Friday Poem

Friday Poem – ‘The Leech House’ by Rhiannon Hooson

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This week’s Friday Poem is ‘The Leech House’ by Rhiannon Hooson from her forthcoming collection Goliat.

This cover shows a ghost-like figure wrapped in a sheet standing in a field at dusk. The text reads: Goliat Rhiannon Hooson

Goliat is the second collection by Rhiannon Hooson, a follow-up to her Wales Book of the Year nominated debut, The Other City. 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.

The Leech House She says he is older than me. I think it is a lie, but in his tank (round, like a chalice), he moves like an eel; he moves like a dream. Come winter someone must stoke the fire in the leech house, bring fresh moss, sweep out the channel in the floor where the river sends its emissary, while behind their glass the leeches dance. My lady has me mark on little labels when each leech has last been fed: a leech can live a year without blood, but each dark moon when the fever comes for her, he lies across her calf, or sometimes the smooth warm skin at the crook of her elbow. I scrub his tank clean while he is out of it. She says a leech is her true companion: the only thing that knows blood as well as a woman. Is it strange she has a favourite? Fresh earth for him, and cold clean water, and green pond moss. I do not like to look when he is feeding, but she smiles, and it is relief in her face, not fondness, as if as he drank he took from her the knowledge of a thing so painful she could not bear to know it.

Goliat is available on the Seren website: £9.99

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Join us at 7:30pm at Chapter in Cardiff on National Poetry Day Thursday 6th October to see Rhiannon launch Goliat at Seren First Thursday alongside Hilary Llewellyn-Williams. If you can’t join us in person, we’re also streaming via Facebook live. Find the details on our website.

Seren First Thursday October. Hilary Llewellyn-Williams and Rhiannon Hooson. In person and streamed online. Thursday 6 October 7:30pm BST. Tickets £3 on the door or watch live on Facebook for free.

Friday Poem – ‘Fish. Oh. Fish’ by Judy Brown

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This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Fish. Oh. Fish’ by Judy Brown from her forthcoming collection Lairs.

This cover shows a collage of a woman sitting in a field at twilight starting at a giant black orb, in the distance, filled with stars. Red mountains stretch out behind it. The text reads Lairs Judy Brown.

Lairs brings together something primal and secret – the lair as haven for a wild or feral animal – with the poem framed as a mathematical equation. In these terms, the ‘lair’ is a kind of nest, a beautiful accumulation of dense detail. The poems are introspective, by turns mocking, fearful and analytical. Judy Brown’s use of language is innovative, while maintaining moments of vulnerability and moving self-awareness. In these exquisite poems, the lair is both the community at large and a dark and intricate interior space where something wild still survives.

Fish. Oh. Fish ‘Even snakes lie together’ – D.H. Lawrence (‘Fish’) Your egg eye is open and you look worried. You’re the scaly junior lawyer at midnight f alling short on her target of a year’s billable hours. Corporate fish, you’re bright as pain, sliced up. You share the water with a spill of inky stripes. Y our kind blaze colours fine as banknotes. Oh, fish, you have whisked up a clever curve defining the future as it draws itself into a fist. Then the e vening comes on, pistachio and blue. You breathe and flex between bars of dark. A clerk could still walk into the hot, open night lea ving a jacket on the back of her office chair. A lit anglepoise floats above the papery desk. There’s a deep anglerfish clocking the hours. No one m ust turn off your light while you are gone or there’ll be nothing to swim back to but a scrunchie of kelp, uncounted on dry sand. Little fish, everything that matters happens here.

Lairs is available to pre-order on the Seren website: £9.99

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Friday Poem – ‘The meaning of employable’ by Bryony Littlefair

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This week’s Friday Poem is ‘The meaning of employable’ by Bryony Littlefair from her forthcoming debut collection Escape Room which will be published on National Poetry Day.

