Friday Poem

Friday Poem – ‘Politics of Water’ by Peter Finch

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This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Politics of Water’ by Peter Finch. Originally published in his 1996 collection Math, it now features in Volume One of his newly published Collected Poems.

This cover features a photo of a geometric concrete sculpture made up of hexagons. The text reads: Peter Finch Collected Poems One 1968-1997

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.

This cover features a photo of a geometric concrete sculpture made up of hexagons. The text reads: Peter Finch Collected Poems Two 1997-2021

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.

POLITICS OF WATER there (here) are (were) places (pimples) in (on) Wales (wheels) I (we) don’t (can’t) go (gone) reservoirs (places) that (this) are (will be) the (a) subconscious (subterranean) (subtotal) (subliminal) (superfluous) (serenity) of (in) (on) a (the) people (people). Here (where) were (will be) pimples (scars) (gouges) (savage stripes) on (in) wheels (fields) (folds) I (you) (we) can’t (can) (cannot) gone (grown) (green) places (princes) (parsons) (people) this (those) will be (will not) a (the) subterranean (terminal) (termination) (treeless) invasion (inversion) in (of) the (the) people (person) (personal) (private) (so private) (so personal) (only) it is (never) not (yours) (mine) (moan) (theirs) (his) (hers) (ours) (whose) dig (dirge) (deep) (down) (down) (down)

Order the Collected Poems Complete Set on the Seren website for £30.00, or buy them individually for £19.99 each.

We launched the Collected Poems at Jury’s Inn in Cardiff earlier this week. Watch the live stream recording on demand on our AM channel now amam.cymru/seren.

Photos by John Briggs.

Friday Poem – ‘Rhys’ by Rhian Edwards

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This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Rhys’ by Rhian Edwards from her collection Clueless Dogs.

This cover shows a cartoon collage of a Dalmatian. The text reads Clueless Dogs Rhian Edwards.

Clueless Dogs is the multi-award-winning debut collection by Rhian Edwards. Full of verve and humour, Rhian Edwards’ language has a winning honesty and intensity. Poems like ‘The Welshman Who Couldn’t Sing’ chronicle a fraught childhood in Bridgend, south Wales, where the sensitive child escapes through imaginative games of ‘Playing Dead’ and ‘Broken Lifeboat’. Later poems explore teenage lusts, student rivalries, damaged peers and tense situations. Although the author doesn’t flinch from ruthless depictions, in which we are often implicated by her use of the second person ‘You’, there is an underlying sweetness, an elegiac thread to this remarkable collection.

Rhys Like the time you invited me inside the ottoman on the landing and sat on the lid laughing while I scratched and screamed at the wood. Or when the babysitter wasn’t looking, you taught me the quickest way to add nine, showed me to tie my laces with the tale of two rabbits disappearing down a hole. Like the day you caught the slow-worm that tried to whip away the sun, letting it loose into the folds of the blanket that I held like a lover. Not to mention the crimes I invented for which I never knew you were beaten, or that summer you took away the stabilisers to be the sole witness to me riding away. Like the times I spied in your bedroom, played your records and fanned open your books, only to slip between the sheets with a nakedness meant only for bath time.

Clueless Dogs is available on the Seren website: £9.99

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Friday Poem – ‘Samuel Taylor Colderidge Walking from the Queen’s Head…’ by Jonathan Edwards

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This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Samuel Taylor Coleridge Walking from The Queen’s Head…’ by Jonathan Edwards from his collection Gen.

