 In Issue 10's podcast, our guest Mari Ellis Dunning recommended a poetry anthology that reminds how the right words can influence the universe, Rhys pointed our listeners towards a collection that traces the rites and rituals of passage across three generations, Richard recommended some entertaining and spirited essays that vary in form and style, and Adam took the opportunity to ask Rhys a few questions about his debut poetry collection 'That Lone Ship'. Species of Spaces and Other Pieces – Georges Perec Galilée, 1974 Georges Perec was only forty-six when he died in 1982. Despite a tragic childhood, during which his mother was deported to Auschwitz, Perec produced some of the most entertaining and spirited essays of the age. His literary output was deliberately varied in form and style, and Species of Spaces and Other Pieces is a generous selection of his non-fiction work. In this collection of essays, Perec contemplates the many ways in which we occupy the space around us, and depicts the commonplace items with which we are familiar in a startling, engrossing way. He recounts his psychoanalysis while remaining reticent about his feelings, and depicts the Paris of his childhood without a trace of sentimentality. Species of Spaces and Other Pieces demonstrates Perec’s characteristic lightness of touch, wry humor, and accessibility. Species of Spaces and Other Pieces is available to buy from penguin.co.uk Spells: 21st-Century Occult Poetry Ignota Books, 2018 Spells, the first poetry anthology from independent publisher Ignota Books, brings together 36 contemporary voices exploring the territory where justice, selfhood and the imagination meet the transformative power of the occult. Reflecting recent struggles around #MeToo and the growing interest in witchcraft and astrology, these poems unmake the world around them so that it might be remade anew. Edited by Sarah Shin and Rebecca Tamás, with an introduction by So Mayer, the contributors to Spells include Emily Berry, Kayo Chingonyi and past Crunch guest Nia Davies. Spells takes us into a place where the right words can influence the universe. Spells: 21st-Century Occult Poetry is available to buy from ignota.org All My Mad Mothers – Jacqueline Saphra Nine Arches Press, 2017 All My Mad Mothers explores love, sex and family relationships in vivacious, lush poems that span the decades and generations. At the heart of this collection of poems is the portrait of a mother as multitudes – as a magician with a bathroom of beauty tricks, as necromancer, as glamorous fire-starter, trapped in ever-decreasing circles and, above all else, almost impossible to grasp. These astute poems step assuredly from childhood’s first exposures to the scratched records and unsuitable lovers of young womanhood, the slammed doors of daughters and sons, the tears and salted soups of friendships, and the charms of late love. All the time, incandescent and luminous as an everlasting lightbulb, at the heart of each of Saphra’s poems is a delicate filament kicking out a heavy-duty wattage. All My Mad Mothers is available to buy from ninearchespress.com That Lone Ship – Rhys Owain Williams Parthian Books, 2018 That Lone Ship is the debut collection from The Crunch’s own Rhys Owain Williams. It was launched by Parthian Books in October 2018 alongside Salacia: the debut collection from our Issue 10 guest Mari Ellis Dunning. During the ‘What We’re Reading’ segment of Issue 10’s podcast, Adam took the opportunity to ask Rhys and Mari how their books had been received, and how it felt now that they were out in the world. Mari and Rhys also gave us an insight into what it’s like to launch a collection alongside other poets. That Lone Ship and Salacia are available to buy individually or as part of a bundle from parthianbooks.com To hear what we said about these books in the 'What We're Reading' segment of the Issue 10 podcast, go here: crunchpoetry.com/issue-10.html
0 Comments
 In Issue 9's podcast, Adam, Rhys and our guest Emily Blewitt coincidentally all chose poetry pamphlets to recommend to our listeners, proving that the art form is still going strong almost a decade after Jackie Kay celebrated its 'return'. Teaching a Bird to Sing – Tracey Rhys Green Bottle Press, 2016 Tracey Rhys’s Teaching a Bird to Sing was published by Green Bottle Press in 2016, and was featured in The TLS in its end-of-year round-up of the Michael Marks Awards for Poetry Pamphlets. Touching yet unsentimental, Teaching a Bird to Sing explores Rhys’s son’s diagnosis of autism, what it means to her and the frustrations, worries and hopes it brings. Written from the perspective of both mother and child, the poems in this pamphlet are by turns