The Seren Poetry Podcast

Friday Poem – ‘We are coming’ by Kim Moore

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Earlier this week, Kim Moore was announced the winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2022. This week’s Friday Poem is ‘We are coming’ from her wining collection All The Men I Never Married. You can hear Kim chatting in-depth about the book on the The Seren Poetry Podcast which is available now on all podcast platforms.

This cover shows a collage of a male figure made up of tiny images of nature. The figure is surrounded by butterflies which stand out against the black background. The text reads All The Men I Never Married, Kim Moore. Winner of the Forward Prize.

Pointedly feminist, challenging and keenly aware of the contradictions and complexities of desire, All The Men I Never Married is Kim Moore’s award-winning and critically acclaimed second collection. The 48 numbered poems take us through a gallery of exes and significant others where we encounter rage, pain, guilt, and love. She turns the spotlight on interactions between men and women, revealing easy misogyny, everyday sexism and uncomfortable truths about the challenges women face on a daily basis.

We are coming under cover of darkness, with our strawberry marks, our familiars, our third nipples, our ill-mannered bodies, our childhoods spent hobbled like horses where we were told to keep our legs closed, where we sat in the light of a window and posed and waited for the makers of the world to tell us again how a woman is made. We are arriving from the narrow places, from the spaces we were given, with our curses and our spells and our solitude, with our potions we swallow to shrink us small as insects or stretch us into giants, for yes, there are giants amongst us, we must warn you. There will be riots, we’re carrying all that we know about silence as we return from the forests and towers, unmaking ourselves, stepping from the pages of books, from the eye of the camera, from the cages we built for each other, the frames of paintings, from every place we were lost and afraid in. We stand at the base of our own spines and watch tree turn to bone and climb each vertebra to crawl back into our minds, we’ve been out of our minds all this time, our bodies saying no, we were not born for this, dragging the snare and the wire behind us.

The Seren Poetry Podcast is a new series of in-depth interviews with Seren poets. Listen to our in-depth interview with Kim about All The Men I Never Married in episode 9 which is available now.

Simply search ‘The Seren Poetry Podcast’ in your favourite podcast app and 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.

All The Men I Never Married is available on the Seren website for £9.99

Create your free Seren account and enjoy 20% off every book you buy direct from us.

Friday Poem – ‘1986’ by Eric Ngalle Charles

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This week’s Friday Poem is ‘1986’ by Eric Ngalle Charles from his debut collection Homelands. You can hear Eric chatting about the book on the The Seren Poetry Podcast which is available now on all podcast platforms.

This cover shows a painting of a young African boy standing in front of a wooden wall. He is wearing a large black hat, blue robe around his waist and is holding a bunch of reeds.

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. 

1986 Red Moon over lake Nyos, doomsday whispers armed with drums, survivors like ghosts of the apocalypse, singing choruses of the end times. Why have the gods forsaken us? Red Moon over the poisonous lake, salutations of umbra and penumbra. Survivors like Old Testament eremite from yonder, foretelling tales, turning ghosts, consumed by gaseous light. Red Moon, dogs in heat, barking. One lone, dazed survivor. See her: standing/stuttering/falling/holding onto nearby railings. Did she invite disaster by boiling beans overnight? Red Moon over lake Nyos. Noises, clamoring. They went to bed and never woke up. The few, resurrected, singing choruses of the end times. Why have the gods forsaken us?

*Lake Nyos disaster, Bamenda, Cameroon, 1986: a limnic eruption on the 24th of August 1986 killed 1,746 people. 

The Seren Poetry Podcast is a new series of in-depth interviews with Seren poets. Episode 8 with Eric Ngalle Charles is available to listen to now.

Simply search ‘The Seren Poetry Podcast’ in your favourite podcast app and 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.

Homelands is available on the Seren website for £9.99

Create your free Seren account and enjoy 20% off every book you buy direct from us.

Friday Poem – ‘What the Burglar Took’ by Rosalind Hudis

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This week’s Friday Poem is ‘What the Burglar Took’ by Rosalind Hudis from her collection Restorations. You can hear Rosalind chatting about the book on the The Seren Poetry Podcast which is available now on all podcast platforms.

This cover shows an abstract print of some mountains tinged with hints of blue, red and purple. The text reads: Restorations, Rosalind Hudis.

