Eirin Peryglus and Patricia Morgan from Datblygu performing in videos and asserting a space for non-rock female personas. Before the web, encountering such bands as Datblygy, Anhrefn, Y Cyrff onthe TV and at gigs arranged by Cymdeithas yr. Iaith, felt like finding a community. An outsider Wales which was vibrant and questioning.
The range was broad: moving from the reggae dub of Llwybr Llaethog, the malleable beats of Pop Negatif Wastad and guitar riffs of The Crumblowers to Traddodiad Ofnus’s socialist love letters and Tŷ Gwydr’s dance utopianism. Welsh language music was part of a global community. Datblygu could be cued between Le Mystère Des Voix Bulgares and The Sugarcubes.
Republic offers a full discography. A Spotify playlist accompanies the book giving a sense not only of the period, but also issues that remain. Elfyn Presli’s “Jackboots Maggie Thatcher” and The Specials’ “Ghost Town” have not lost their resonance, or their relevance. There are some bands (especially Welsh bands from the listing above) whose work cannot be located on Spotify. Archive recordings exist on various web platforms (such as Ffarout’s YouTube channel). But I want to stress that Apple Music and Bandcamp offer ways of financially contributing to Welsh bands and labels through subscription downloads.
Writing this, on Welsh language music day 10th February 2023, I am grateful to those 1980s bands who were never able to get any sustainable income from their music, but did it anyhow. I thank those bands who loaded their vans and cars, went cross-country in the cold and rain to visit run down country hotels. I hug those band members who having travelled on B roads, played to drunken audiences. I acknowledge those experimentalists who often faced jeering or apathy. I salute the women who organised gigs and Cymdeithas cells tirelessly. I carry this archive of voices with me (with recent updates).
Nerys Williams
Full Discography (by section number)
8
Elfyn Presli ‘Jackboots Maggie Thatcher’ The First Cuts Are The Deepest (Words of Warning, 1987)
Coldplay A Rush of Blood to the Head (Parlaphone, 2002)
PJ Harvey Let England Shake (Island, 2011)
In her explosive new poetry collection Republic Nerys Williams opens a window on life in rural west Wales during the 1980s and 90s. English and Welsh-language post-punk bands, politics, feminism and family life are thrown together on the page as she questions what makes a republic?
Peter Finch’s remarkable career spans over fifty years. He has been taking poetry to places it didn’t know it wanted to go from the beginning; blending the avant-garde, concrete, visual, sound, performance and more conventional forms to create something unique. His new two-volume Collected Poems, edited by Andrew Taylor, cement his reputation as one of Britain’s leading poets.
Volume One brings together work from long lost chapbooks, broadsheets and limited editions, as well as more conventionally published work. Volume Two focuses on the second half of Finch’s career with poems from later collections sitting alongside works from his prose books and those engraved in the public realm on sculptures, walls and buildings, particularly in his native Cardiff. Nerys Williams and Ian McMillan provide appreciative forewords to each volume.
Order the Collected Poems Complete Set on the Seren website for £30.00, or buy them individually for £19.99 each.
To celebrate Shrove Tuesday aka Pancake Day, we’re sharing this delicious recipe for pancakes with blueberry compote and coconut cream from The Seasonal Veganby Sarah Philpott.
If you’re looking for an in-season alternative to blueberries, why not serve with stewed apple, rhubarb, or frozen blackberries?
The Seasonal Vegan is a kitchen diary of seasonal recipes with a delicious mixture of Sarah Philpott’s fine food writing and Manon Houston’s beautiful photography. This guide to eating with the seasons takes a realistic approach to shopping cheaply and sustainably and proves that the vegan lifestyle is anything but expensive.
Pancakes with blueberry compote and coconut cream
Under 20 minutes | Makes 2 large pancakes
Photograph by Manon Houston
Ingredients
– 160g chickpea/gram flour – 1 ½ tsp baking powder – 2 tbsp maple syrup – 1 tsp cinnamon – 200ml plant milk or water – 2-3 tbsp oil – Half a tin or packet of coconut cream
For the compote
– 200g fresh or frozen blueberries – 45ml water – 50g granulated sugar –The juice of half a lemon – 1 tsp vanilla extract
Mix the dry ingredients together and gradually add the water or milk and the maple syrup and stir until it has a thick, but pourable, consistency. Heat the oil in a non-stick pan over a medium heat (test if it’s hot enough by dropping in a tiny bit of batter – it should sizzle) then pour in half the batter and cook, flipping over occasionally, for 3-4 minutes. Repeat with the rest of the batter.
To make the compote, combine the blueberries, water, sugar, vanilla extract and lemon juice in a small saucepan. Cook over a medium heat for about 10-15 mins. Serve warm or cold.
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