This cover shows a colourful painting of a street scene croweded with people. The text reads: Gen, Jonathan Edwards

Gen is a book of lions and rock stars, street parties and servants, postmen and voices. In the opening sequence’s exploration of youth and young manhood, the author sets his own Valleys upbringing against the 50s youth of his parents and the experience of a range of pop culture icons, including Kurt Cobain and Harry Houdini. These poems give way to a sequence of monologues and character sketches, giving us the lives of crocodiles and food testers, pianists and retail park trees.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge Walking from The Queen’s Head, Gray’s Inn, to Hornsby’s and Co., Cornhill, to Buy an Irish Lottery Ticket, November 1793 At twenty-one, he needs something big to happen to cover his bar tab, run up trying to escape thought of his debts. What his life is going like is this: the blown scholarship nothing that can’t be dealt with by opium; ladies with abracadabra clothes to make the girl who will not love disappear. A night of weighing up options: on one hand, the army, in the other, a pistol. Then drunken inspiration, a solution to his life and here he is, on his way, inventing a new walk – the wobble-stride. He’s walking, walking, writing in his head To Fortune, a poem to read whose rhyming couplets is to hear him walking now. A month or two and his brother will clear his debts, a day or so and his lottery ticket will lie in a ditch, a couple of weeks and To Fortune will appear in The Morning Chronicle, his first published poem, and they’ll pay a guinea, which he’ll try – and find it good – against his teeth.

Gen is available on the Seren website: £9.99

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Friday Poem – ‘Under One’s Hat’ by Hannah Hodgson

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This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Under One’s Hat’ by Hannah Hodgson from her debut collection 163 Days.

This cover shows a photo of the artist Sue Austin diving underwater in her wheel chair. The text reads: 163 Days Hannah Hodgson.

Hannah Hodgon is an award-winning poet and a palliative care patient. In her compelling debut collection 163 Days, she 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.  

“Hannah Hodgson takes us to the paradoxical heart of poetry itself” – Caroline Bird

Under One’s Hat My mother thinks my tongue is retractable tape. That I reveal too much, that I’m not good at keeping secrets. One of my friends said the only reason he can keep things quiet, is his body has the handy feature of forgetting. Never registering which truths belong to who, blank pages recorded in place of events. Part of it is my inheritance. My nan is a lethal gossip. I’m a witness to so many lives unspooling, that I’ve stopped waiting for the Police to arrive and collect statements. Truth is slippery. There’s a reason why water polishes riverbeds and stones. I close my mouth around the things I know, lock them inside of me as treasure. I understand now, why NHS noticeboards are laminated. It’s because of blood. Turns out, doctors can’t keep secrets either. They hide them, chirping, tiny birds nesting in their desks; fed by a tiny paintbrush.

163 Days is available on the Seren website: £9.99

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Listen to a radio play of 163 Days on the BBC New Creative Website

Friday Poem – ‘The Creel’ by Kathleen Jamie

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To celebrate Earth Day, this week’s Friday Poem is ‘The Creel’ by Kathleen Jamie from 100 Poems to Save the Earth.

100 Poems to Save the Earth. Edited by Zoë Brigley and Kristian Evans.

Our climate is on the brink of catastrophic change. 100 Poems to Save the Earth invites us to fine-tune our senses, to listen to the world around us, pay attention to what we have been missing. The defining crisis of our time is revealed to be fundamentally a crisis of perception. For too long, the earth has been exploited. With its incisive Foreword from editors Zoë Brigley and Kristian Evans, this landmark anthology is a call to action to fight the threat facing the only planet we have. 

Kathleen Jamie The Creel The world began with a woman, shawl-happed, stooped under a creel, whose slow step you recognize from troubled dreams. You feel obliged to help bear her burden from hill or kelp-strewn shore, but she passes by unseeing thirled to her private chore. It’s not sea birds or peat she’s carrying, not fleece, nor the herring bright but her fear that if ever she put it down the world would go out like a light.

100 Poems to Save the Earth is available on the Seren website: £12.99

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Friday Poem – ‘Somniloquy’ by Paul Henry

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This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Somniloquy’ by Paul Henry from his new collection As If To Sing.

This cover shows an abstract painting by the artist Antony Goble. A woman with blue skin dominates the image in a vibrant orange dress. She is balancing an urn on her head and holds a red crow in her hand. The text reads: As If To Sing, Paul Henry. "One of the best lyric poets currently writing" - Hugo Williams

The power of song, to sustain the human spirit, resonates through As if to Sing. A trapped caver crawls back through songs to the sea; Welsh soldiers pack their hearts into a song on the eve of battle, ‘for safe-keeping’; a child crossing a bridge sings ‘a song with no beginning or end’… Rich in the musical lyricism admired by readers and fellow poets, As if to Sing is an essential addition to this poet’s compelling body of work.

