163 Days Hannah Hodgson
Hannah Hodgon is an award-winning poet and a palliative care patient. In her compelling debut collection 163 Days, she uses a panoply of medical, legal, and personal vocabularies to explore what illness, death and dying does to a person as both patient and witness.
In ‘Aftercare’, Hannah navigates the worlds of both nightclubs and hospice care as she embarks on a new version of her life as a disabled adult. 163 Days is an important collection, in which Hodgson’s true voice takes poetry into difficult places.
Same Difference Ben Wilkinson
This ambitious new collection from poet and critic Ben Wilkinson finds its author experimenting with poetic voice and the dramatic monologue. Carefully crafted yet charged with contemporary language, the book brims with everyone from cage fighters to boy-racers, cancer patients to whales in captivity.
While empathetic and often moving, Same Difference is a collection that seeks to undermine the confessional mode, keeping the reader on their toes and asking just who is doing the talking. It is also formally elegant, often using traditional rhyme and metre to weave its arguments.
As If To Sing Paul Henry
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, ‘for safe-keeping’; a child crossing a bridge sings ‘a song with no beginning or end’….
Blurring past and present, a ‘torchsong’ of music and light intensifies in The Boys in the Branches, a moving sequence to the poet’s sons where three boys scale a tree to manhood, to ‘carve their names on the late sun’. The collection’s closing cadence includes the long poem The Key to Penllain. Set in the summer of 1969, its apocalyptic dream stages a search for a key which could save the planet. Rich in the musical lyricism admired by readers and fellow poets, As if to Sing is an essential addition to this poet’s compelling body of work.
Homelands Eric Ngalle Charles
In Homelands, his debut collection, Eric Ngalle Charles draws on his early life raised by the matriarchs of Cameroon, being sent to Moscow by human traffickers, and finding a new home in Wales. Rich in tone, subject and emotion, Charles’ poetry moves between the present and the past, between Africa and Europe, and between despair and hope. It discovers that historical injustices now play out in new forms, and that family tensions are as strong as the love within a family. Despite the difficulties Charles has faced, Homelands contains poems of fondness, warmth and humour and, as he returns to Cameroon to confront old ghosts, forgiveness.
Sanctuary: There Must Be Somewhere Angela Graham
Sanctuary is – urgent. The pandemic has made people crave it; political crises are denying it to millions; the earth is no longer our haven. This theme has enormous traction at a time of existential fear − especially among the young − that nowhere is safe. Even our minds and our bodies are not refuges we can rely on. Truth itself is on shaky ground.
Sanctuary: There Must Be Somewhere addresses these critical situations from the inside. How we can save the earth, ourselves and others? How valid is the concept of a ‘holy’ place these days? Are any values still sacrosanct? We all deserve peace and security but can these be achieved without exploitation?
Collected Poems Peter Finch
The two volumes of Peter Finch’s Collected Poems chart the course of a remarkable writing career. After reading Allen Ginsberg’s Howl as a young man Finch was inspired to become a poet, founded Second Aeon magazine and publishing house, and become a poetry entrepreneur, bringing to all these things an unquenchable vitality which set him apart in contemporary poetry.
Volume One makes available poems from long lost chapbooks, broadsheets and limited editions, as well as more conventionally published work. Here are concrete poems, sound poems, typographical poems, visual poems, poems in cartoon form or as crumpled photocopies. Whatever their form, Finch’s poems are always vivid and alive, pulsing with inventive energy. As he says himself, this is work which pushes the idea on until it breaks, flowers, or dissolves. It means that Finch’s writing can never be taken for granted.
Volume Two includes poems from the second half of Finch’s career, in which his poems also appeared in his prose books, and in the public realm on sculptures, walls and buildings particularly in his native Cardiff. Yet still the poems continued to ‘operate at the far edges of what poetry is understood to be’. Although the poetry landscape of Britain has changed since Finch’s first published poem in 1968, his desire to experiment, to question what constitutes a poem, and to challenge orthodoxy has remained both undiminished and relevant.
bodies and other haunted houses SL Grange – Winner of the Poetry Wales Pamphlet Competition
Speaking from and for LGBTQIA+ communities, SL Grange gives a voice to lost transcestors (Where Are We Going, Mary Frith), celebrates acts of resistance (Resharpen Your Weapons, She Protests, Service), sings a gender-fluid love song (Sun-return), and hosts a tender-angry conversation with the ghosts of the personal and political histories that inhabit us. In true haunted house tradition, the non-human and the supernatural are also given rooms of their own; personal demons are summoned (White Poem, This Shit Is Killing You), we are entangled with our wilder sides (Under, Whales at Night). Witchcraft, seance and prophecy are invoked (Malkin Tower, Ritual For, The Glory, This Morning I) and brought up against sharp slices of reality (Cold Ham, Safe Words).