tender and outraged. Some were featured in the Winterlight Theatre stage show Touch Blue Touch Yellow, providing a sobering insight into the lives of autistic people and those who love them. Teaching a Bird to Sing is available to buy from greenbottlepress.com The Wild Gods – Malene Engelund Valley Press, 2016 Malene Engelund grew up in Aalborg, a city grown from a former Viking settlement in northern Denmark. She moved to England in 2002 and currently lives in Greenwich. The eighteen poems that comprise her debut pamphlet, The Wild Gods, reveal a distinctly Nordic imagination, punctured with rich colour, shadows and light. Here are letters, portraits and prayers, composed with an almost painterly precision. Searching and clear-eyed, each poem is a compact saga that revives folklore and extends it into the present. Engelund’s wild gods take their places between borders: of home and belonging, darkness and dawn, the silenced and the lost. The Wild Gods is available to buy from valleypressuk.com Giraffe – Bryony Littlefair Seren, 2017 Giraffe is a beguiling, beautiful and entertaining debut pamphlet of poems by Bryony Littlefair. Her poetry displays novelistic qualities: clarity of language and the use of realism, a feeling for plot and incident, an eye and ear for character. Also noted are the subtle ways that Littlefair indicates character and relationships. There is a good deal of wit on display in Giraffe, but also a wonderful humanity. Poems need head, heart, and soul but this particular Mslexia Poetry Prize-winning pamphlet has an extra ingredient: a feminist kick. Littlefair is acutely aware of women’s lives and gives us mothers, daughters, grandmothers, friends and colleagues whose adventures or misadventures we become increasingly eager to follow. Giraffe is available to buy from serenbooks.com To hear what we said about these books in the 'What We're Reading' segment of the Issue 9 podcast, go here: crunchpoetry.com/issue-9.html
 In Issue 8's podcast, Rhys recommended a debut collection that interrogates the very idea of masculinity, Adam chose to highlight a new novel by a Faber poet, Richard suggested a modern morality cycle with an everyman figure at its centre, and our guest clare e. potter praised an artful and expansive collection from a newly-revived author. physical – Andrew McMillan Jonathan Cape, 2015 Winner of the 2015 Guardian First Book Award, Andrew McMillan’s debut poetry collection physical confronts what it is to be a man, and interrogates the very idea of masculinity. Raw and urgent, these poems are hymns to the male body – to male friendship and male love – muscular, sometimes shocking, but always deeply moving. McMillan is an elegant stylist and an unfashionably honest poet. Dispensing with conventional punctuation, he is attentive and alert to the quality of breathing, giving his poems an extraordinary sense of being vividly poised and present – drawing lines that are deft, lyrical and perfectly pitched from a world of urban dereliction. physical is available to buy from penguin.co.uk The Adulterants – Joe Dunthorne Hamish Hamilton, 2018 Joe Dunthorne’s The Adulterants is an uproarious tale of competitively sensitive men and catastrophic open marriages, riots on the streets of London and Internet righteousness, and one man's valiant quest to come of age in his thirties. Fresh, sharp and wickedly funny, The Adulterants is Dunthorne's third novel, following Submarine (2008) and Wild Abandon (2011). His first full-length poetry collection will be published by Faber and Faber in 2019. The Adulterants is available to buy from penguin.co.uk Pallbearers Envying the One Who Rides – Stephen Dobyns Penguin, 1999 A modern morality cycle with an everyman figure named Heart at its centre, Pallbearers Envying the One Who Rides takes the form of sixty-one episodic poems. Throughout the collection, Heart – who “comes to resemble Charlie Brown as seen by Charles Bukowski” – is foiled repeatedly in his quest for happiness. Dobyns’ poetry employs extended tropes, using the ridiculous and the absurd as vehicles to introduce more profound meditations on life, love, and art. Originally published by Penguin in 1999, Pallbearers Envying the One Who Rides is Dobyn’s tenth collection of poems. A later edition was published by Bloodaxe Books. Pallbearers Envying the One Who Rides is now out of print, but you can still pick up a second-hand copy at worldofbooks.com Sax Burglar Blues – Robert Walton Seren Books, 2017 The poems in Robert Walton’s Sax Burglar Blues are clever and keenly observed, ranging from vivid memories of youth to pointed satire. In the title poem, the pleasing complexity of jazz mirrors the poet’s vocation to embody, echo and reverberate the complexities of lived experience. As befits a poet born and based on the Severn Estuary, Walton’s land and townscapes are often damp, misty, watery, and recorded with many subtle variations of blue. There are also pleasingly unlikely totem animals, a nod to the mythical man-eating crocodile that infests Bristol Docks, and the surreal lampoon of a canary’s presidential candidacy. Artful and expansive, this is a stunning collection from a newly-revived author. Sax Burglar Blues is available to buy from serenbooks.com To hear what we said about these books in the 'What We're Reading' segment of the Issue 8 podcast, go here: crunchpoetry.com/issue-8.html