“A poet at the top of his game.” – Radio Wales Review Show

Somniloquy Speak into my good ear. The house is bubble-wrapped with rain. It’s late. To better hear your voice through this worn out device I lean in closer to the page. To better hear the sleep talk tangled in its sheets I lean in closer to your lips. Speak into my good ear. The crackle of dark matter on its way to this room clears at last, to better hear your dream ask, Is it you? Where have you been?

Listen to Gary Raymond, Paul Chambers and Dr Emily Garside reviewing As If To Sing on the Radio Wales Review Show.

Paul is launching As If To Sing at Book-ish in Crickhowell on Thursday 28th April. Visit their website book-ish.co.uk to buy tickets.

As If To Sing is available on the Seren website £9.99

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Friday Poem – ‘When it Rains, I Think of You’ by Eric Ngalle Charles

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This week’s Friday Poem is ‘When it Rains, I Think of You’ by Eric Ngalle Charles from his new collection Homelands.

This cover shows a painting of a young African boy wearing a blue robe tied around his waist and an oversized black hat standing in front of a building. The text reads: Homelands, Eric Ngalle Charles.

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. 

When it Rains, I Think of You Farzana, and if you will return alive or dead from that awful place, the Al-Jawiywah prison, meeting point for migrants and traffickers. I think of you there, where today, a quarrel brews: to entertain themselves the guards throw one toothbrush and paste and watch inmates fight for it. A mad woman paces up, then down, an old man sits and stares. Farzana is pregnant, skeletal, she wants to leave this makeshift jail where migrants starve and soldiers make merry over rum with traffickers. When it rains I think of you, Farzana, and if you will return.

Homelands is available on the Seren website: £9.99

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On the 27th May Eric will be reading from Homelands as part of the Hay Festival Schools Programme. Tickets for the Hay Festival main programme go on sale today at 12pm.

Friday Poem – ‘Four Poets in a Bookshop’ by Abeer Ameer

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This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Four Poets in a Bookshop’ by Abeer Ameer from her debut collection Inhale/Exile.

This cover shows a closeup painting of someone cutting reeds. The text reads: Inhale/Exile Abeer Ameer

Cardiff-based poet Abeer Ameer writes of her forebears in her first collection, Inhale/Exile. Dedicated to the “holders of these stories”, the book begins with a poem about a storyteller on a rooftop in Najaf, Iraq, follows tales of courage and survival, and ends with a woman cooking food for neighbours on the anniversary of her son’s death.

Four Poets in a Bookshop In the land of two rivers and hanging gardens, four poets meet in a bookshop. No one can know. Portrait of Saddam watches; they hide under the cloak of Arabic lexicon. They share with one breath meanings that turn the Master’s key to worlds where Adam was taught the names. Trees, reborn as pages, witness the names of four and those gathered to reach the Gardens, as they escape their locked chests without key. They are four men who know. Reading between lines of apocalypse, each strained breath foretells of beasts with their daggers and cloak scarring minds and hearts of men by Baathist cloak. Present are bygone days of Karbala’s names which poets dare to mention under their breath. Alive and well with the Lord of the Gardens. Willing to exchange this world for the next, four know that informants sell to the cruellest bidder for neighbours’ key. Saddam’s spies claw to learn of persons key and clothe their families in mourning cloak. Three-quarters give eyes, tongues and nails. They know they must not, to treachery, yield any names. Silent skin, dipped in acid, bastes in hanging gardens bearing to keep hidden secrets beyond dissolved breath. No haste nor waste for ordained beat and breath nor desire for the iron key to dust’s throne; they dream of other gardens. Longing only to reunite with the People of the Cloak and the Most Compassionate through His Names. Those clinging to ebbing sands of time do not yet know The bookshop bears witness to what few mortals know. Its shelves and books inhale each whispered breath and all that poetry and scripture, names. Kerosene warms the last poet. He clutches the bookshop’s key, drinks black tea sugar cannot sweeten and wears a black cloak. Alone; his companions have already reached the Garden. Many years after a shroud is his cloak and cancer takes his breath, the names of seekers are still hidden. Their key is kept buried in the earth upon which gardens grow, and reed beds and shrines know how to Read.