This cover shows a collage of a woman in 50s dress standing beside an easel showing a close up picture of a man's torso blocking out a burning building. There is a eerie photo of white lightning against dark clouds behind her. The text reads: Escape Room, Bryony Littlefair

Escape Room is the long-awaited debut collection by Bryony Littlefair. This is a collection exploring the possibilities of freedom, goodness, meaning and connection under late capitalism. Can we escape the imperatives of money, gender and human fallibility to freely construct our own identities – should we even try This complexity is balanced with a resolute joy, humour and irony. If you’ve ever grappled with ‘a desire you could not understand / like wanting to touch dark, wet paint’, had an identity crisis at a corporate away day, or just not known what to do with your Sunday morning, the Escape Room is open for you.

The meaning of employable always changes, used to mean you could whittle or solder and almost definitely had a dick. Now your genitals can be any shape, in this part of the world anyhow. And whittling and soldering don’t matter so much. And the meaning of employable is something else, a bit to do with your handshake, how firm, how dry, a bit to do with how well you balance sincerity and irony. But not in a way anyone can define. I want to do a backflip! I am weak and clumsy, but I could learn. A good backflip is a good backflip. We know of what we speak. It must be light and springy, legs tight together. A pleasing arch of the spine. I’ll backflip into an interview, quick and light and maybe they’ll be shuffling their papers when I do it – there’s four of them – so no one would be sure they saw, and wouldn’t say anything about it to the others. All would be feeling funny. Maybe I had too many coffees today. So the backflip would not be acknowledged, would not be turned into something else, like ‘oh, I suppose it shows humour?’ drawls one. ‘Demonstrates initiative!’ the mousy one pipes up. No. It will just be a backflip, a perfect, secret backflip, and I’ll be delightful in the interview, but I won’t get the job. ‘Great on paper. But something wasn’t quite right,’ one will say, and they’ll murmur in agreement. Because I created in everyone a private unease, which is not the meaning of employable, but could well be the meaning of life.

Escape Room is available to pre-order on the Seren website: £9.99

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Friday Poem – ‘Prayer’ by Grahame Davies

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This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Prayer’ by Grahame Davies from his collection Lightning Beneath the Sea.

This cover shows the far away, dark silhouette of a narwal floating in the empty blue ocean. The text reads: Grahame Davies, Lightning Beneath the Sea

Lightning Beneath the Sea is the first collection of poems in English by Grahame Davies, featuring the work that he has honed over the years as he has read them at literary festivals, conferences and events world-wide. Well-known for his prize-winning Welsh-language poetry and fiction, and for his scholarly non-fiction, he brings a native warmth, an intimate, conversational tone, and a raised civic awareness to these poems.

Grahame Davies P R AY E R Spirit, use me today, not in some miracle that would make others marvel and would make me proud. Not in the word of wisdom that would stay in the mind and make me always remembered. Not in the heroic act that would change the world for the better and me for the worse. But in the mundane miracles of honesty and truth that keep the sky from falling. In the unremembered quiet words that keep a soul on the path. And in the unnoticed acts that keep the world moving slowly closer to the light.

Lightning Beneath the Sea is available on the Seren website: £8.99

This poem also featured in the anthology 100 Poems to Save the Earth.

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Friday Poem – ‘[ search ]’ by Sammy Weaver

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This week’s Friday Poem is ‘[ search ]’ by Sammy Weaver from her pamphlet Angola, America which won this year’s Mslexia Poetry Pamphlet Prize.

This cover shows a geometric image of think white lines against black stripes. A gaping white hole is cut from the middle. The text reads: Angola, America. Sammy Weaver.

Angola, America, winner of the Mslexia Poetry Pamphlet Prize 2021, takes its name from a prison in Louisiana in the southern United Sates. In these strikingly original, thoroughly contemporary, and deeply moving poems, we are immersed in the world the inmates must endure. From the first poem, when we witness a home-made tattoo and understand that this scarring and incision is a “map in the connective tissue of pain and loss”, we are drawn into this world in a way that is carefully observed and beautifully empathetic.

[ search ] 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.

Angola, America is available on the Seren website: £6.00

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Read Sammy’s poem ‘[ exhibit : electric chair ]’ and a comment about ‘How she did it’ on the Mslexia website.

The Mslexia Poetry Pamphlet Prize 2022 is now open for entries. Find out more here.

