Böcker utgivna av Poetry Wales Press

The Turpentine Tree is an enduring symbol of memory, fragile but enduring the passage of time and still persisting: in the title poem, Lynne Hjelmgaard describes it 'a coppery faux god / with wildly twisted branches'. It might slip into the void, but here it is for now 'flying into the eye of the storm.' Hjelmgaard employs strong, sensuous imagery to capture moments from across her remarkable life. These are portraits of family, friends and relationships - of Hjelmgaard's uprooted life, including a life at sea, the subsequent displacement, widowhood and search for connections. Often the remembrances in poems are sweet-bitter, recalling friends and lovers lost, including the writer's late partner Dannie Abse. These explorations of loss are extremely moving, but the poems also communicate the value of a rich bank of memories which range around from spectating on a girl being punished at camp ('Summer Camp'), a Florida roadtrip with friends ('1969'), or an 'Evening Flight from Copenhagen.' Very often the speakers are in transit, travelling through, and so the poems hold onto intense, lucid or epiphanic moments. Out of Hjelmgaard's experiences of solitude come landscapes of silence: atmospheric, rich in emotion and personal detail, exploratory and questioning. Her poems reveal uncertainty, loneliness and longing but also celebrate the lost; they take solace from ocean journeys that still inform her present - from people and places loved and left behind - and from what is garnered from the natural world. There's an honesty, easiness and at times humour about the language. Vulnerability and strength walk side by side to give an extraordinary depth of experience for the reader. There's a visitation from her dead lover; her husband's spirit is safe in her wardrobe in a plastic bag; her father's ghost is on a WWII battleship in Norfolk Harbour and later waits for her in a crowd of strangers at Miami airport. These snapshots are sometimes based on real photographs, or at other times are imaginary photographs; Hjelmgaard questions 'Did we really exist? Yes - / the photograph answers' ('The Photograph Answers'). Threaded throughout all these memories is the gorgeous vividness of nature - the sea, animals, and creatures - which take speakers out of human concerns to a more connected relation with the world. The Turpentine Tree is about intangible presences which open up memory and move beyond it, towards a universal interconnectedness. How far back does grief go? What is lost, what can be found? Is memory transferred between us without words, years later, is the unsayable felt? (from 'On the Atlantic Coast of Spain')

Welcome to Kathryn Gray's Hollywood or Home, a poetry collection with as much ruthless glamour as any Old Hollywood movie. These worldly-wise poems explore celebrity culture in a mode that is both seriously playful and playfully serious. Here, melancholy and humour, irony and sincerity can be often found in the same poem, creating a rich experience for the film buff or fan of celebrity culture, as the book is full of easter eggs and movie references. Spectres of Hollywood haunt the collection: moguls, politicians, starlets, and monsters. They leap from screen and stage to page, as in 'Portrait of my Superego as Mommie Dearest': 'you're / the one swinging the axe, Mommie'. Famous actors drop in to entertain, for example in 'Meryl Streep is my Therapist' or 'Six Ways of Looking at John Cazale', while writers do their best to pitch their best ideas, working hard to convince: 'It's "relatable". / It's really "relatable" stuff' ('High-concept'). Film memorabilia is explored, like The Deer Hunter's bandana, as well as movie-business secrets: the title of 'As told by Alan Smithee' refers to the alter ego that directors use in movie credits when they want to disown their films. Stock characters and plots show up, like the 'Handome Weeping Boy', and 'The Meet-Cute', that scene in a romantic comedy where a couple have a first hilarious or 'cute' meeting. Classic 1980s movies like Pretty in Pink and Top Gun make their cameos. Power couples take their place, like Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner in 'Night and Day, 1957', and melodrama heightens to Douglas Sirk's grand levels in 'Love'. All the stories and characters loom larger than life, and as the narrator asks, contemplating celebrity Tweets in 'Fresh Hell', 'Why can't life be EVERYTHING IN CAPS LIKE CHER?'. In decadent celebrity culture, where a star is born every minute and becomes a flop even more quickly, these fierce and funny poems open space for the writer to reassess failures and successes, to overcome writer's block, and to remember that we never stop longing for our old dreams to come true. Gray is writing at the top of her game with her much-anticipated second collection. Out of Hollywood's brutal disdain for failure, Gray manages to find spectacle - and survival.

God's Little Artist is a biography in verse of Welsh painter Gwen John (1876 - 1939). Illustrated with precision, authenticity and a keen painterly eye, God's Little Artist is a celebration of John's life and work, by poet, novelist and art critic Sue Hubbard.