Inhale/Exile is available on the Seren website: £9.99

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Friday Poem – ‘Plasticine Love Hearts’ by Janette Ayachi

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As it’s Mother’s Day on Sunday, this week’s Friday Poem is ‘Plasticine Love Hearts’ by Janette Ayachi from the anthology Writing Motherhood.

Writing Motherhood Carolyn Jess-Cooke

Through a unique combination of interviews, poems, and essays, Writing Motherhood, edited by Carolyn Jess-Cooke, interrogates contemporary representations of motherhood in media and literature. It asks why so many novels dealing with serious women’s issues are packaged in pink covers with wellies and tea cups, and demonstrates how the exquisite moments of motherhood often enrich artistic practice rather than hinder it. Writing Motherhood is a vital exploration of the complexities of contemporary sexual politics, publishing, artistic creation, and 21st Century parenting.

Janette Ayachi PLASTICINE LOVE HEARTS You curved into me like a child that has never learnt to walk, a scuttle into my chest as I folded over you like a Russian doll. The first day I left you there I came back to find you crying nestled on the nursery teacher’s lap like a newborn regressing, an upside down egg chart. You were late for their world as I practised detachment from tiny chairs and tiny children asked me to zip-up jackets tie laces, tell stories whilst you learnt the letters in your name made plasticine love-hearts became the keeper of the chicken coup sifting your fur-less hands over its feathers feeding it corn and water with curious precision. Today I am not there watching you and the time ticks slowly, my heart now scuttles in my chest as I align trust and bravery from its layers like a Russian doll internally displaced into individual shapes, regiment in its own body-hollow echo waiting for the bell to siren its puzzle-march to complete single form. We step back into each other the same way people jump onto moving trains, a leap toward shelter, your nails darkened by the hearts you carved and cloned for me in my absence.

This weekend Writing Motherhood is just £6.49 in our half-price Spring Sale! Enjoy 50% off titles across our website this weekend only. Sale ends midnight Monday 28th March 2022.

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Friday Poem – ‘From the Cockpit Window’ by Anne-Marie Fyfe

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This week’s Friday Poem is ‘From the Cockpit Window’ by Anne-Marie Fyfe from her collection House of Small Absences.

This cover shows a painting of a girl carrying a dolls house, standing in the garden of big house. The text reads: House of Small Absences, Anne-Marie Fyfe

Anne-Marie Fyfe’s poems have long dwelt on the role that the spaces we inhabit, the places in which we find security, play in our lives: House of Small Absences is an observation window into strange, unsettling spaces—a deserted stage-set, our own personalised ‘museum’, a Piedmont albergo, underground cities, Midtown roof-gardens, convent orchards, houseboats, a foldaway circus, a Romanian sleeper-carriage—the familiar rendered uncanny through the distorting lenses of distance and life’s exigencies, its inevitable lettings-go…

From the Cockpit Window Here, above, cracks in the buildings are filled with battered moonlight. – Elizabeth Bishop, The Man-Moth The full moon is being held hostage tonight. A two-hundred-&-seventy degree vista and all I make out are roof-garden umbrellas, latticed fire escapes, jungles of wisteria straggling around water-tower struts. Uplighters cast panther shadows and Egyptian columns against the cloudswirl that drapes the Chrysler pinnacle. There’s a low-altitude nosedive, a rattle of applause on the wing. Our world is hurtling towards sudden resolution. Tumbling zeros play needle roulette, the spirit bubble’s way out of kilter. Close enough now to smell garbage scows, charred pretzels, onions, to hear taxis honking, meters ticking, the steam whoosh of airshafts. On my tongue there’s the after-taste of metal fatigue. Who’ll answer my entryphone? How long before they empty the closet of shirts and jackets, their sleeves hanging aimless.

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