The Things She Burned That Year

October 12, 2016April 4, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Whole nights claimed her on sooty knees,
worshipping the heat of a first open fire.
She tended it with the caution of a mistress,

offered her past and part of her future.
She kindled her half-filled diary; each curling
page exposed the inky, unburned next.

All afternoon it read itself to the blaze,
settled down at dusk to a soft grey bed.
She was watching someone she knew grow old.

Then she’d fed the fire a banquet of porn
that she no longer had an attic to store.
The printed bodies, the breasts and cocks

were nibbled off by a bright green flame
before the paper charred in the usual way.
And the final text that lanterned out

in the beige-tiled fireplace flared so fast
that the thing she wanted to erase
was lost: even its capsicum name is dust.

by Judy Brown

News from the Centre! This Friday sees the first of our lunchtime readings at Brookes for the semester, featuring Seán Street and Jennifer Wong. All are welcome! Please feel free to bring your lunch!

There are just a couple of places left on the workshop led by Tamar Yoseloff entitled ‘The Space of the Poem’ on Saturday 22 October. Inspired by the exhibition by Pan Gongkai running at Brookes’ Glass Tank, we will look at examples of Chinese painting, concrete poetry and text-based sculpture as a way of generating new poems. You can read more about the workshop on the Brookes website, where you can also book your place. There is a reduced price for Brookes students and staff.

Threads Across Water is an exhibition of painting, print and sculpture by Carola Colley inspired by the poetry of Usha Kishore, which is currently running at The Mill Arts Centre in Banbury, Oxfordshire. To tie in with the show, there will be a workshop and reading by Usha Kishore on Saturday 15 October. The workshop, entitled ‘Poetising Myth’, will take place at the Mill Arts Centre from 2.30-4 p.m on Saturday, and the reading will take place at 5.30pm. Email carola.colley@gmail.com for details and to book your place, or visit the Facebook page for more details.

Notes from Seren:

Driven as much by thoughtful speculation and metaphysics as by personal experience and relationships, Judy Brown‘s poems surprise and delight at every turn. Crowds and isolation, and city and the country collide in Judy’s second collection. Spells living in London and Hong Kong and the author’s recent residencies in Grasmere and North Wales provide key moments of inspiration. Crowd Sensations is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Judy’s debut, Loudness, was shortlisted for the Forward and Fenton Aldeburgh first collection prizes. Judy writes and teaches in Derbyshire and London and is a Royal Literary Fund Fellow. She was the Wordsworth Trust’s poet-in-residence for 2013 and was a 2014 Gladstone’s Library writer-in-residence. Judy won the Manchester Poetry Prize in 2010. Carol Rumens has described her as ‘a poet who instinctively sees the possibilities of defamiliarisation wherever she casts her penetrating, colour-loving eye.’

Seren has been publishing poetry for 35 years. We are an independent publisher specialising in English-language writing from Wales. Seren’s wide-ranging list includes fiction, translation, biography, art and history. Seren’s authors are shortlisted for – and win – major literary prizes across Britain and America, including the 2014 Costa Poetry Prize (for Jonathan Edwards’ My Family and Other Superheroes). Amy Wack has been Seren’s Poetry Editor for more than 20 years. You can find more details about Seren on the publisher’s website.

Copyright information: please note that the copyrights of all the poems displayed on the website and sent out on the mailing list are held by the respective authors, translators or estates, and no work should be reproduced without first gaining permission from the individual publishers.

Masculine Happiness

May 2, 2016April 4, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

John Wayne is warm, tired and had
just the right number of drinks. Firelight
and the stars of Arizona surround his bed:
a saddle blanket rolled out in the desert night.

News headlines of a foreign war: the reporter’s
hair and blue eyes match her checked scarf;
and a voice behind me starts: who’s havingher,
insulted when I won’t laugh as he starts to laugh.On another channel Bob Mitchum’s an old sea captain:
safe on land while his son’s submarine is overdue;
drinking cognac from a dark bottle, he finishes it all,
and floats into the sleep of drunk and drowned men.
Sick the next morning, his steps slow and unsure,
like a shipwrecked sailor exploring a new shore.

by David Foster-Morgan

Exciting news from the Centre: our 2016 International Poetry Competition is now open for entries! This year’s judge is the award-winning poet Daljit Nagra, and you can find details about how to enter on the Poetry Centre website. There are two categories: Open and English as a Second Language, and the winners of each category will receive £1000, with both runners-up receiving £200. The deadline for entries is 31 August.