Restorations is a journey into what it means to preserve – a monument, a moment, a life-story, a poppy. It’s about the hunger to possess and the need to let go. Welding themes from art and history with the contemporary, there are poems about pigments and dictators, glue and glass houses, collections, crinolines, and barometers, and the vagaries of memory itself. Entwined, is a more personal story that tracks the loss of a parent to dementia. Also running through, is a theme of women eroding the straitjacket of gendered roles. Linking all is a play with colour, particularly blue, in all its stages from vital to decayed.

What the Burglar Took That night it was nothing. Cinematic, he’d slid under the kitchen window, swerved an old veined saucer, rocked the vintage cactus, slippered his way across tiles on a moulting rug that still smelt of your last dog and made you wheeze. After that threshold no sign, yet you felt him in every omission the carriage clock that paced him but never chimed, silverfish partying by moonlight who’d fled into covens of dust, slivers of streetlamp that laid a grid from back to front room where shadows failed to creak. His exit, another window, half open in the study. The room was rigid with night, The Great Bear encrypted in the cushions. You touched frost on the inside, took to spying on your house, heard whispers in the heating kettle Morse in the water-pipes.

The Seren Poetry Podcast is a new series of in-depth interviews with Seren poets. Episode 7 with Rosalind Hudis is available to listen to now.

Simply search ‘The Seren Poetry Podcast’ in your favourite podcast app and 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.

Restorations is available on the Seren website for £9.99

Create your free Seren account and enjoy 20% off every book you buy direct from us.

Friday Poem – ‘A Late Aubade’ by Ben Wilkinson

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This week’s Friday Poem is ‘A Late Aubade’ by Ben Wilkinson from his collection Same Difference. You can hear Ben chatting about the book on the The Seren Poetry Podcast which is available now on all podcast platforms.

This cover shows an abstract painting made up of dark blues and greys. There is a face-like smudge in the centre and splashes of red, yellow and green on the left hand side. The text reads: Same Difference, Ben Wilkinson.

Same Difference is the formally acute second collection by Ben Wilkinson. Carefully crafted, and charged with contemporary language, the poems play with poetic voice and the dramatic monologue, keeping us on our toes and asking just who is doing the talking. Throughout, he ‘steps into the shoes’ of French symbolist poet Paul Verlaine (1844-96), reframing his voice for modern readers. Brimming with everyone from cage fighters and boy racers to cancer patients and whales in captivity, Same Difference is gritty, darkly ironic and often moving – a collection for our times.

A Late Aubade after Verlaine How long since we last lolled here all morning, the house quiet and still, snow falling beyond our bedroom’s window and warmth? Now we’ve time to uncover each other after what seems like months apart – losing ourselves in that same tender art to open one thought onto another – even this grim half-light has a charm of sorts. Times like these grant us leave from the world – those claims it makes of everyone – and the constant doing that comes to nothing; the snow still falls and the streets are frozen. Instead, let this moment be perfectly held: return us to something we hadn’t thought missing.

The Seren Poetry Podcast is a new series of in-depth interviews with Seren poets. Episode 6 with Ben Wilkinson is available to listen to now.

Simply search ‘The Seren Poetry Podcast’ in your favourite podcast app and 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.

Same Difference is available on the Seren website for £9.99

Create your free Seren account and enjoy 20% off every book you buy direct from us.

Friday Poem – ‘Peeling the Skin’ by Carolyn Jess-Cooke

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This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Peeling the Skin’ by Carolyn Jess-Cooke from her collection We Have to Leave the Earth. You can hear Carolyn chatting about the book on the The Seren Poetry Podcast which is available now on all podcast platforms.

This cover shows a photograph of a tangled ball of blue fishing line in relief against a pale pink and blue background. The text reads: We Have to Leave the Earth. Carolyn Jess-Cooke

Carolyn Jess-Cooke’s third collection We Have to Leave the Earth deftly interweaves the personal and the political. Climate change is confronted in a sequence about the Arctic; poems that are vividly descriptive of an extreme landscape, sensitive to the effects of global warming. A second sequence, The House of Rest, is a history in 9 poems of Josephine Butler, (1828-1906) a pioneering feminist activist. There are also tender poems about family, mental health, motherhood and the earth.

