Rhiannon Hooson

Friday Poem – ‘In Spring’ by Rhiannon Hooson

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This week’s Friday Poem is ‘In Spring’ by Rhiannon Hooson from her collection The Other City. Rhiannon’s new collection Goliat was published in 2022.

This cover shows a painting of two towering walls casting long shadows down onto the ground, dwarfing the tiny figure walking into the light on the other side. The text reads: The Other City. Rhiannon Hooson.

Shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year, The Other City is full of sharply focused, beautifully resonant and deeply felt poems. The poet charts a course through real and imagined landscapes, where actions are done and undone, and the everyday made unfamiliar. Drawing on the personal and political histories of the Welsh countryside where she grew up, as well as more enigmatic mythologies, the poems map a journey through both the familiar and the foreign, giving us glimpses of unsettling spaces, where light falls “like silk pegged out to rot across the snow”.

In Spring There are leaves like hands opening and the old queen in her rotten palanquin teetering along the road, stones in the black ground opening like eyes you open your mouth to sing the road bursts into blossom ticks fall from the backs of horses nests from the eaves. In attic rooms fanfared with creaking ropes poets hanging quietly sift into insects, find cracks, escape and burrow into the bronze shock of the sky. Those pinkly newborn children uncurl on their pillows and speak new words to their mothers, new soft words from their soft palates and soak up sun on all the windowsills like fat hairless cats, watching. What gods come, come stalking on all fours, lean, and hungry, and afraid.

The Other City is available on the Seren website for £9.99

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On Tuesday 11th April, hear Rhiannon reading from her new collection Goliat in the Seren Showcase at Waterstones Cardiff. Tickets £6. Starts at 7pm. Book via the Waterstones website.

This cover shows a photograph of a ghost-like figure, standing in a field at dusk with a sheet draped over its head. The text reads: Goliat. Rhiannon Hooson.

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.

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Friday Poem – ‘You and I are ghosts in the future’s forest’ by Rhiannon Hooson

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This week’s Friday Poem is ‘You and I are ghosts in the future’s forest’ by Rhiannon Hooson from her latest 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 shortlisted 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.

You and I are ghosts in the future’s forest It is a gentle, haunted world. Circumstance has thrown it far into the future, but there are things in it you and I would understand: the way silence settles across a wet morning and the roe deer raise their heads. Perhaps, also, a sense of things that need not find their equilibrium. Our sighs are vapours: no myth exists to hold us like a heart in aspic. Again and again the sun sets, swings under the earth’s belly, lifts a worn edge of cloud come morning. Perhaps we grieve for language, realising our fluency was false. Words are a closed loop. A tight knot. The roe deer raise their heads, move between the trees, listening for wolves. Pale moths and the moon’s white light. Where once we walked, water rises. You and I are ghosts in the future’s forest.

Goliat 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 – ‘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

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

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 ­– ‘Thirlmere’ by Rhiannon Hooson

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This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Thirlmere’ by Rhiannon Hooson from 100 Poems to Save the Earth.

100 Poems to Save the Earth edited by Zoe 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. 

Thirlmere After we lit the last candle the gales couldn't hold us any more. Along the lane the walls had begin to slump, water sluicing through them green as grass, but we drove through anyway and out into the valley. The fields were polished flat. Trees were hung with drooping ropes of fleece that caught in the breeze like kudzu. Banks of shale sprawled draining across the roads, and the sky was open, dizzying and blue, tall into the air above the crowns of our heads, and the slate face of the lake was the same as always. Lakes survive any flood, lie oblique in their hollows, streaked with the half-truths of glimpsed reflections. The birds were only then beginning to sound. All across the fields the fallen trees were burning.

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

Rhiannon Hooson’s collection The Other City is available on the Seren website: £9.99

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

Friday Poem – ‘Autumn’ by Rhiannon Hooson

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This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Autumn’ by Rhiannon Hooson from her collection The Other City.

Rhiannon Hooson’s debut collection The Other City was shortlisted for the Roland Mathias Prize. Sharply focused, beautifully resonant, and deeply felt,  these poems reference and re-make narratives from classical Greek myth, while others rework elements of Welsh history, ancient and modern.

Rhiannon runs workshops and courses throughout the year, visit www.inkandoaktree.com for more details.

The Other City is available on the Seren website: £9.99

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

Friday Poem – ‘Weathering’ by Rhiannon Hooson

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Our Friday Poem this week is ‘Weathering’, a new poem by Rhiannon Hooson. Rhiannon’s collection The Other City  is available from Seren.

