Poetry prompt – David Baker on ‘Pastoral’

In this video, David Baker reads his poem ‘Pastoral’ which is featured in the anthology 100 Poems to Save the Earth. At the end of the video he suggests two prompts to inspire your own responses to the poem and the topics of the anthology. Share your responses with us on social media – @SerenBooks on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook – using the hashtag #100PoemsPrompts.

David Baker on ‘Pastoral‘

Poems happen for me–when they happen–not in the writing but in the rewriting. They emerge. This little poem, “Pastoral,” began as a sonnet, as a section of a long poem, “Scavenger Loop,” which I was writing about Midwestern landscapes and in memory of my mother.

Soon enough I pried this piece out of the big poem and began the work of rediscovery. It became an elegy, and I knew it should be outdoors–at first in a woodland, but then, as here, in a field, wind-swept, expansive, more empty than not.

The sonnet became half a sonnet. I drew open the blank verse line, with double caesuras–more space, more speechlessness, a wider field–and I abbreviated the final line by a few syllables. There’s more hush than sound, I think, more wind than substance. Someone said, it’s a love poem. Someone told me it was a pastoral elegy for the earth. Someone said, it’s all of those.

Prompt 1

Write a poem that floats among the forms, more ghost than substance. Let your ode grieve, say, where it might more conventionally extol; let your love poem think about a political conundrum. Let your reader discover those forms you have tucked away–like intimate messages, bits of song within a song–inside the apparent body of your poem.

Prompt 2

Go somewhere and stand still. Listen. Sniff the air. Feel your heartbeat. Let the whole universe of being revolve around that stillness for a moment, for two moments. Now write it down, and make it sing. That’s what I tried to do in “Pastoral.”

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, this landmark anthology is a call to action to fight the threat facing the only planet we have. 

“These achingly beautiful poems… remind us how to refind ourselves amid the landscape we call home.”  – Sonya Huber

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

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Guest Post – Katrina Naomi: One week in

Today we have a guest post from poet Katrina Naomi who shares some of the things she has been doing to keep positive during this strange time.

One week in

It’s been a week since I had to abandon a holiday at my sister’s to come back home to Cornwall. Like most people, I’m still trying to get my head around what’s happening, and the situation shifts every day. I have a collection, Wild Persistence, coming out with Seren on 1 June, although the date for this might change.

Everything is changing, everything is uncertain. It’s the uncertainty that I – and many others – am finding so hard.

A few days back, I don’t mind admitting I had a major wobble. I was tearful when I wrote first thing and I found myself crying while making soup at lunchtime. It was the day when the first (or maybe second or third, it’s hard to keep track) restrictions came in. I was worried about money – all my income comes from poetry – and I was missing seeing friends. All the losses started to pile up.

Walking usually helps me find some sort of balance. I went out for a walk with my partner that afternoon. We walked in woods and fields near our home in Penzance, I sat by a stream, listened to jackdaws and watched two heifers jostle with each other. I sat for about 10, maybe 15 minutes, and I felt better, not brilliant, but better. We came home and I decided to paint the walls – it was that or climb them. I’ve done a lot of painting since – the stairs, the mouldy bits in the kitchen and bathroom. I’ve enjoyed having another focus and felt more positive – and reminded myself that I have my health and partner and so many other wonderful things in my life.

In a more positive frame of mind, I’ve been developing some sort of routine for my days. I’ve been telling myself that uncertainty is a useful thing for poetry. I never sit down to write a poem having any idea where it’s going to go, I have to allow the poem to happen and trust where my subconscious, odd ideas, bits of film, overhead conversations, and pen, take me. Of course, not every poem goes anywhere and that’s also fine. I’m trying to develop this more open attitude towards life and where it’s going to take me – and take all of us – in the week and months to come. But a routine still feels helpful and here’s what I’ve set up for myself. It can change, it might have to change, depending on how things go:

I’ve been reading poetry and writing first thing. The resulting poems are dire but I don’t mind. I’m just glad to be writing. Then I walk for a couple of hours. This week, we’ve had a really low tide, so I’ve been walking from Penzance harbour towards Marazion on the sand, all the way. Yesterday I walked with a good friend, keeping our distance, we had to shout to each other in the wind – it’s often windy in West Cornwall. After lunch, I’ve been doing emails, checking proofs and – before things tightened down – going on another walk around teatime, usually around the harbour and through the near-deserted town. I come home and do some yoga, eat and read. In the evenings, I’ve been talking to friends on the phone, reading novels and dancing to the radio in the freshly-painted kitchen. Thank you to my local library and Radio 6 Music.

Katrina Naomi

Katrina Naomi’s first collection The Way the Crocodile Taught Me is available on our website: £9.99

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Friday Poem – ‘Spring Tide’, Paul Deaton

The clocks jump forward this weekend, signalling the start of British Summer Time – but before that, we have Paul Deaton’s ‘Spring Tide’ as our Friday Poem this week.

Paul Deaton’s debut, A Watchful Astronomy, is a book of beautifully clear and powerful poems. A PBS Recommendation, the collection is haunted by the ghost of the author’s father, a figure that appears throughout the collection as an overbearing, even threatening presence, embodied in glowering mountain ranges, in icy blasts of weather, in bits of bleak, monosyllabic dialogue. Cutting through this harsh imagery are poems of reflection and contemplation that celebrate the weather and the seasons. ‘Spring Tide’ is one such poem.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Watchful Astronomy is available from the Seren website: £9.99

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Friday Poem – ‘Armadillo’, Jane Lovell

Our Friday Poem this week is ‘Armadillo’ by Jane Lovell, from her Mslexia Prize-winning pamphlet, This Tilting Earth.