If you are in or around Oxford, don’t miss this Saturday’s reading at Oriel College, featuring Lucy Ingrams, Stav Poleg, Rosie Shepperd, and Liane Strauss. It begins at 7.30pm. There are more details on Rosie Shepperd’s website.

The beautiful, multi-layered poems of David Foster-Morgan have already made him a ‘poet’s poet’ amongst the cognoscenti. His debut collection, Masculine Happiness, brings this subtle and remarkable poet to a wider readership. O’Hara, Ginsberg and Borges are amongst the many influences that inspire these poems on themes of masculinity. Writing about his work, Judy Brown has commented that ‘David Foster-Morgan’s exacting images and distinctive music create a world of complex interactions – between places, people, stories and voices. These subtle and unexpected poems investigate what lies under the surface, making up a memorable collection which is both cool, and richly textured.’ You can read more about David Foster-Morgan’s new book on the Seren website, and follow his work on his blog and via Twitter.

Seren is an independent publisher based in Wales. Founded in 1981 to publish poetry discovered by the then-editor of Poetry Wales magazine, Cary Archard. Under Managing Editor Mick Felton the press now publishes a broad range of fiction, non-fiction, and criticism. Amy Wack has been Poetry Editor at Seren for over 20 years. During that time, poets published by Seren have won or been shortlisted for the Costa, Forward, T.S. Eliot and Aldeburgh Prizes. ‪You can find out more about Seren on the publisher’s website.

Copyright information: please note that the copyrights of all the poems displayed on the website and sent out on the mailing list are held by the respective authors, translators or estates, and no work should be reproduced without first gaining permission from the individual publishers.

The Red Aeroplane

April 25, 2016April 4, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

From the oratory window I witness
mid-air doom, a slew of concentric
swirls, a trail of forge-sparks,
and that’s it. A vermilion two-seater
stagger-wing loops earthbound,
so much depending upon centrifugal
drive. Slivers of toughened glass
spangle the outer stone sill,
the vacant co-pilot seat
is plummeted deep in rosebed mulch.

I question now if the red bi-plane
ever was, the way sureties tilt
and untangle from any one freezeframe
to its sequel. Maybe I was glimpsing
that two-seater red pedal car
– injection-moulded plastic –
collected one Christmas Eve night
for a fevered child? Or conflating
the replica cherry-red sixty-three
we’d toyed with, tinkered with, briefly
on a tinsmith’s covered stall
that drenched Saturday?
What can’t be
cast in any doubt is the wreckage,
a fragmentary scattering,
the mangledness on the far side
of glass. And how a Galway blue
skyscape proves ineluctably
the exponential function of tangents.

by Anne-Marie Fyfe

Irish literature expert (and former Director of the Poetry Centre) Dr Eóin Flannery, and Dr Donal Lowry, who has published widely on Irish foreign policy, are leading a one-day short course on Saturday 14 May at Oxford Brookes: ‘One Hundred Years On: 1916–2016. The Easter Rising: its History and Literature, Then and Now’. All are welcome. For more details, visit the Brookes website.

Don’t miss Modern Poetry in Translation‘s 50th anniversary study day in ‎Oxford on 14 May. A really spectacular programme is on offer with writers and translators like Patrick McGuinness, Karen Leeder, David Constantine, Jamie McKendrick and Sasha Dugdale. There will be another translation day in Cambridge on 30 April.

‘The Red Aeroplane’ is copyright © Anne-Marie Fyfe, 2015. It is reprinted from House of Small Absences (Seren, 2015) by permission of Seren Books.House of Small Absencesfollows Fyfe’s popularUnderstudies: New and SelectedPoems. Her new collection serves as an observation window into strange, unsettling spaces—a deserted stage-set, our own personalised ‘museum’, a Piedmontalbergo,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. Youcan read more about the book on theSeren website, and more about Anne-Marie’s work and forthcoming appearances onher own site. Anne-Marie is alsoon Twitter.

Anne-Marie Fyfe, poet, creative-writing teacher, arts-organiser of the Troubadour Coffee House poetry events and former Chair of the Poetry Society, (2006-2009), was born in Cushendall in the Glens of Antrim and now lives in West London. She has read and performed her work worldwide.

Denominations

April 18, 2016April 4, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

You’ll paint me gross –
gripping my shins,
retching silver coins.