Ten new writers explore what Wales and Welshness mean to them as people from backgrounds largely 'under-represented' in an inspiring new look at Wales; previously unwritten. Identity, integration, language, aspiration, civic decline are the subjects of those who have sought sanctuary.

In Last Poem for Sarah & Other Poems, John Powell Ward, now at the age of eighty-five and in the seventh decade of his career, offers memorable work on a twentieth century life and recollections of Wales. Most poignant is his commentary on grief in the titular elegy for his late wife, Sarah.

'Octopus Mind' plays with an array of rich and original metaphors to explore the intricacies of neurodiversity, perception and the human mind. They observe the nuances of creativity, art, relationships, and self-expression through the lens of neurodiversity, reflecting on the poet's experience of being diagnosed with dyspraxia as an adult.

Viva Bartali! is a biography-in-verse of the iconic Italian cyclist Gino Bartali (1914-2000), two-time winner of the Tour de France. These poems conjure his career, his rivalries and his remarkable secret missions in the saddle during World War 2 carrying forged identity documents that saved the lives of hundreds of Italian Jews.

A Hardy Breed is a collection of 120 black and white photographs celebrating shepherding and sheep farming in mid and north Wales. An important social document, of reportage, portraiture and documentary photography, it records a way of life under pressure for the past couple of centuries, and more than ever today.

1967, the war still casts a shadow. Ruth was a child resistance fighter; her secret past sends daughter Katya on a dangerous chase across Germany in search of Nazi diamonds.

1790: Nantucket whalers, invited to found the port of Milford Haven, are preceded by a beached whale. An omen for the local people, but what is its meaning? The line between superstition and faith blurs, the local people become fearful and led by their increasingly insane preacher fashion an hysterical Jonah-like fate for the incomers.

Rachael Clyne's You'll Never Be Anyone Else presents a direct and assured voice, demanding that we think carefully about what it takes to reconcile being different. She advises the reader to 'Stop drinking the poison / labelled "Hate me." / It's that simple. I didn't say easy.' Clyne also has an alter-ego "Girl Golem" reminiscent of a superhero but based on the mythical man made from clay and spells to protect Jewish people from persecution. Through this empowering persona, Clyne opens up an exploration of Jewish and lesbian identity. Surveying attitudes in the present day and in the past, these poems explore migrant heritage, sexual identity, domestic violence and ageing. The stories of this collection are often poignant, like the retired tailor in 'Mr Shopping Trolley', who takes to shearing newspapers, so that his scissor fingers remain busy. Or in 'Leaving Odesa', the speaker revisits the prison where - under Tsarist law - her grandmother (even as an infant) had to serve out the remainder of her father's sentence after he died. Clyne's imagery is razor sharp in its precision, as she deftly weaves different poetic forms and wildly versatile subject matter, even interspersing Yiddish phrases, as part of her own unique poetic idiolect. Take the hilarious poem, 'Jew-a-lingo (Code-switching for Jews 1970 edition)' which emphasizes Jewish humour as a staple survival strategy. You'll Never Be Anyone Else offers a unique story of survival and empowerment told in spite of experiences of violence and prejudice - this from a poet who has spent a lifetime learning self-acceptance and as a psychotherapist helping others to do similar. Treating even dark subjects with playful wit and colourful imagery, Clyne is a distinctive new voice with a powerful message about self-acceptance.

In these lyric essays, prize-winning poet Kim Moore negotiates being a woman poet and public performer. Encouraged by the #Metoo movement and drawing on her personal experiences, she challenges objectification and lazy conventional assumptions, and advises on surviving twitter storms and bringing about change. An important book whose time has come.

The title of this Mslexia Prize-winning Pamphlet for 2022 is Angola, America, the name of a prison in Louisiana in the southern United Sates. In these strikingly original, thoroughly contemporary, and deeply moving poems by poet Sammy Weater, we are immersed in the world the inmates must endure. From the first poem, when we witness a home-made tattoo and understand that this scarring and incision is a "map in the connective tissue of pain and loss", we are drawn into this world in a way that is carefully observed and beautifully empathetic. What is particularly convincing about these poems is the moral fervor that accompanies an ear that delights in the complexities of language and the music of syntax. It is an emphatic voice, observant to the smallest details and yet steps back from an intrusive 'authorial' presence to let these prisoners and landscapes breathe and be. We observe with the author the society that builds these institutions in which the protagonists survive under extraordinary pressures. We come to acknowledge that we are responsible for the contemporary establishment and continuance of these places. The 'Prison Industrial Complex' is excoriated through artful conceits. There are poems about handcuffs, the Louisiana State Flag, the electric chair. Throughout, the fate of the body is aligned with the fate of the landscape, we see Louisiana's famously endangered coastline, prone to hurricanes and oil-spills. As many of the prisoners are African American, there are some poems that pull historical and cultural references to bear upon themes of whiteness and blackness. Formally, the work is adept, with many 14-line proto-sonnets and then longer-lined free verse poems that are nevertheless, wonderfully compact. it conveys anger without hysteria, empathy without condescension, and pulls us through its compelling narratives with style and flair.