Peeling the Skin They’d try to find the hem first, the beginning of that lace-fine calyx that sometimes ran deliciously from shoulder to waist in a continuum of cells shucked by too long in the burning glare. No one thought to rub in sun cream, it seems, for each summer my lunar Irish epidermis crisped from salmon to magenta before flaking off great silvery coats and blankets, milky curtains, pearl bodices. The confetti of my childhood lies in corners of Connemara, the sands of Donegal, bearing traces of fingers that picked me to riddance. I’d hear the sellotape-tear of strips they’d peel from my back and I felt like something being primed for the spit, or dressed for the rite. Sometimes they’d shear what wasn’t ready for shearing, and blood would globe at the new rind that knitted under the husk. I think it was this small breach, this being pared in pain for others’ pleasure, that taught me where DNA ended and I begin, and begin, and begin.

The Seren Poetry Podcast is a new series of in-depth interviews with Seren poets. Episode 5 with Carolyn Jess-Cooke is available to listen to now.

Simply search ‘The Seren Poetry Podcast’ in your favourite podcast app and 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.

We Have to Leave the Earth is available on the Seren website for £9.99

Create your free Seren account and enjoy 20% off every book you buy direct from us.

Friday Poem – ‘All the Terrors’ by Rhian Edwards

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This week’s Friday Poem is ‘All the Terrors’ by Rhian Edwards from her collection The Estate Agent’s Daughter. You can hear Rhian chatting about the book on the The Seren Poetry Podcast which is available now on all podcast platforms.

This cover shows a black and white photograph of Gareth L Edwards outside his estate agents with three other men dress in 70s style suits. The text reads: The Estate Agent's Daughter. Rhian Edwards.

The Estate Agent’s Daughter by Rhian Edwards is both powerfully personal, local to the author’s Bridgend birthplace, and performative, born to be read aloud. In the title poem, the protagonist is reimagined as a surrealist house, foreshadowing both the heartbreak (a shattered first marriage) and joy (the birth of a daughter), that feature in the work that follows. Employing sly irony, close observation and sharp wit, the poet confronts a myriad of themes, from family and the body to the word of disillusioned dating. Throughout she combines her visceral skill for description with a feminist forthright courage to speak of difficult things.

All the Terrors are gathered in this portmanteau, this Hammmer House, this Ealing-made. The razor cut of Cushing’s cheeks, hollowed eyes, RP that belongs to the Raj. How I long for Christopher Lee, his oil-slicked widow’s peak, badger grey, immaculate cravat. I would give the earth, mortality, to be the trussed brunette in Regency. Could my generous décolletage invite the screeches of a fishing-lined bat to my Juliet balcony? Or could the punctured cloud of my négligée summon an unseasonable wind to my French doors? Behold the jagged cloak, crimson lining, arms raised. Regard as I back away in mugging fear, mesmerised by the bloodshot white of his eyes, all a swoon to the preachery of his pearly fangs.

The Seren Poetry Podcast is a new series of in-depth interviews with Seren poets. Episode 4 with Rhian Edwards is available to listen to now.

Simply search ‘The Seren Poetry Podcast’ in your favourite podcast app and 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.

The Estate Agent’s Daughter is available on the Seren website for £9.99

Create your free Seren account and enjoy 20% off every book you buy direct from us.

Friday Poem – ‘Old Spyder’ by Christopher Meredith

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This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Old Spyder’ by Christopher Meredith from his collection Still. You can hear Christopher chatting about Still and his novel Please on the The Seren Poetry Podcast which is available now on all podcast platforms.

This cover shows a painting of a snowy landscape beneath a wintery sky. The fields are small and far away, dotted with bushes. A single black crow sits on the bare branches of a tree in the foreground. The text reads: Still Christopher Meredith.

Still uses the title as a fulcrum to balance paradoxical concerns: stillness and motion, memory and forgetting, sanity and madness, survival and extinction. The old man in the title poem is seen standing, backlit by an open door. Fixing this in the mind is both memorial and a means of partial forgetting, of releasing him into history. The closing set of poems ‘Still Air’ focuses on a small landscape in the Usk Valley, observing the multiple, complex, endlessly moving parts of nature in the stars, geology, the seasons, the days. Lively and thought provoking, this is a beautifully crafted, insightful and intelligent collection.