Let me put you straight.
All I’ve got’s loose change
for late-night kofta stands

outside the Lions’ Gate,
where tote-bag tourists
sip tart tamarind

from paper cups.
On Friday night I saw the city
wane and wax to pixels

on the screens of untold
mobile phones. From unbuilt
minarets, muezzins hoistthe pale Passover moon
above the gospel

of the Separation Wall.

by Damian Walford Davies

Don’t miss Modern Poetry in Translation‘s 50th anniversary study day in ‎Oxford on 14 May. A really spectacular programme is on offer with writers and translators like Patrick McGuinness, Karen Leeder, David Constantine, Jamie McKendrick and Sasha Dugdale. There will be another translation day in Cambridge on 30 April.

Damian Walford Davies is Professor of English and Head of the School of English, Communication & Philosophy at Cardiff University. He has published two previous collections with Seren. A literary critic, theorist, and editor as well as a poet, he has published widely on Romantic-period literature and culture and on the two literatures of Wales.

Writing about Damian Walford Davies’ book, Judas, Tiffany Atkinson comments: ‘An apocryphal tour de force, Damian Walford Davies’s Judas is a long-overdue mythobiography of the infamous Iscariot. With dazzling linguistic precision, mordant wit and unflinching humanity, these poems turn the familiar story inside out, exposing not just the many facets it has accrued from two thousand years’ telling, but how the veil between past and present, love and betrayal, magic and miracle is fine, and easily torn. Walk with this shadowy figure past the tombs, soldiers and late-night kofta stands of a shimmering, timeless Jerusalem, and be prepared to hear the other side.’ You can read more about Judas on the Seren website, and an interview with Damian Walford Davies here.

The Muntjac

March 21, 2016April 4, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

reflects our headlights in his eyes; 
his scrubby body disappears into the hedge

now white with May, 
tar and fern on his delicate hooves

and all at once the road reverts 
to emptiness, but something of his presence

stays, an apparition on the verge: 
fugitive from walled estates that favoured

curiosities, alien tropics quick and rank,
snaking beyond the boundaries, laying roots.

The road curves past Darks Dale floodlit,
 a tractor ploughing furrows, past New Broke Ups,

Wrong Land; and beyond, a tangle of forest,
oaks hunched like old men against the night.

by Tamar Yoseloff

News from the Centre! Tonight at 7pm, the Poetry Centre hosts an exciting poetry reading at the Albion Beatnik in Oxford with visiting US poet Leah Umansky and local poet Penny Boxall. Leah is the author of the dystopian-themed chapbook, Straight Away the Emptied World, the Mad-Men inspired, Don Dreams and I Dream, and the full-length collection Domestic Uncertainties. Penny is Education Officer at Oxford’s University Church. Her debut collection, Ship of the Line, was published by Eyewear in 2014, a year in which she also won second prize in the Jane Martin Poetry Prize and had her poem, ‘What You Mean to Me’, commended in the Forward Prize. For more details of the reading, visit our Facebook event page.

Tamar Yoseloff’s A Formula for Night: New and Selected Poems includes dazzling new work as well as selections from her print collections and pieces from collaborations with artists. The title poem was commissioned by the Hayward Gallery for their 2013 exhibition ‘Light Show’ and is based on an installation by the Welsh Artist Cerith Wyn Evans. The poems in this collection are also concerned with heavenly presences, as well as evil spirits, explorations of light and dark.

Writing about the book, Martyn Crucefix has commented: ‘A Formula for Night is a major collection and career summary and really ought to be both on your wish list and on prize shortlists in the coming 12 months.’ Read more about A Formula for Night on Seren’s website.

Tamar Yoseloff is the author of four poetry collections, including Sweetheart, a PBS Special Commendation and the winner of the Jerwood Aldeburgh Festival Prize. Her most recent collections are The City with Horns and Formerly, a chapbook incorporating photographs by Vici MacDonald, which was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award. As well as other projects with artists, Yoseloff has also edited A Room to Live In: A Kettle’s Yard Anthology. She has been Reviews Editor for Poetry London and Poetry Editor for Art World. Yoseloff lives in London, where she is a freelance tutor in creative writing. She explores the intersection between poetry and visual art on her blog Invective Against Swans.