Friday Poem – ‘Navigation Points’ by Emily Blewitt

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This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Navigation Points’ by Emily Blewitt from her collection This Is Not A Rescue.

This cover shows a painting of a tabby cat with it's shadow set against a sandy stone background. The text reads: This Is Not A Rescue. Emily Blewitt. 'a riotus, cacophonous and wonderful book.' - Jonathan Edwards

In This Is Not A Rescue we are introduced to a poet whose voice is fresh and striking, who writes both forcefully and tenderly about refusing to be rescued, rescuing oneself, and rescuing others. This book is about finding love and keeping it, negotiating difficult family and personal struggles, and looking at the world with a lively, intelligent and sardonic eye.

Navigation Points Crossing the bridge, you find me by touch alone; have turned off your sat nav, dipped your lights. You feel your way past landmarks, signs, the steady flow of traffic. When you arrive, though, I am still at the threshold. Standing by streetlight, I think I am lost. You smile, then, lead me gently inside; draw the curtains, undress me by sight. You lower your long dark lashes just once: to trace your route across my skin. These moles, you say, fine points for navigation. You’ll map my constellations, you explain, know me anywhere.

This Is Not A Rescue is available on the Seren website: £9.99

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Friday Poem – ‘A Flock of Young Birds’ by Hilary Llewellyn-Williams

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This week’s Friday Poem is ‘A Flock of Young Birds’ by Hilary Llewellyn-Williams from her new book The Little Hours: New and Selected Poems.

The Little Hours: New and Selected Poems. Hilary Llewellyn-Williams.

The Little Hours: New and Selected Poems is a landmark volume which collects key poems from the career of Hilary Llewellyn-Williams, one of the outstanding poets of her generation in Wales. In addition to the classic sequences ‘The Tree Calendar’ and ‘Book of Shadows’, the book also includes new work, including ‘The Little Hours’, a new sequence arranged according to the traditional monastic hours. Llewellyn-Williams is one of the earliest environmental poets; her response to nature always profound, passionate and keenly observed. The Little Hours will remind readers of her many strengths and beauties and shows new readers the breadth and talent of a writer whose eye for vivid imagery and startling detail has always astounded.

A Flock of Young Birds for Bob Needs, i.m. Shirley Needs Something of me, a remnant enclosed in a little box tucked away in the rosy earth: yes, that dear dust, precious stuff from the breathing body that flourished and grew from my birth – while you who loved me gather around that trace of me, remember, mourn and pray on this gentle August day of sun and breeze. How can I tell you now how much I love, how happy I am? How here, how near, how free? Now in this summer tree among the leaves, the light, the webs and spiderlings, the stray bees, I call these birds to sing that song for me.

The Little Hours: New and Selected Poems is available on the Seren website: £12.99

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Friday Poem – ‘The Park in the Afternoon’ by Dai George

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This week’s Friday Poem is ‘The Park in the Afternoon’ by Dai George from his collection Karaoke King.

The cover of Karaoke King shows a drawing of a teenage boy wearing a red and brown stripped vest and white shirt. His glasses are crooked and he is wearing a crumpled yellow crown.

Dai George’s confident second collection Karaoke King, addresses the contentious nature of the times. Always deeply thoughtful but also alternately ebullient, angry, curious, ashamed, the poet moves through urban and digital spaces feeling both uneasy and exhilarated. There is a feeling of history shifting, as a younger generation confronts its ethical obligations, its sense of complicity and disappointment. Ecological crisis hovers in the background. Karaoke King also contains numerous reflections on popular culture, culminating in ‘A History of Jamaican Music’, a sequence at the heart of the volume speaking to urgent contemporary questions of ownership and privilege, pain and celebration. 

