Category: Seren

Comet

~ oxfordbrookesuni

I walked at night over Fountains Fell under Pen-y-Ghent.
The moor was a still wave and I was riding it,
my head capped in the sky’s metal.

The god was hammering out stars, the hill its anvil.
Where they fell they left a darker trail, 
the glints speeding away in the gill.

Hale-Bopp was a fist of flung glitter, a child’s firework
on black paper, my marker the five miles
from dale to dale.

I never made it to the village,
but lay under the broken eaves of a barn,
watched to see the god unsheathe his sword.

by Sarah Corbett

from Other Beasts, Seren (2008)

From the first sumptuous poem, ‘Birthday’ where the protagonist, running at night, thinks of her body as a “nocturnal bloom”, the reader is immersed in the compelling voice of Sarah Corbett. From her first book, The Red Wardrobe, nominated for both the Forward and the T.S. Eliot Prize, we are familiar with the world she portrays, of the childhood spent in rural North Wales, and the first half of this new collection is devoted mostly to poems that re-create scenes from a youth that was haunted by trouble, but also redeemed by a strong attachment to the beauties of nature, particularly horses, and an early love of reading and culture. In poems like ‘Rivers, Roads’ the two images mesh and intertwine, becoming symbolic and strangely evocative.

This poet bravely eschews lightness and irony for a whole-heartedly passionate and intensely physical response to life. Other Beasts differs from her earlier work in that in the latter half of the collection, she moves away from her own personal history and focuses on in-depth and often scary narratives of other lives. In these poems, such as ‘dreaming history’ she closely identifies with survivors of trauma, in this case the horror of a small girl hiding in a trunk while her family is massacred in a war-torn country. In the long poem ‘Testimony’ she inhabits the voice of Joanne Lees, the woman at the centre of the famously controversial case in Australia where her partner, Peter Falconio, was murdered and she managed, although tied up, to escape into the bush. Another sequence, ‘Cuttings’ weaves a week’s worth of international press cuttings together, creating an alternately horrible, sad, funny and odd tapestry of events.

Sarah Corbett was born in Chester, raised in north Wales, and educated at the Universities of Leeds and East Anglia. This is her third book of poems, following the acclaimed The Red Wardrobe (1998) and The Witch Bag (2002). She has published her poems in a wide selection of magazines and anthologies and has read her work at festivals internationally.

Seren is an independent literary publisher, specialising in English-language writing from Wales. Our diverse and eclectic list has something to offer anyone with an interest in excellent writing. Our aim is not simply to reflect what is going on in the culture in which we publish, but to drive that culture forward, to engage with the world, and to bring Welsh literature, art and politics before a wider audience.

Please visit our website for more information on our authors and titles.

Webcam Sonnet 4. Now

~ oxfordbrookesuni

Film and photograph only show
how it was. You’re seeing how it is,

now, this moment. A moody sunrise
bruising the nimbus above Hammerfest

to a nacreous flush that will never outlast
the next refresh. The very townsfolk

will miss it, unless they chance to look
now, right now. Can you catch his attention,

the man crossing the Torg, head down;
can you make him see one moment of sky

unlike all the others you and he
will walk under today, unlike the moment

passing in Padua, Jaipur, Tashkent,
that you don’t happen to be watching now?

by Sheenagh Pugh

from Long-Haul Travellers, Seren (2008)

Some of the journeys in this collection can be found on maps. But some travellers are journeying from one self to another, like those strange adventurers Murat Reis and Tristan Jones. Some, like Adwaitya the tortoise, have traversed time as well as space. Some travel in dreams. And the longest-haul travellers of all are the dead, like Josephine, whose memory returns to haunt our consciousness and remind us that not all places can be found in the atlas. (Sheenagh Pugh)

Elisions, displacements, journeys, dreams: this new collection of poems by Sheenagh Pugh has a pervasive, elegiac quality. Known for her intriguing narratives, many of these new poems work more by implication than explication. Typical is ‘The Unconversations’ which is a beautiful paean to the shorthand of private references used by a long-married couple. A longer poem, ‘Murat Reis’, chronicles the life of a man who was Dutch, Algerian, Christian, Muslim and many other things according to circumstance and his own whim. History provides vignettes such as ‘Victor’ which mourns the life of a young freed slave in Roman times, via the words and images carved on his gravestone. ‘Webcam Sonnets’ capture the subtle, sometimes poignant, sometimes sad, illusion of intimacy given by webcam contacts.

Sheenagh Pugh is a poet, critic, essayist, lecturer, and author of several works of fiction, non fiction and translation. The winner of many awards, including the Bridport Prize and the Forward Prize, she has published twelve individual collections of poetry, most recently The Movement of Bodies, which was a Poetry Book Society recommendation and also shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize.

Seren is an independent literary publisher, specialising in English-language writing from Wales. Our diverse and eclectic list has something to offer anyone with an interest in excellent writing. Our aim is not simply to reflect what is going on in the culture in which we publish, but to drive that culture forward, to engage with the world, and to bring Welsh literature, art and politics before a wider audience.