In Issue #7's podcast, our guest Rhys Milsom pointed listeners towards a collection that is full of sentiment without being sentimental, Richard recommended a fascinating glimpse into the mind of a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Adam endorsed a stunning debut collection from a former Crunch guest, and Rhys suggested picking up a mini coffee-table book about carving site-specific poems onto stone.  A Boat Called Annalise – Lynne Hjelmgaard Seren Books, 2016 Lynne Hjelmgaard’s third collection A Boat Called Annalise evokes life on a sailboat, recalling a journey the poet took on a sailboat to the Caribbean and back to Europe with her husband. The couple’s relationship is poised on tensions, beautifully observed, as masculine/feminine, the need to assert and/or withdraw in the face of the turbulent seascape. Our guest Rhys Milsom reviewed A Boat Called Annalise for Wales Arts Review in 2016. You can read Rhys's review here: walesartsreview.org/a-boat-called-annalise-by-lynne-hjelmgaard A Boat Called Annalise is available to buy from serenbooks.com  The Monster Loves His Labyrinth – Charles Simic Ausable Press, 2008 The Monster Loves His Labyrinth offers a fascinating glimpse into the mind of poet Charles Simic. Passionate, witty, tender and curious, these notebook entries range from casual jottings to profound observations. Their subject is the vast array of ways in which we human beings try to make sense of our world. Born in Yugoslavia in 1938, Charles Simic won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1990. In 2007, he was appointed US Poet Laureate and received the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets. The Monster Loves His Labyrinth is available to buy from coppercanyonpress.org  The Days After – Rebecca Parfitt Listen Softly London, 2017 The Days After is the stunning debut collection from our Issue #5 guest Rebecca Parfitt. A moving, close-to-the-bone account of heartbreak, the poems record the trajectory of a relationship – from passionate infatuation, through tortuous unravelling and, finally, the promise of what will be lived afterwards. The collection was recently selected as one of The Cardiff Review's books of 2017: "...both delicate and powerful....Parfitt has a precise, sometimes devastatingly brittle, quality to her writing." The Days After is available to buy from listensoftlylondon.com Watch Rebecca reading some of the poems from The Days After here: crunchpoetry.com/rebecca-parfitt.html  Stanza Stones – Simon Armitage, Pip Hall and Tom Lonsdale Enitharmon Press, 2013 In 2012, Simon Armitage was commissioned by the Ilkley Literature Festival to write six site-specific poems. Stanza Stones presents a record of the project to carve these poems onto stone along a new trail in England’s Pennine region. With the help of local expert Tom Lonsdale and letter-carver Pip Hall, Armitage found extraordinary, secluded sites for his words to be carved into stone. Stanza Stones brings together Armitage's six poems and the accounts of Hall and Lonsdale, publishing them alongside colour photographs of the project in progress and the stones in their completed state. Stanza Stones is available to buy from enitharmon.co.uk To hear what we said about these books in the 'What We're Reading' segment of the Issue #7 podcast, go here: crunchpoetry.com/issue-7.html
 We're fiercely proud to be based in our hometown Swansea. Seven of the poets we've featured so far are Swansea residents, and the city and its environs provide the backdrop to many of our videos. Swansea is already a city of culture – the Swansea 2021 team have proved that with their inspirational #SwanseaIsCulture hashtag –but it would be so good for the city and its residents to take the official UK City of Culture title for 2021. Prouder cities rise through the haze of time, The Crunch fully supports Swansea's bid to become UK City of Culture 2021. Good luck to everyone involved today, let's hope the judges agree that #SwanseaIsCulture!