J​​ane Lovell’s poems are both beautiful and disturbing. A deep feeling for the natural world is aligned with an acute lyric sensibility, as well as a profound ethical awareness of our responsibility for the planet and the devastation of its landscapes and vulnerable species.
‘Armadillo’ considers the biology and expressiveness of this curious creature: a ‘dusty jungle relic’ that upon examination raises more questions than it answers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This Tilting Earth is available from the Seren website: £5.00

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Friday Poem – ‘Arcades’, Paul Henry

Our new quartet of regional poetry pamphlets have just arrived, with each celebrating a special place in Wales: its people, landscape, wildlife, and vibrant goings-on. This week our Friday Poem comes from Poems from Cardiff, our tribute to the Capital.

Paul Henry’s ‘Arcades’ inhabits the busy and eclectic Victorian arcades that wind around the city centre, telling a private tale of sadness, love, and hope. The poem was first published in The Brittle Sea, Henry’s bestselling New and Selected Poems.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

All four regional pamphlets, including Poems from Cardiff, are available on the Seren website: £5.00 (each)

 

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Friday Poem(s) – 3 Poems for International Women’s Day

For our celebration of International Women’s Day, we’ve selected not one Friday Poem but three – each offering a different perspective, and each representing a different stage in a woman’s life.

 

‘Home Birth’ by Carolyn Jess-Cooke, from Boom!
Through vivid, painful and powerful imagery, Jess-Cooke relives the intensely physical and emotional act of labour.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Boom!
Carolyn Jess-Cooke
£9.99
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‘The Girls on the Train’ by Katherine Stansfield, from Playing House
The joy of youth is a catalyst for the speaker mourning the loss of her ‘early velour glory’ in this short, powerful poem, which causes us to question our aversion to ageing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Playing House
Katherine Stansfield
£9.99
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‘I start to understand yellow’ by Rosie Shepperd, from
The Man at the Corner Table
Violence and isolation are overcome as the quiet power of female unity gathers strength in the textures, flavours and colours of nineteenth century Mauritius.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Man at the Corner Table
Rosie Shepperd
£9.99
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Happy International Women’s Day. We hope these poems nourish and delight, and if you’d like to discover more of our women writers, have a browse on our website.

 

 

 

Friday Poem – ‘Perspective’, Damian Walford Davies

It’s 1st March – Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Sant Hapus (or Happy St David’s Day) to you! This Welsh holiday has been celebrated since the 12th Century, and honours Wales’ patron saint.

On such a historic holiday it seems fitting to consider Wales’ history, and our Friday Poem does just that – ‘Perspective’, the opening poem from Docklands by Damian Walford Davies, introduces Victorian Cardiff: the chilling and visceral setting of this intriguing ghost-story-in-verse.

‘When much new poetry looks no further than the poet’s navel, this kind of imaginative leap is a tonic.’ – The Telegraph

Damian Walford Davies’s compellingly eerie new poetry collection, Docklands: A Ghost Story, introduces us to a Cardiff architect – a man supremely sure of himself – as he is commissioned to transform an area in the busy docks. Docklands explores grey worlds at the edges of the eye, conjuring late-Victorian Cardiff’s hustling, booming, sullied docks – and the horrors they conceal.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Docklands: A Ghost Story is available from the Seren website: £9.99

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Friday Poem – ‘The World at One’, Kate Bingham

Today in the TLS you’ll find a new poem by Kate Bingham – ‘The Sound I have’. For our Friday Poem we also have one of Kate’s poems, though for us its one taken from Infragreen: ‘The World at One’.

Infragreen is full of poems that are perceptive, persuasive and intricately made. They take the reader on a startling and unfamiliar journey through everyday experiences and phenomena. Bingham’s keen eye, reflectiveness and quiet wit endow each subject with a shimmering freshness. Those who know her earlier work will recognise in this collection a playful, often darkly comic, appreciation of the surreal, which features hearts and hands, feet, and even a pair of shoes with minds and agenda of their own.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Infragreen is available from the Seren website: £9.99

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Friday Poem – ‘Angry Birds’, Eoghan Walls

This week our Friday Poem is the opening number from Eoghan Walls’ forthcoming second collection, Pigeon Songs – ‘Angry Birds’.

Pigeon Songs follows on from Walls’ much-praised debut, The Salt Harvest. From the first poem, we have a sense of the poet’s themes and preoccupations: we have a richly metaphorical and densely allusive style, a pull towards formal metre and structures. There is also the occasional vigorous vulgarity, adding a touch of blue humour to the canvas, breaking up the formal rigour. Family is a potent presence in poems inspired by parents, grandparents, partners, children. They often emit a sort of energy, a fierce gravitational pull of emotion around the burning heart of a poem ultimately about love, or the sorrow of losing a loved-one.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pigeon Songs is due for publication on 28 February. Pre-order your copy now from the Seren website: £9.99

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Friday Poem – ‘Telling the bees’, Katherine Stansfield

This week our Friday Poem is a new work by Katherine Stansfield, ‘Telling the bees’.

‘Telling the bees’ is a touching memorial to Christian Brown OBE, co-founder of the Seren Cornerstone Poetry Festival. The poem weaves together memories with the imagery of a garden in which ‘everything has bloomed’: a legacy of colour and life, conjured by Christian even after his passing.

Christian was the driving force behind the first Seren Cornerstone Poetry Festival in 2018 and as we approach 2019’s festival we are reminded of his extraordinary energy and vision. Cornerstone’s Poet in Residence, Katherine Stansfield will be opening the festival alongside Kim Moore and Emily Blewitt in the Opening Buffet event: tickets available now. All That Was Wood, a pamphlet of poems written during Katherine’s residency, will be published to coincide with the festival.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

All That Was Wood will be available in February 2019 from our website, and at the Seren Cornerstone Poetry Festival (8-10 February 2019).