Friday Poem – ‘On Allt yr Esgair’ by Christopher Meredith

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘On Allt yr Esgair’ by Christopher Meredith from his newly published poetry collection Still. In a unique publishing event, Still is published simultaneously with Christopher’s tragicomic short novel Please. Both are available on our website now.

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, Meredith ‘fixes stillness’ in absences here. His perfect ear tunes in so precisely – especially to the natural world, it’s ‘edge of sense’ – we are left haunted á la Frost, by a deep lonliness in the human condition.” – Paul Henry

Two book deal – purchase both Still and Please for the discounted price of £15.00.

Don’t miss the launch of both books at the Seren Cardiff Poetry Festival from 12pm on Sunday 18 April. Register for free via the festival website here. You only need to register ONCE for access to the entire four-day weekend.

Friday Poem – ‘Slave Bangle, Wales’ by Maggie Harris

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Slave Bangle, Wales’ by Maggie Harris from the pamphlet Poems from the Borders. Maggie recently won the Poetry Wales Wales Poetry Award judged by Pascale Petit.

Poems from The Borders is part of Seren’s pamphlet series celebrating the spirit of place. Featured poems range from “the spine of the A470”, through Monmouthshire, over the dramatic Brecon Beacons, and also through the Black Mountains towards Hay-on-Wye, towns in Herefordshire and Radnorshire and along rivers, the Wye and Severn.​

Poems from The Borders is available on the Seren website: £5

Maggie’s short story collection Writing on Water is available on the Seren website: £8.99

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Friday Poem – ‘Remembrance of Things Past’ by Grahame Davies

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Remembrance of Things Past’ by Grahame Davies from his collection Lightning Beneath the Sea which is currently £4.49 in our half-price spring sale.

Earlier this week we launched Grahame’s new book Real Cambridge, the latest addition to the Seren ‘Real’ Series.

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.

Lightning Beneath the Sea is currently available for £4.49 in our half-price Spring Sale

Browse our website for more fantastic half-price deals. Sale ends Sunday 28 March.

Browse Poetry

Grahame’s newest book Real Cambridge is available for £9.99

Friday Poems – ‘Penny’ and ‘Glasffrwd’ from TROEON : TURNINGS

This week we have two Friday Poems from TROEON : TURNINGS, the new bilingual collaboration between poets Philip Gross and Cyril Jones and artist Valerie Coffin Price. ‘Penny’ by Philip Gross and ‘Glasffrwd’ by Cyril Jones.

To turn, to dig, to plough, to upset, to translate… Bend, lap, journey, time… The Welsh word troeon unfolds meaning after meaning. In TROEON : TURNINGS, two poets confident in their own traditions meet in the hinterland between translation and collaboration – Cyril Jones from the disciplines of Welsh cynghanedd, Philip Gross from the restless variety of English verse.

TROEON : TURNINGS is available on the Seren website £12.99

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Friday Poem – ’Hands’ by Elizabeth Parker

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Hands’ by Elizabeth Parker from her debut collection In Her Shambles.

Spiky, provocative, declamatory, these energetic poems sweep the reader along through their narratives. In Her Shambles introduces us to a poet who uses language with verve and zest. Her subjects range from a poem where family members are embodied by their own rivers, to carefully observed set-pieces inspired by relationships, from burgeoning first loves to break-ups.

“A radiantly-written and vigorous collection by a rising star of British poetry.” – David Morley

In Her Shambles is available on the Seren website: £9.99

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Friday Poem – ‘Green Ink’ by Abeer Ameer

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Green Ink’ by Abeer Ameer from her debut collection Inhale/Exile.

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.

 “…these poems remind us that even in the darkest times, there is light, and there is love.” – Katherine Stansfield

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

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Watch Abeer read her poem ‘The Reed Flute and I’:

Friday Poem – ‘Fixative’ by Rosalind Hudis

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Fixative’ by Rosalind Hudis from her new collection Restorations which was published earlier this week.

Inspired by the art restorer’s keen eye and by a vivid empathy for people and events, Restorations, is a journey through memory. Suffused with colour, inspired by thoughts of people and places, by artefacts and how the passage of time shifts perspectives and erodes surfaces, these poems are beautifully complex explorations, full of curiosity and the adventure of seeing and listening.

“If a poem is like a picture, these are history paintings, rich in human detail and many-layered in their brushwork.” – Matthew Francis

Restorations is available on the Seren website: £9.99

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Join us for the online launch of Restorations on Tuesday 16th March from 7pm. Register for free via Evenbrite here https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/141406315095.

Friday Poem – ‘Ash’ by Robert Walton

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Ash’ by Robert Walton from his collection Sax Burglar Blues.

Sax Burglar Blues by Robert Walton is packed with memory, incident, observation, opinion, humour, outrage and elegy. Subjects include: woodlice, jazz, teachers, grandparents, a canary who runs for President, Sisley’s lovely painting of the Gower, the iconoclastic poet John Tripp, a night bus named after Dusty Springfield, a Dad who loves Cardiff City, the annoying closure of bookshops and much more.

​‘Dip into Walton’s jazzed-up version of the world and you will inevitably surface from the pages in a brighter hue.’ – Wales Arts Review

Sax Burglar Blues is available on the Seren website: £9.99

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Friday Poem – ‘After Bonnefoy’ by Martyn Crucefix

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘After Bonnefoy’ by Martyn Crucefix from his collection The Lovely Disciplines.

Everyone at Seren would like to congratulate Martyn on winning the Schlegel-Tieck Prize for Translation 2021 for his translation of These Numbered Days by Peter Huchel, announced yesterday.

Displaying his characteristic flair, craft and intelligence, Crucefix’s poems often begin with the visible, the tangible, the ordinary, yet through each act of attentiveness and the delicate fluidity of the language they re-discover the extraordinary in the everyday.

‘…highly wrought, ambitious, thoughtful – and very good.’ – The Sunday Times

The Lovely Disciplines is available on the Seren website: £9.99

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Friday Poem – ‘One Way’ by Katherine Stansfield

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘One Way’ by Katherine Stansfield from her collection We Could Be Anywhere By Now.

In her second collection, We Could Be Anywhere by Now, Katherine Stansfield brings us poems about placement and displacement full of both wry comedy and uneasy tension. Stints in Wales, Italy and Canada, plus return trips to her native Cornwall all spark poems delighting in the off-key, the overheard, the comedy and pathos of everyday life.

‘multi-layered and full of surprising transitions’ – Patrick McGuiness

We Could Be Anywhere By Now is available on the Seren website: £9.99

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