Rhiannon Hooson is a gifted young poet born in mid-Wales and currently living in the Welsh Marches. The Other City, her debut collection of poems, was shortlisted for the Roland Mathias Prize.

Sharply focused, beautifully resonant, and deeply felt,  these poems reference and re-make narratives from classical Greek myth, while others rework elements of Welsh history, ancient and modern.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Other City is available from the Seren website: £9.99

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

Friday Poem – ‘Luminosity’ by Rhiannon Hooson

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Our Friday Poem this week is ‘Luminosity’ by Rhiannon Hooson, which appears in her collection The Other City, and Poems from the Borders pamphlet.

Rhiannon Hooson is a gifted young poet born in mid-Wales and currently living in the Welsh Marches. The Other City, her debut collection of poems, was shortlisted for the Roland Mathias Prize.

Sharply focused, beautifully resonant, deeply felt,  some poems reference and re-make narratives from classical Greek myth, some rework elements of Welsh history, ancient and modern.

‘Luminosity’ contemplates Alfred Watkins’ moment of inspiration in Herefordshire, when he proposed the existence of ley lines.

 

The Other City is available from the Seren website: £9.99

Poems from the Borders is available from the Seren website: £5.00

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

 

Friday Poem – ‘How Women Are Not The Same’, Rhiannon Hooson

Friday Poem Women Rhiannon Hooson
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Our Friday Poem this week is Rhiannon Hooson’s ‘How Women Are Not The Same’, from her debut poetry collection, The Other City.

The Other City Rhiannon Hooson‘Hooson’s style is thoughtful, questioning, reflective, and consistently restrained. Her collection gives the impression of having come together over a long period, with each piece earning its place’ – Orbis

The Other City offers us elegant, artful verse of precision and insight. This is a poet that can re-imagine scenes from Greek myth, from Welsh history, and make them as urgent and compelling as her poems about personal relationships. ‘How Women Are Not The Same’ is one such personal poem – in which memories are conjured, and intimacies wound tight around strands of hair.

 

Rhiannon Hooson poem

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Other City is available from the Seren website: £9.99

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

 

 

 

Friday Poem – ‘Wintering’, Rhiannon Hooson

Friday Poem Rhiannon Hooson Wintering
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Rhiannon Hooson’s incredible debut collection, The Other City, has just appeared on the Wales Book of the Year shortlist – and this week our Friday Poem is one from its pages: the seasonally-appropriate ‘Wintering’.

The Other City Rhiannon HoosonThe Other City offers us elegant, artful verse of precision and insight. Sharply focused, beautifully resonant, deeply felt, these poems tend to travel in distinct streams: characters like Zeus, Narcissus, Ariadne, and Ganymede sit alongside reworkings of Welsh history, both ancient and modern. Other poems explore the idea of otherness and the uncanny, where actions are done and undone, and the familiar made unfamiliar.
This is a poet who can re-imagine scenes from Greek myth, from Welsh history, and make them as urgent and compelling as her poems about personal relationships.

 

Rhiannon Hooson Wintering

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Other City is available from the Seren website: £9.99

Join our free Book Club for 20% off every book you buy from us.

 

 

January Giveaway: win a copy of The Other City by Rhiannon Hooson

Giveaway The Other City Rhiannon Hooson
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This month we are giving away a copy of Rhiannon Hooson’s ‘beguiling’ debut poetry collection, The Other City.

To enter, simply sign up to the Seren newsletter before 1st February:
https://www.serenbooks.com/newsletter/signup

other-city-jan-giveaway


About The Other City:
The Other City Rhiannon HoosonRhiannon Hooson is a gifted young poet born in mid-Wales and currently living in the Welsh Marches. The Other City is her debut collection of poems.
Sharply focused, beautifully resonant, deeply felt, these poems tend to travel in distinct streams: some reference and re-make narratives from classical Greek myth; others explore the idea of otherness and the uncanny, where actions are done and undone, and the familiar made unfamiliar.
‘This is a beguiling debut from a poet who already has a recognizable voice and emotional register. Sensuous, musical, darkly involved, the poems make and confound their own realities.’ – Graham Mort

 

The winner of this giveaway will be chosen at random from all our email subscribers on 1st February 2017, so if you haven’t already, hurry and sign up for our newsletter before the end of the month!