Old Spyder Under jewelled Aldebaran old Spyder sat, his head hunched down. All matter he thought’s just a flower fight and all that we think heavy light and all that’s truly light seems dark and all that’s truly play seems work. Oh we could shine such a jewelled light but for the memory’s grip on hurt and the interference of the heart.

The Seren Poetry Podcast is a new series of in-depth interviews with Seren poets. Episode 3 with Christopher Meredith is available to listen to now.

Simply search ‘The Seren Poetry Podcast’ in your favourite podcast app and 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.

Both Still and Please are available as a bundle on the Seren website for £15.00

Friday Poem – ‘Heirloom’ by Ilse Pedler

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This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Heirloom’ by Ilse Pedler from her collection Auscultation. You can hear Ilse chatting poetry and her job as a vet in episode 2 of The Seren Poetry Podcast which is available now on all podcast platforms.

This cover shows an image of an orange butterfly resting on the cord of a stethoscope. The text reads: Auscultation. Ilse Pedler.

Auscultation, which means listening and specifically, in medicine, listening to sounds that come from the body’s internal organs. If listening is a central theme of this collection, it is also about being heard. There are poems about vets waiting rooms and surgical instruments, about crisis calls, about overhearing farmers and pet owners and colleagues. There are also poems about surviving a stern childhood and a heartbreaking sequence about being a stepmother. This is a compelling set of poems from a striking new voice.

Heirloom Inside my mother’s sewing box, little plaits of embroidery silks lie in ordered rainbows. Most evenings she licks the end of a strand into a point and threads it through my eye with fierce concentration, fixing me in little stitches to the stretched canvas. My scalp smarts as she tugs the tangles out of my hair and anchors it in neat bunches. My neck itches with the stiff collar of the dress she chain stitches for me and my toes are pinched by the tight black shoes buttoned with French knots. In running stitch, she outlines a straight-backed chair for me to sit on and a book for my hands. Finally, with little split stitches she carefully stabs out a smile on my face.

The Seren Poetry Podcast is a new series of in-depth interviews with Seren poets. Episode 2 with Ilse Pedler is available to listen to now.

Simply search ‘The Seren Poetry Podcast’ in your favourite podcast app and 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.

Auscultation is available on the Seren website: £9.99

Create your free Seren account and enjoy 20% off every book you buy direct from us.

Friday Poem – ‘Borders Gothic’ by Polly Atkin

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This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Borders Gothic’ by Polly Atkin from her collection Much With Body. You can hear Polly chatting about her poetry in episode 1 of The Seren Poetry Podcast which is available now on all podcast platforms.

This cover shows a painting of a woman floating on her back in a blue green lake. The text reads: Much With Body. Polly Atkin.

Much With Body is a startlingly original second collection. The beauty of the Lake District is both balm and mirror, refracting pain and also soothing it with distraction. Much of the landscape is lakescape, giving the book a watery feel. Atkin also draws on the journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, from a period late in her life when she was often ill. In common with the works of the Wordsworths, these poems share a quality of the metaphysical sublime. Their reverence for the natural world is an uneasy awe, contingent upon knowledge of our fragility and mortality.

Borders Gothic You will meet it as a corner you cannot turn, a gate flung open, a muffled struggle offroad, in the woody murk where the old track hums under mulch and brambles. You will be a traveller in the midst, alone. It will throw itself into your bag as a weight so heavy you cannot go on. It will block your path in the body of a bone white calf, or lady, eyes like swollen moons, its voice the splash of stones thrown in deep water. It will howl. It will sit at your feet and sink through the bog of the tarmac with a glug like a rock or a woman being dropped in a mire. It will cry three times from the shore. It will carry its coffin or its head or its child in its hands. It will follow you home. It will make you promises. You will try to rid your house of it – the radiant boy of it, heirloom drab of it – you will take it still screaming, to sea, and drown it, you will bury it day after day and find it always back where it started, its lamp casting light through every window, its small skull shrieking I know I know I know

The Seren Poetry Podcast is a new series of in-depth interviews with Seren poets. Episode 1 with Polly Atkin is available to listen to now.

Simply search ‘The Seren Poetry Podcast’ in your favourite podcast app and 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.

Much With Body is available on the Seren website: £9.99

Create your free Seren account and enjoy 20% off every book you buy direct from us.