Nerys Williams' new collection questions what makes a Republic? Machinations of power? The speeches of politicians? The broad sweep of official histories? This sequence of 80 prose-poems, each constructed in 20 sentences, has arisen from the author's need to tell a more intimate history, to commit an untold oral history to paper. Williams returns to the meaning of "republic" in its Latin origins which meant "wealth of the people". The poems tell the story of a young Welsh woman growing up and coming of age in the 1980s and 90s, a time that culminated with new devolutionary powers in Wales. The explosion of the arts and culture looms large, through bands from New Order to my bloody valentine, but it is explored specifically through Cwl Cymru', and the power of Welsh-language bands like Datblygu. This story is also about class, as we explore a family history of hard work in jobs from retail to caregiving. The poems introduce us to family influences, from a father who urges the narrator as a child to 'own the stage' in an early school Eisteddfod, to a grandmother who worked long hours in her rural shop, and a mother who was the local midwife. There are stories told, overheard, handed down, sometimes translated from Welsh. Together, they create an expansive portrait of the era, including the challenges for women, Welsh-speakers, and other marginalized groups. Ferocious remarks about the Welsh in the popular media are dissected with satirical humour and appalled fascination, while other poems describe being a token woman and political outsider on a TV current affairs show panel, tolerated but ostracized. From her more recent home, the republic of Ireland, Williams poses the possibilities of a nation looking at itself and its history from afar. Wales has not been allowed to be a republic, but is subject to a state that has military claims on its landscape and a second home explosion which has a severe impact on its communities. There is rebellion to be found in the older meaning of "republic": since the wealth of the people is a wealth of sounded stories, culture, art, and history.

On receiving news of a beloved teacher's death, a man struggles with the loss of a relationship sustained by deep admiration and love. Memories of their shared trajectory are separated in three orbits where the man's past, present, and future are all punctuated by the same intense grief. In Orbit is a sustained narrative of loss and longing.

Peter Finch and John Briggs build on the success of their book Walking Cardiff and venture outside the capital and into the very different world of the Valleys. Over the past two centuries the Valleys have gone from idyllic rural landscape to the engine room of the British Empire to post industrial decline. As centres of coal mining and iron and steel-making, the Valleys saw over a hundred thousand people crammed between their steep sides. Their industry produced not only fuel and products exported around the world, but also archetypal working class communities, with their chapels, union militancy, self-funded workersâEUR(TM) institutes, and seemingly unbreakable identities. Fuelled by massive immigration, they were also a social experiment in assimilation and radical politics. Now the pits and foundries have become heritage sites, the chapels are retail centres or housing, and Finch and Briggs explore how the Valleys have changed, and what they have become. Their forward-looking book is also one of record, as the towns and villages evolve into the twenty-first centuries. This is their take on Abercynon, Aberdare, Aberfan, Bargoed, Caerphilly, Gelli, Gelligaer, Merthyr Tydfil, Pontypridd, Porth, Rhymney, Taffs Well, Tonypandy, Treherbert and Ystrad Mynach. The informative texts can be used as both a route finder and a literary entertainment in themselves. Armchair walkers will find the book as interesting and as useful as those actually pull on their boots. And natives and visitors alike will find a new discovery around every corner. Each walk is illustrated with a map and photographs by John Briggs.

