Böcker utgivna av Poetry Wales Press

From disastrous first gigs, to major record deals, from North Wales to the smoky clubs of Soho, Euron GriffithâEUR(TM)s memoir is a roller-coaster ride wrapped in six t-shirts.

Elizabeth Parker's second collection, Cormorant, explores the bird to tell stories about human and natural worlds, their losses and felicities. As Parker regards the miracle of the cormorant, she reminds us of the importance of wonder, offering an uplifting antidote to difficult times.

Taz Rahman's East of the Sun, West of the Moon is named after the 1935 jazz standard, and like any great jazz tune - many of which inspire these poems - this collection is full of improvisation and innovation with language, and it demands the quality of listening carefully, of paying attention to the world. Threaded with subtlety through the collection is a sense of grief, but these poems remind us of what can be created from trauma, and how the poet can use difficult experiences to contemplate larger themes like intimacy, nature, spirituality, and language as a complex structure in which we live. Many of these poems are from the perspective of a flaneur, someone who wanders through the city - in this case Cardiff - registering impressions about the people and things observed. This includes a deep fascination for nature as encountered in city parks and on the banks of the rivers Taff and Ely as they wind their way through the metropolis. Often this close attention reveals the awe-inspiring beauty of nature, even in the city: "wild petunia spread wings / unburden / become butterflies / trample ripples on Ely". In finding an aspect of the city beyond bricks and concrete, might there be spiritual fulfilment to be found even in this most urban landscape? Rahman's vision of the city dweller is inflected too by his Bangladeshi heritage, which appears in explorations of immigrant identity and racism, in poems like 'Sanctuary' from the viewpoint of an immigrant delivery rider, or 'Chocolate' about unreported attacks on people of the global majority. Immigrant family history is threaded through many of these poems, offering an important perspective on life in contemporary Wales. For example, in 'Amygdala' commemorating the Welsh moral philosopher, Richard Price, Rahman applies Price's ideas about the rights of human beings to the 1859 Nil Bidroho (Indigo Revolt) in Bengal when rice farmers refused to cultivate indigo instead of food crops and defied the East India Company rulers. Alongside this and sustained attention to intimacy with the environment even in urban spaces, there is a series of love poems inspired by jazz standards and using description of nature to express lush and sensuous feeling: "I think / your top lip is // a delirious roller / passing up a storm, incubating / needs, a primer // on primal". Like the heron that swoops over the famous 'Animal Wall', the narrators of these poems look down over the city's beauty, but also focus in on micro perspectives, animating Cardiff and setting it to life.

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.

Rooted in everyday communities, the voice of Say It With Me is wry, candid and knowing, offering poems that playfully record the foibles of domestic life. There are curious stories: a parrot flies away but always returns to its master, a school bully becomes their victim's acupuncture patient in adulthood, and a donor finds new kinship with the woman who receives his cells. All these stories are gems full of curious twists and turns. Often the poems represent specific places and people, sometimes nostalgically so, like memories of family beach trips with loved ones now deceased. Others are flights of fancy: imagining a park of one's dreams, an ode to the small pleasures of life, or inventing a new history where a father didn't die young. Most significant however are the poignant and remarkable stories of family life. There are happy portraits as well as thoughtful poems concerning divorce and parenthood, also the body in triumph and decline. Though speakers take up a watchful distance from events, they are also fierce and unafraid to intervene. A middle-aged woman on the beach wades into the sea to chastise some lads playing with an inflatable sex doll. "Say it with me" a line taken from the poem 'Canada' is a phrase that often precedes a rallying cry, or a brave but controversial factual statement. The tales in this collection feel true and honest and its title is a call to unite. This is a collection about the communities in which we live and the interconnectedness of human beings. The likeable speaker of these poems surveys it all with the dry humour and wisdom of an older woman, posing scenarios that we can all recognize as authentic. Ultimately, Vanessa Lampert uses deep and rich storytelling to lay bare truths that are at once funny, moving, and illuminating.

Jon Woolcott is an entertaining and informative guide to Dorset, county of spectacular coast and countryside, historic towns, eco-foodie innovation, Hardy and Fowles. The county of subversion, rebellion and revolt, wealth and poverty, and rich folklore. Its history stretches from the origins of the Cerne Abbas Giant to cutting edge ecology today.

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.