This week’s Friday Poem is ‘White Poem’ by SL Grange from their pamphlet bodies and other haunted houses which won the inaugural Poetry Wales Pamphlet Competition. The Poetry Wales Wales Poetry Award is currently open for entries for single poems until the 12th January 2023.
Speaking from and for LGBTQIA+ communities, SL Grange gives a voice to lost transcestors, celebrates acts of resistance, sings a gender-fluid love song, and hosts a tender-angry conversation with the ghosts of the personal and political histories that inhabit us. In true haunted house tradition, the non-human and the supernatural are also given rooms of their own; personal demons are summoned, we are entangled with our wilder sides. Witchcraft, seance and prophecy are invoked and brought up against sharp slices of reality. Described by judges as ‘strong and self-assured’, ‘sheer gorgeous’, and ‘a dark and brooding collection that combines the visceral nature of the body with the ephemeral and supernatural’, bodies, and other haunted houses is a beautifully crafted exploration of identity which queers time as well as self.
bodies and other haunted houses is available from on the Seren website: £5.00
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In the beginning the guard’s gloved hands
pat you down, searching for weapons,
his touch is weaponized, the muted duty
of his movements smooth along each of your arms.
Soon the guard’s touch is the only touch
from another
and you think of your mother
after bath time, the harbour of her chest
against yours, the rough-love of her towelling
you dry, reaching into all the nooks
and crannies, no cabbages behind the ears
she says. And yes, I guess searching the body
is another way of saying the body is a trove
of treasure and your touch a torch.](https://serenbooks.files.wordpress.com/2022/09/search-sammy-weaver.png)
Welsh Verse has made a triumphant return to print. Tony Conran’s unrivalled volume of Welsh poetry through the ages contains lively yet meticulous translations stretching from the sixth century to the late twentieth century. Virtually every significant poet (or poem: there are several Anonymous entries over the centuries) is present, and every poetic form: the epics of Taliesin and Aneurin, the poets of the medieval princes, Tudor poets, Non-conformist poets, hymn-writers, Romantics, Social Realists and political Nationalists.
Princess Adélaïde, daughter of Louis XV, is at odds with the etiquette of the French court. Adélaïde envies her brother, is bored with her sister and, when Madame de Pompadour, a bourgeoise, comes to court as her father’s mistress, she is smitten, with dangerous results. Adélaïde pushes against the confines of the court, blind to the difference between a mistress and princess, with tragic results. Forty-four years later, under the looming shadow of the revolution, what has happened to the hopes of a young girl and the doomed regime in which she grew up?
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