The stories in Scar Tissue appear under the enigmatic headings of Space, Home, Away, Nowhere, Somewhere. Through a wide variety of characters and situations, Clare MorganâEUR(TM)s subjects include sex, death, relationships, the individual, the impossibility of relationships, parents and children, the passing on (or not) of things between generations. Many are informed by a sense of loss. The stories also explore contemporary themes of displacement, belonging, and identity, while Nietzsche and his philosophies also appear. The stories, and the structure of the collection, relates âEUR¿placeâEUR(TM) (or estrangement) to a kind of existential discomfort. This resonates in the locations of the stories. The Space, Home and Somewhere sections are all set in Wales/the Marches; the Away and Nowhere sections are set in India, Paris, New England, Scandinavia, Spain and a transatlantic flight.âEUR¯Additionally, many of the stories are set in the uncertain, fluctuating realm where individual consciousness meets the hard materials of the world.âEUR¯The collection ends with a piece of autobiographical writing about the haunting of MorganâEUR(TM)s Welsh home, an ancient mill, which in turn provokes the reader to re-address the eleven stories which precede it. Scar Tissue is a fascinating collection of well-crafted and engaging short stories by a writer who knows exactly what she is about. Readers will be reminded of the fiction of authors like Sally Rooney and Maggie OâEUR(TM)Farrell.

In the third Inspector Chard mystery, Chard is arrested for a horrific double murder. Faced with the prospect of execution, his fight to prove his innocence is a page-turning journey through corruption and foul play in Victorian Shrewsbury. The tension rises as Chard must find a missing woman and the stolen Sabrina's Teardrop to be free.

Darkly suggestive of animal dens, shelter and secretive havens, Lairs is inspired by mathematics, the poem becoming a kind of nest, a beautiful accumulation of dense detail. The poems are complex, introspective, reminiscent of fervid lockdowns as well as offering a subtle strand on post-Brexit life, a mocking of establishment conservatism.

Escape Room is the startling debut collection from Bryony Littlefair, following her award-winning pamphlet Giraffe. Littlefair combines clear-eyed observation with wry, surreal humour. Everyday life, work, therapy, graduation and lapsed Christianity are transformed into the comedic and absurd, with warmth, humanity and a deadpan delivery.

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.

Sanctuary is - urgent. The pandemic has made people crave it; political crises are denying it to millions; the earth is no longer our haven. Even our minds & bodies are not refuges we can rely on. Angela Graham & 5 other poets from Wales & Northern Ireland explore Sanctuary from the inside, asking how we can save the earth, ourselves and others?

The power of song, to sustain the human spirit, resonates through As if to Sing. A trapped caver crawls back through songs to the sea; Welsh soldiers pack their hearts into a song on the eve of battle, âEUR¿for safe-keepingâEUR(TM); a child crossing a bridge sings âEUR¿a song with no beginning or endâEUR(TM).... Blurring past and present, a âEUR¿torchsongâEUR(TM) of music and light intensifies in âEUR¿The Boys in the BranchesâEUR(TM), a moving sequence to the poetâEUR(TM)s sons where three boys scale a tree to manhood, to âEURœcarve their names on the late sunâEUR?. The collectionâEUR(TM)s closing cadence includes the long poem âEUR¿The Key to PenllainâEUR(TM). Set on the Ceredigion coastline in the summer of 1969, its apocalyptic dream stages a search for a key which could save the planet. This tenth collection is rich in the musical lyricism admired by readers and fellow poets, As if to Sing is an essential addition to this poetâEUR(TM)s compelling body of work. Henry has honed his technique still further; he uses traditional and local elements which hymn Wales and gives them to the reader freshly seen.

Fargo Hawkins is 20, he's Harry Swaine's gardener. One day, after he sees a fight between Harry and his wife Anne, Fargo steals a car and he, Anne and a dog called Radar go on the run. They are chased across England by Harry, a firm of detectives and their emotions. Eventually, at a caravan site in Wales, the climax between Fargo and Harry unfolds.

New and Selected Poems is a landmark volume which collects key poems from the career of Hilary Llewellyn-Williams, one of the outstanding poets of her generation in Wales. In addition to the classic sequences 'The Tree Calendar' and 'Book of Shadows', the book also includes new work, such as a cycle of poems devoted to the Benedictine hours.

In 1994 two girls are pen-pals. Then Victoria's letters from Rwanda stop; in Paris Iris can only wonder why. Twenty years later journalist Iris pitches a story to her editor: haunted, to look for Victoria. As she researches, questions about Rwanda & about her father emerge & she is forced to revisit her childhood memories. Can she find Victoria?

Cardiff-lover Peter Finch spent the first lockdown walking the edge of the city in which he was confined by the restrictions. He thought he knew Cardiff, but it was a revelation. Here are new discoveries about the capital's places and history, drawn from Finch's walks, knowledge and his personal history, and an exploration of the nature of borders.