The Park in the Afternoon By the goats, a high-vis warden tweezers litter with glacial care. Men bear tins of Scrumpy Jack aloft to salute Ol’ Blue Eyes as he spreads the news from a battered tape machine. Their conductor lies down in the grass crafting languorous signals from a spliff. On the lunchtime news, a minister reviled my productivity: sleepwalking into a crisis is how he described the nation’s plight when output fails to tack with growth. Watching a duckling wobble afloat as sun glints, useless, on the pond, I see his point. Diverse and splendid things have brought us here, we heathens in the Christendom to come. The drunk, the retired, the roistering lads bunking off early with blazer sleeves riding up their arms – each of us truant, and gentle for an hour, our output no more than what we can make of the angle of hurried daylight before a shower.

Karaoke King is available on the Seren website: £9.99

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Catch Dai George reading from Karaoke King alongside Ilse Pedler, Sarona Abuaker & Jeremy Dixon at Seren Cardiff Poetry Festival on Friday 29th July in Published During the Pandemic. Tickets are on sale here www.cardiffpoetryfestival.com/tickets-22.

Earlier this year, Dai George put together a playlist of songs that tie in with poems from Karaoke King. Take a look here.

Friday Poem – Page 35 from ‘Witch’ by Damian Walford Davies

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This week’s Friday Poem is taken from Witch by Damian Walford Davies. This continuous narrative poem conjures a thrilling portrait of a Suffolk village in the throes of the witchcraft hunts of the mid-seventeenth century.

This cover shows a red sketchy print of a monkey sitting on a table beside a lamp. The text reads: Damian Walford Davies Witch.

With the narrative pull of a novel and the vibrancy of a play for voices, the poems in this collection are dark spells, compact and moving: seven sections, each of seven poems, each of seven couplets, are delivered by those most closely involved in the ‘making’ of a witch. The speakers authentically conjure a war-torn society in which religious paranoia amplifies local grievances to fever pitch. Damian Walford Davies’s Witch is a damning parable that chimes with the terror and anxieties of our own haunted age.

We were eeling in the fingers of the creek, drawing knots of muscle from the rushwork creels, a silty tidemark just above the knees. We watched him loll along the boards, lank sprays of loosestrife in his hands. Clem dropped her trussed skirt on the tide, two eels flailing round her wrists, quickening water lapping at our legs. He saw us, held his poor posy out. Love! he said. I couldn’t say to which.

Witch is available on the Seren website: £8.99

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Friday Poem – ‘Still’ by Christopher Meredith

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This week’s Friday Poem is the title poem ‘Still’ from Christopher Meredith’s collection of the same name. Christopher was recently interviewed by Nawr magazine about his poetry and fiction. You can read the issue online via their website.

This cover shows a painting of a winter landscape looked on from far away, the tiny trees visible in the fields. The black branches of a tree are visible in the foreground with a single black crow amongst the branches. The text reads: Still Christopher Meredith.

Christopher Meredith’s new poetry collection Still, uses the title word as a fulcrum to balance various paradoxical concerns: stillness and motion, memory and forgetting, sanity and madness, survival and extinction. Lively and thought-provoking, this is a beautifully crafted, humane and intelligent collection.

“Lyrical, always surprising… His perfect ear tunes in so precisely” – Paul Henry

Still At the banister above you an old man stands in long johns like you’ll never see again except in films, backlit by an open door smiling and lifting a slow hand and you are forever in slow motion sailing down the narrow stairs. Your eyes are rolling up to watch his head inclining gently as you go. That’s all. Rerun it. Look again. He lifts a hand that’s bossed and broad. He smiles and pinpoints of white stubble light the folding cheek. The moustache shifts. No no, they say. You never saw him. He couldn’t stand, and you were far too young. But you did. He could. And were you cradled down the darkening drift, a babe in arms? Again. That backlight is the sun. Same hand slowly raised, same slow-inclining head, same kind smile, his shape at the handrail this time hunched like a passenger who’s slipping from the quay too courteous yet to turn back to the glare of the final room, though he hungers to, and will. Memory is the still of slow forgetting, the black and aching decades boiled to air, cooled to this crawling droplet in the pipe moving still and still in this suspension rolling on its empty convolutions to catch and lose a world in hard white light.

Still is available on the Seren website: £9.99

Still was published simultaneously with Christopher’s latest novel Please. You can buy them as a set on our website for £15.00.