SL Grange is a queer writer, theatre-maker and multi-disciplinary artist. Their recent work includes A Note to Mary Frith, commissioned by Shakespeare’s Globe for the Notes to Forgotten She-Wolvesseries; and of his family commissioned by Improbable for Fly the Flag 2020; and Wou D’Ulzecht, an audio-walk project with composer Catherine Kontz commissioned for European Capital of Culture 2022. They are currently engaged in a PhD exploring more ethical ways that we might ‘do’ Queer history, and in turn how that history might do us, which involves a conversation across 400 years with cross-dressing performer and trickster Mary Frith.
The Little Hours: New and Selected Poems Hilary Llewellyn-Williams
Hilary Llewellyn-Williams is one of the most renowned poets of her generation in Wales. The Little Hours: New and Selected Poems features poems from her earliest as well as her latest work.
Fully immersed in the natural world, the ‘Tree Calendar’ poems are composed in a richly pagan context: cycles of nature as reflected in the seasons which “reaffirm a mystical link between trees and language”. ‘Book of Shadows’, Llewellyn-Williams’ sequence on Renaissance monk/magician Giordano Bruno, is similarly invested in the mystical and in history, and in the heretical, the subverting or challenging of societal norms.
Angola America Sammy Weaver – Winner of the Mslexia Poetry Pamphlet Competiton
Angola, America, winner of the Mslexia Poetry Pamphlet Prize 2021, takes its name from a prison in Louisiana in the southern United Sates. In these strikingly original, thoroughly contemporary, and deeply moving poems by poet Sammy Weaver, 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.
Flamingo Kathryn Bevis
Kathryn Bevis’s Flamingo introduces us to a troupe of wild, unique, and captivating poems. Life and our own embodiment are brought sharply into focus as we encounter a variety of subjects including work, survival, love, and mortality. Formally inventive, these hopeful and sometimes surreal poems are not afraid to confront complex or difficult emotions. Cancer is posed as a ring-tailed lemur, capering through the sufferer’s body, and the title poem imagines death as a flamboyant transformation where the speaker shapeshifts into the afterlife. Each poem is a discovery and a joy: Flamingo is a debut of startling originality.
Goliat Rhiannon Hooson
Goliat is the long-awaited follow-up to Hooson’s debut collection The Other City. The title poem takes us to the Barents Sea and the dark waters of a Russian oil field named Goliat – a whale, a giant, a monster – to the ‘singular infinities of the wintering sea’, where something is starting to sing.
Lairs Judy Brown
Lairs brings together something primal and secret – the lair as haven for a wild or feral animal – with the poem framed as a mathematical equation. In these terms, the ‘lair’ is a kind of nest, a beautiful accumulation of dense detail.
The tension between order and disorder in these poems is informed by mathematics after Judy Brown’s residency at Exeter University’s Institute of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence. There she was inspired by specialists in uncertainty quantification, a branch of mathematics that seeks to estimate the uncertainty on model predictions.
Escape Room Bryony Littlefair
Escape Room is the long-awaited debut collection of poems from Bryony Littlefair, following her Mslexia prize winning pamphlet Giraffe.
This is a collection exploring the possibilities of freedom, goodness, meaning and connection under late capitalism. Can we escape the imperatives of money, gender and human fallibility to freely construct our own identities – should we even try?
At the heart of Escape Room is the question of how to find light within the pain of anxiety and loss, the consolatory powers of friendship and creativity and the reimagining of life’s darkness as ‘an emerald, exciting kind of dark, a gaseous dark, dark / with a lot of light inside it.’
Republic Nerys Williams
What constitutes a republic? Not Wales, a nation subject to military claims on its landscape and a second home explosion which has hollowed out its communities. The achievement of a republic can be a subversive activity, as was the writing of Republic.
Republic is about class, culture and community in west Wales. It recounts the story of a young woman growing up listening to the post-punk music of the 1980s and indie labels of the 1990s. These decades culminated in the explosion of “Cŵl Cymru” and new devolutionary powers in Wales.
In Orbit Glyn Edwards
On receiving news of a beloved teacher’s death, a man struggles with the loss of a relationship sustained by deep admiration and unrequited love. Memories of their shared journey are separated in three orbits where the man’s past, present, and future are punctuated by intense grief.
In Orbit uses a variety of innovative forms to explore loss, from traditional stanzas to prose poems to shaped poems in the form of birds, circuits, or hands. The narrative shifts in time, moving from his teen years to the present day when he himself has become a teacher, working alongside the man he mourns.
The book not only grieves the loss of the teacher, but also toxic standards for boys and men. Beyond human connection, sustenance is found in the moon, the stars, the sky, and nature. The discovery of a badger’s track or the treasure of a bird egg reminds us how small our trajectories are in the context of the more-than-human: an answer perhaps to the grieving process. In Orbit is a deeply moving account of love, longing, and loss.