 We're now on Goodreads, a place for readers to share and discuss books with other readers.
Join the discussion at goodreads.com/group/213818-the-crunch We're still recovering from The Swansea Fringe – what an incredible weekend! Thank you to everyone who came to our Crunch Omnibus event on Friday evening, and to our four readers Christopher Cornwell, Alan Kellermann, D. E. Oprava and Rebecca Parfitt. If the recording gods have been kind to us, then a special Fringe edition of The Crunch will be with you very soon!
 We're delighted to be involved in the return of The Swansea Fringe at the end of this month, and the line-up for our event has now been confirmed! We're getting the band back together, inviting three of our previous guests to return for a special live omnibus edition.
Head down to The Grand Hotel on Friday 29th September to catch up with Alan Kellermann (Issue #3), Rebecca Parfitt (Issue #5) and Christopher Cornwell (Issue #6), and also hear the poetry of forthcoming Crunch feature D. E. Oprava. For more information about the event, head over to the Facebook event page. This is a ticketed event as part of The Swansea Fringe. If you don't have a festival wristband, you can pay £5 on the door. Find out more about day/weekend tickets here: www.tinyurl.com/FringeSwansea We will hopefully see you on the 29th! In Issue #6's podcast, our guest Christopher Cornwell recommended a collection that celebrates and laments a lost Parisian river, Rhys pointed our listeners towards an anthology of emerging Welsh writers, Adam revisited a first collection written in Swansea dialect and Richard recommended a publication that represents a unique and inclusive poetry of consciousness.  Teint – Zoë Skoulding Hafan Books, 2016 Teint (or Teint: For the Bievre / Pour la Bievre) is the latest publication in the Boiled String series of poetry chapbooks from Hafan Books. Zoë Skoulding's poems in this collection celebrate and mourn the 'lost' Parisian river La Bièvre – a culverted tributary of the Seine. A bilingual publication, Teint includes translations into French from the Parisian poet Jean Portante, whose own work was translated into English by Skoulding and published in In Reality (Seren, 2013). Teint is available to buy from lulu.com/hafan  Cheval 9: The Terry Hetherington Award Anthology 2016 Parthian Books, 2016 The ninth edition of the Cheval anthology contains a selection of the best poetry and prose submitted to last year's Terry Hetherington Award. The award has become known as one of the most significant awards for young writers in Wales, and counts poets Jonathan Edwards, Natalie Ann Holborow and Jemma L. King amongst its previous winners. In addition to publishing the year’s best submissions, the anthology also collects new work by previous winners and commended entrants. Cheval 9 is available to buy from parthianbooks.com  Tidy Boy – David Hughes Swansea Poetry Workshop, 1999 A first collection from David Hughes, Tidy Boy reflects upon people's relationships with one another, on being Welsh, and on the city of Swansea and its inhabitants. Many of the poems are written in Swansea dialect, brilliantly capturing the voices and experiences of people rarely heard in poetry. Unfortunately, Tidy Boy is now out of print, but you can still pick up a second-hand copy at biblio.co.uk Watch David Hughes read 'Swansea Market', filmed and edited by friends of the Crunch Turnshoe Productions: Swansea Market – David Hughes  A Dream of Mind – C.K. Williams Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1992 A Dream of Mind is a challenging, exhilarating collection, representing an important stage in the evolution of C. K. Williams' work. It's dominated by the long title poem, which explores the materials and qualities of states of consciousness with enormous flexibility and suppleness. The poetry of C. K. Williams, who died in 2015, has won an essential place in contemporary American poetry. The long lines that characterised his style from the mid-1970s onwards allowed him to make ever more radical forays into what The New York Times called "a unique and inclusive poetry of consciousness." A Dream of Mind is available to buy from us.macmillan.com To hear what we said about these books in the 'What We're Reading' segment of the Issue #6 podcast, go here: crunchpoetry.com/issue-6.html