Seren is an independent publisher based in Wales. Founded in 1981 to publish poetry discovered by the then-editor of Poetry Wales magazine, Cary Archard. Under Managing Editor Mick Felton the press now publishes a broad range of fiction, non-fiction, and criticism. Amy Wack has been Poetry Editor at Seren for over 20 years. During that time, poets published by Seren have won or been shortlisted for the Costa, Forward, T.S. Eliot and Aldeburgh Prizes. ‪You can find out more about Seren on the publisher’s website.

Copyright information: please note that the copyrights of all the poems displayed on the website and sent out on the mailing list are held by the respective authors, translators or estates, and no work should be reproduced without first gaining permission from the individual publishers.

Blackberries

March 14, 2016April 4, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

It’s dark by nine, stoats have been seen
on the dry stone wall by the sun-room,
and I have a feeling the blackberries need to be picked.When I set off with my grandmother’s hat, her stick and basket,
children run after me, thistles lie down,
the cows make way at the gateand even the insects seem to disperse
more respectfully, leaving their eggs
in the crop’s black best as if that might stop me

simmering the lot of them tomorrow
in the big aluminium pan. Somewhere in an outbuilding
jars of ten-year-old overboiled jam

recrystallise slowly (I should throw them away)
while the good stuff sits on a shelf in London
where no one has time for toast and tea.

No one else will put up with so many scratches,
wade into rosebay willowherb six foot high
or chance it with the stinging nettles,

bitten and burnt and aching all over,
filling the basket with little black blind spots,
berry-sized bruises that float in the eye.

This summer again, in patches of scrub
at the back of my mind, such fruit has been ripening
red from green and green from white

that somebody has to pick it, some sweet thing
of the sweetness of August’s August rain
be preserved.

by Kate Bingham

Join us on Monday 21 March for an exciting poetry reading at the Albion Beatnik in Oxford with visiting US poet Leah Umansky and local poet Penny Boxall. Leah is the author of the dystopian-themed chapbook, Straight Away the Emptied World¸ the Mad-Men inspired, Don Dreams and I Dream, and the full-length collection Domestic Uncertainties. Penny is Education Officer at Oxford’s University Church. Her debut collection, Ship of the Line, was published by Eyewear in 2014, a year in which she also won second prize in the Jane Martin Poetry Prize and had her poem, ‘What You Mean to Me’, commended in the Forward Prize. For more details, visit our Facebook event page.

Kate Bingham’s Infragreen is her eagerly-awaited third collection of poems. Her subject matter can be deceptively simple: rain, the school run, a conversation, but these poems are full of subtle emotional power and wrought with dazzling patterns. Quicksand Beach, her Forward Prize-nominated previous book, was admired by The Guardian for its ‘urgent interrogation of the ways in which we love.’

According to Poetry Review, ‘Nothing is taken for granted in the intellectual universe of these poems: instead they draw strength from going on creating in the face of mystery… Infragreen is full of sensuous, imaginative and beautifully accomplished work.’ Read more about the book on the Seren website.

Kate Bingham is a poet, novelist, and filmmaker who lives in London. Her previous collections are Cohabitation and Quicksand Beach. ‘On Highgate Hill’ was nominated for the Forward Prize Best Single Poem in 2010. Find out more about Kate’s work on her website.

Parapluie

March 7, 2016April 4, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

For P & ZG)

I do not want to be made of blue velvet;
I want to be blue velvet. With a handle of silver
shot lace, made by a consumptive old
Romanov who sips her remittance from tall
thin glasses of sweetened black tea.

It is an understatement to say I wish
to shimmer; that I’m quietly reflective
of colour. Selective colour.
I do not want to reflect grey.

I want to be crafted with unprecedented
patience by a slender man who has no
English and fabulous hands. I want to stand
alone, without the icy compromise of a solitary
walk in St Petersburg. I want to lie;

lie beautifully within the fabrication
of my fabric. I want to spread, not just my folds
but myself, on the edge of a shelf of mahogany or
a complex inlay of cherry.

I will be complete but not
undone by a ribbon of magenta. I will be warmed
by dry fired irons and the only creases that fall
from me will be creases that are not
part of the truest part of me.

I will be held by a thin frame of teak, picked
from a clearing in Burma. It has been
rosined with cinnamon and dipped in a resin
of smoked cane sugar.

I will hear the wind before it blows through
the gap in a sash window of a fifth floor
rent-controlled apartment on the west side
of Wenceslas Square. I will contemplate only
the nature of rain.

