Böcker utgivna av Poetry Wales Press

Second collection from the poet of powerful emotions and vivid imagery, The Zoo Father underlines the author's reputation as a questing poet capable of outstanding imagistic flourishes and surprising associations. This extraordinary and powerful volume is comprised of two sections, the first about with the poet's relationship with her father, the second with her mother. Section One is heavily imbued with imagery of the poet's travels in South America and her researches in the cultures and ecology of the Venezuelan. Pain, anger, bewilderment are refracted through a rich, often sensual imagery of fauna, hallucinatory drugs and tribal beliefs. This gives the poems their originality, and prevents subject matter of childhood abandonment and abuse becoming too harrowing. The imagery adapted from shamanistic beliefs is especially memorable. Section Two is set in southern France, in an almost equally exotic location of vineyards and 'dinosaur plateaux'. It concerns the poet's family holidays in "the vineyard" and her rediscovery and subsequent repossession of that place. Once again, the poems delineate a primary relationship (with the poet's mother), with the lushness of the imagery putting into surprising context the development of that relationship.

In this emotional follow-up to" The Zoo Father, " a daughter is haunted by her mentally ill mother until a series of remarkable transformations help her to conquer painful childhood memories. Over the course of the collection, the feared mother becomes a rattlesnake, an Aztec goddess, a Tibetan singing bowl, a stalagmite, a praying mantis, and then a ghost orchid, yet in the central poem the daughter becomes a cosmic stag and escapes her mother-huntress.

This impressive debut includes poems on a wide range of themes: from recollections of a return to Fiji, to sharper memories of an adolescence in a rural town in Wales; from dark ruminations on farm life to tender and unconventional love poems. Owen Sheers has a talent for visual imagery, a flair for narrative and a grasp of the personal as acute as his awareness of the wider world. His astute portraits of relatives and contemporaries entice us into other lives. The Blue Book is a startlingly good first collection by a young writer of considerable ability and promise. "This vivid and potent debut collection from Owen Sheers is populated with characters trying to come to terms with themselves and others and with the difficult journeys they find themselves taking. It is a moving experience, which he makes sense of in finely wrought verse that is tough, but also lyrical. A distinctive new voice for the year 2000.">"Owen Sheers writes controlled, suggestive poems. This is thoughtful work, attentive and responsive to the world, and with a subtle music of its own">"It is the truth in the details that suggests indisputably that Owen Sheers is the real thing, a poet of promise whom we are sure to hear much of in future. Buy, buy." >"Owen Sheer's poetry is contemporary, yet imbued with a strong, surprising, sense of memory. His characters are not merely vehicles for a poet's perceptions, they live - from Fijian preacher to farm workers and edgy adolescents in rural Wales to the sleeping girl who brings love to the night bus. He has a knack for capturing the cruelty of life's lack of tidy resolution but, best of all, Sheers has the courage to be tender." >Owen Sheers was born in 1974, spent a portion of his childhood abroad, then returned to live on a farm in Abergavenny when he was nine. Educated at Oxford, with an MA in Creative Writing from the UEA writing programme, he has worked in television in London and Wales. He hit the limelight in 2000 when for The Times of January 1st, 2000, David Bailey photographed the foremost practitioners in the arts and sciences together with their choice of the person they expected to carry the discipline forward: Poet Laureate Andrew Motion selected Owen Sheers as the poet to watch. His first book was shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize Best First Collection and ACW Book of the Year 2001. Skirrid Hill, his second collection, won a Somerset Maugham Prize in 2006 and was longlisted for Welsh Book of the Year.