Recently, thanks to a very helpful librarian called Emily, we were listed on the Scottish Poetry Library's 'Collections' page – an excellent resource for both poetry readers and writers. Similar listings with the Southbank Centre and Poetry Ireland have followed (thank you to both Lorraine and Elizabeth!) These listings will hopefully help to spread the word about The Crunch a little further, and we really appreciate the time spent by these very busy people to add us to their websites. Please do check them out – all three organisations do a lot of good work in the name of poetry. A by-product of these listings is that we're now eligible to nominate three poems for The Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. Exciting times! The deadline for nominations is the end of this week, with the prize awarded at a ceremony in London on 21 September 2017. We've just posted off our nominations – here are our chosen three: An Amateur's Guide to AstronomyTonight is hysterical with stars. Light and memory: both needle through from the past. In this bay, we were equally combustible. One lunatic electron is enough to ignite bodies. I remember you in charted galaxies. Andromeda's arms. Your hands on my waist; the startled particles between. Gravity. When you pulled me into the February sea, we were nebulous. Light and memory. Constellations apart, we scuttle our feet under different waves. How to tease the sea from the moon's leash? Alan Kellermann The Crunch Issue #3 MedeaI stand in the bedroom, sweatless. I admit to the dagger, the rage and the kids who looked like you; had the eye of the cool Aegean with Argonaut bravado and a traitor’s blood. Our babies. I nursed them with love and a knife to save them from sins like you— our lullabied young. Like you, they were forked in the tongue. But I was once young, a charming girl, head over claws in love with you-- protective, faithful as any good angel, my Colchis light bleaching a brother’s bones. You could say I became obsessed. I had you possessed but Corinth tore us apart. Still, I can’t resist revenge, death knell shaking the house to its dead foundations, the children’s gasping surprise; oh, the look in your eyes when you found them, coiled like little white worms or the curl of a gorgon’s hair. She may be princess but I am a queen, Medea-- monster maternal, with blood in my breasts and a glint in my milkwhite eye. Revenge is a kick in the womb. Natalie Ann Holborow The Crunch Issue #4 The BayThe merry-go-round played out with grim enthusiasm as we passed by, the skirt of our black umbrella angled against the wind. We were the only people walking the promenade of empty chain restaurants devoid of charm. Latin music piped out through crummy speakers, a delusion of a summer holiday somewhere hot, somewhere else, somewhere not here. Yet the chairs stacked up against the walls dripped with rain and we huddled together to keep warm. I bought you chips to eat in the salted sea air, vinegared with a sharp gull’s cry, and from the jetty we watched tourists venture out onto the platform, take a photo, clouded by the dark sky, and scuttle away like insects, enduring little of the chilly British weather. In the distance the merry-go-round played but still did not turn. That night we drank the world and rolled heavily into bed, murmured of making babies between things unsaid. Rebecca Parfitt The Crunch Issue #5 The winner of The Forward Prize for Best Single Poem receives £1000, with all other poems nominated also considered for an anthology of the year's best poetry. Good luck to Alan, Natalie and Rebecca!
|
RSS Feed