If I am left in the maze of second hand shops
that runs under Rue de Rivoli; if I’m thrown on a bonfire
at the end of no particular week, my combustion
will form a distraction of radiance.
I will show you the origin of red.

by Rosie Shepperd

Tomorrow at the Old Fire Station in Oxford, poet & theatre-maker Hannah Silva presents her solo show ‪‎Schlock! Produced by Penned in the Margins , Schlock! sees Hannah rip up her copy of Fifty Shades of Grey and with the help of radical punk-pirate Kathy Acker, she attempts to put the female body back together.You can find out more on the OFS website .

The Poetry Centre has programmed two events at the upcoming Oxford Literary Festival . Helen Mort and Alan Buckley perform their show ‘The Body Beautiful’ on Sunday 3 April , and then Claire Trévien, Harry Man, and Sarah Hesketh will read on Tuesday 5 April . Come along!

Rosie Shepperd’s debut poetry collection, The Man at the Corner Table , is a feast of delights. Its grace and precision charm us, and then beguile us into a world that is vital and unsettling. Sheenagh Pugh says: ‘Rosie Shepperd looks aslant at the everyday until it becomes uncommon. She explores sadness through humour and emotion via the silence of white space. Her voice is singular, engaging, unmistakable.’

Rosie Shepperd trained as an economist and worked in financial journalism and then banking in London and New York until 2004. She studied Creative Writing at London University’s Birkbeck College and at the University of South Wales and has a PhD from London University’s Goldsmith’s College. Her poems have appeared widely in journals and she has won a number of competitions and was shortlisted for the 2013 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem, which was read on stage by Juliet Stevenson. Stevenson observed: ‘Rosie Shepperd’s poems read like miniature films. The intensity of the moment she captures in each is framed with such vivid imagery, shot through with sensuality and wit. And her rhythms have the rigour and restlessness of really good jazz… Hers is a startlingly original voice. I so enjoyed reading this collection.’

In That Year

February 22, 2016April 4, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

And in that year my body was a pillar of smoke
and even his hands could not hold me.

And in that year my mind was an empty table
and he laid his thoughts down like dishes of plenty.

And in that year my heart was the old monument,
the folly, and no use could be found for it.

And in that year my tongue spoke the language
of insects and not even my father knew me.

And in that year I waited for the horses
but they only shifted their feet in the darkness.

And in that year I imagined a vain thing;
I believed that the world would come for me.

And in that year I gave up on all the things
I was promised and left myself to sadness.

And then that year lay down like a path
and I walked it, I walked it, I walk it.

by Kim Moore

News from the Centre: the Poetry Centre’s International Poetry Competition awards event took place last Friday. If you couldn’t make it, you can watch the ceremony (and hear readings from the winning poets, local poets, and by Hannah Lowe) on the Brookes website . The event begins about 14.30 into the film.

Dr Niall Munro, Director of the Centre, appeared with Prof Langdon Hammer on the Dan Schneider Video Series to discuss American poet Hart Crane recently. You can watch the discussion via YouTube .

The Art of Falling is Kim Moore’s keenly-anticipated debut poetry collection. A young poet from Cumbria, she writes with a compelling directness and power, as inspired by her life as a music teacher, as she is by the lives of ‘my people’ ancestors, poets and musicians. A case of domestic violence features in the cathartic central section. ‘In That Year’ is the opening poem of that section and was nominated for the Forward Prize for Best Poem of 2015.

Poetry London has commented that ‘there is a real menace and a compelling sense of the narrator’s urgent struggle to escape her abuser in this sequence, with the cycling back of repeated words reflecting the circular non-logic of a woman trapped in a violent relationship.’

Kim Moore lives in Barrow, Cumbria. Her poems have been published in the TLS, Poetry Review, Poetry London, and elsewhere. She regularly appears at festivals and events, and her prize-winning pamphlet, If we could speak like wolves (Smith-Doorstop), was chosen as an Independent Book of the Year in 2012 and was shortlisted for other prizes. Moore won an Eric Gregory Award in 2011 and the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2010. You can read more about her book on the Seren website, and more about Moore’s work on her own site. You can also follow her on Twitter.

Studio Flat

February 15, 2016April 4, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Socks hang like bats from a skylight.
They may be dry in time for the moon.
The camp site owner’s water-feature
drains more blood from the sun.

Cars queue for the narrow bridge.
Birds catch their pulses and fly. 
I am suddenly old. What’s an attic
but a bungalow in the sky.