Please visit our website for more information on our authors and titles.

For the cosmonauts

~ oxfordbrookesuni

I, Yuri Gagarin, having not seen God,
wake now to the scrollwork of a body,
to my own white fibres leafing into the bone:
know that beyond this dome of rain there is
only the nothing where the soul sweeps
out its parallax like a distant star and truth
brightens to X, to gamma, through a metal sail.

So I return to you, cramming your pockets
with the atmosphere and evening news,
fumbling for gardens in the moon’s shadow,
in its waterfalls of silence. I wish for you
familiar towns, their piers and amusement arcades
unpeopled at dusk, the unicorn tumbling by
on china hooves behind the high walls
of parks, among congregating lamps.

May you find Earth rising there, between
your steepled hands. May your voyages
end. May you have a cold unfurling
of limbs each morning, when I am fallen
out of the world.

by Meirion Jordan

from Moonrise, published by Seren in November 2008.

Finely held moods and moments resonate throughout this unusually accomplished first book. The rich, complex history of Wales often crops up in expected places, as in the post industrial imagery of ‘A Camera at Senghenydd Pit’, and then, in often unexpected contexts: ‘The New World’ is a vision, a cross between ‘Under Milk Wood’ and an early J.G. Ballad novel, of post-global warming Wales, with a polyglot population: “Ronaldinho Davies/wowing the crowds at the Millennium Stadium” and swamped by tropical vegetation: “cobalt lizards and coral snakes/swallowing the cottages in Llandinam/the mahoganies uprooting Carno’s hearths”. Another apocalyptic scenario prevails in ‘Pirate Music’ where a typical weekend in the binge-drinking culture unravels vividly as one of Dante’s circles of Hell.

Such inversions of myth are rife in this book. There is a freshness with which classical motifs echo in thoroughly modern contexts. A girl on a motorbike: “you fly your hair like a flag” is a glimpse of a goddess at speed. ‘The Head of an athlete in an Ionian shipwreck’ is the past as ghost: “his smile as white as alum”. What starts as portraiture sometimes veers off in darkly mysterious incantatory digressions as in ‘The Magdalen College Chef’ whose “souffles bloom from a dipped fork./Upstairs his ragouts seethe under the grins of dons and demons”.

There are also clever, out-and-out satires like ‘The Nuclear Disaster Appreciation Society’ where “We love to watch/the palm trees beating in the thorium breeze…” and ‘Blockbuster Season’ where the protagonist is bizarrely ensnared by the cliché plots and B-list actors of the cinema “Darth Vader using my Ford Fiesta to escape from Colditz…”. The plot twists and clever inversions available in these poems often recall science fiction writers like Philip K. Dick. Engaging, musically deft, an intelligence that wears its learning lightly, this is a sparkling debut from one of the most promising young poets Wales has seen in some time.

Meirion Jordan was born in 1985 in Swansea, Wales, read Mathematics at Somerville College, Oxford, and is currently studying in the University of East Anglia Writing programme. He won the Newdigate Prize in 2007 and has been published in Poetry Wales, the TLS, and Gallous, amongst other places. He is influenced by poets David Constantine, Andrew Waterhouse, Gillian Clarke, Geoffrey Hill, Byzantine & mediaeval art, music and science fiction.

Seren is an independent literary publisher, specialising in English-language writing from Wales. Our diverse and eclectic list has something to offer anyone with an interest in excellent writing. Our aim is not simply to reflect what is going on in the culture in which we publish, but to drive that culture forward, to engage with the world, and to bring Welsh literature, art and politics before a wider audience.

Please visit our website for more information on our authors and titles.

Apologies to the handful of you who also received this poem by e-mail in October. Our software wasn’t working properly then and the poem only reached the first twenty on the maillist, and we didn’t want the other 650 to miss out.

At Last

~ oxfordbrookesuni

At last, there is some colour in the house.
Quite amazing, how these four daffodils
have made this room so bright, made the blank walls
painted, the light come back into the space.

It’s all so simple. Pick them from the side
of busy roads, their petals grey with fumes.
Then put them in a jamjar. Now you’ve made
an ornament, a pet, a fire, a home,

an installation, a mausoleum.
I never thought I’d love such sentiment,
and never thought I’d dare to utter ‘pain’.
I didn’t want to take the easy slant

on things. Did not intend. But here we are,
a room, one window, four yellow flowers.

by Michael McKimm

From: Sherb: New Urban Writing from Coventry.

Mike McKimm graduated from the University of Warwick with an MA in English Literature in 2006. His poetry, much of it first published by Heaventree, won an Eric Gregory Award in 2007. This poem comes from the collection Sherb: New Urban Writing from Coventry.

The Heaventree Press is an independent poetry press based in Coventry. For more information on Heaventree, and to buy Sherb: New Urban Writing from Coventry, please visit the Heaventree Press website.