And where are you, my sons? 
I heard your voices in the bells 
of snowdrops pulled by the wind.
These tulips have lost their smell.

Perhaps I could tell you, one day 
where the snowdrops went, why old men
dry their socks on the moon, and what
darkened the skylight, just then.

by Paul Henry

This Friday from 6-8pm in the John Henry Brookes Lecture Theatre, the Poetry Centre presents its inaugural International Poetry Competition awards event, which will include readings by the winners and by the judge, Hannah Lowe. More details can be found on the Centre’s website. All are welcome, but RSVP asap please to poetrycomp@brookes.ac.uk

Boy Running is the artful new collection of poems by Paul Henry and the first to follow his widely praised: The Brittle Sea: New and Selected Poems. Also a singer-songwriter Henry is known for his precise lyricism, intimate tone and a cast of characters inspired (like Dylan Thomas) by his childhood by the sea in Aberystwyth, West Wales. Commenting on Henry’s work, Hugo Williams has written: ‘With the purity of a sixteenth-century poet, Paul Henry lets fall his beautiful lyrics like cloaks in the mud of every day. Effortless epiphanies and images gradually break open, releasing a strange power, a dark ocean of longing and loss. His poetry deepens our perception of the world.’ Read more about Boy Running on Seren’s site, and more about Henry on his own website.

Paul Henry came to poetry through songwriting. He has read and performed his work at literary festivals across Europe, Asia and the USA. A popular Creative Writing tutor, Henry has lectured at the University of South Wales and led courses at writers’ centres in the UK and France. Also a broadcaster, Paul Henry has written and presented arts programmes for BBC Radio Wales, Radio 3 and Radio 4.

A Birthmother’s Catechism

March 30, 2015April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

How did you let him go?

With black ink and legalese

How did you let him go?

It’d be another year before I could vote

How did you let him go?

With altruism, tears, and self-loathing

How did you let him go?

A nurse brought pills for drying up breast milk

How did you let him go?

Who hangs a birdhouse from a sapling?

by Carrie Etter

Notes from Seren:

American poet Carrie Etter has lived in England since 2001 and taught creative writing at Bath Spa University since 2004. She has published three collections of poetry: The Tethers (Seren, 2009), winner of the London New Poetry Prize, Divining for Starters (Shearsman, 2011) and Imagined Sons (Seren, 2014); she also edited the anthology Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by UK Women Poets (Shearsman, 2010). Individual poems have appeared in Boston Review, The New Republic, The New Statesman, Poetry Review, The Times Literary Supplement, and many other journals worldwide. She also reviews contemporary poetry, most recently for The Guardian and Warwick Review.

You can read more about the book on Seren’s site, and find out more about Carrie’s work from her blog. You can also follow her on Twitter.

Writing of this collection, Carol Rumens has commented: ‘The narrator is a mother whose son was adopted soon after his birth. In the main sequence she describes a series of encounters with the now-adult child. This is not the report of a literal search, nor an effort to construct an identity, but a mosaic of the numerous possibilities of relationship. Funny at times, fast-moving and psychologically astute, these tiny monologues are held together by a narrative voice as seemingly self-possessed as it is candid.’

Seren is based in Bridgend, South Wales and was originally conceived in the early 80’s by then Head of English at Brynteg Comp, Cary Archard, on his kitchen table as an offshoot of Poetry Wales magazine. After moving briefly to poet Dannie Abse’s garage in Ogmore by Sea, the advent of Managing Editor Mick Felton has seen the press has go from strength to strength. We’ve published a wide range of titles including fiction (which under Editor Penny Thomas has seen the Booker-nominated novel by Patrick McGuinness, The Last Hundred Days, and an acclaimed novella series based on the medieval Welsh tales from the Mabinogion) and non-fiction (including literary criticism such as John Redmond’s Poetry and Privacy, as well as sumptuous art books like the collaboration between the painter Shani Rhys James and a number of poets and writers: Florilingua). Seren’s poetry list, edited by Amy Wack since the early 90s, has produced T.S. Eliot-nominated titles by Deryn Rees-Jones and Pascale Petit, Costa winner John Haynes, and a large list of Forward prize winners and nominees. Cary Archard remains on our Board of Directors and is a lively and influential presence. We mourn the loss, last year, of the wonderful Dannie Abse, also a guiding spirit. Find out more about the publisher from its website.