poets RSS

Roberto Pastore published his first full collection of poetry, Hey Bert, with us in October. He was recently featured in the Western Mail's Author's Notes and here is the interview with Jenny White in full: Tell me a bit about yourself – where you grew up, how you came to Cardiff, when you started writing poetry. So I grew up in and around Milton Keynes, England, we moved around a lot growing up. My family comes from Italy, my father lives there now. My poem Show Homes is about my parents fondness for looking around houses. It was the era of...

HomeAs if we would never arrive,we check our watches and connections.So many elsewheres as wewalk into abandoned roomsthat somehow have forgotten us.A window propped, half-openon a garden, stares. A birdas if to say, you’re here,glances its wings against the blueso far away, then becomes invisible.How they call to us, the lost places.Now I carry my life, as a snail might,slipping across grass and stone:the shrugged contours of her shell’s light spiral,the glistening of her bridal train.Like a half-remembered song,marking us, making us,words call us back, they call us on.To know the world in another languageis to never know the world...

A Thousandfold Loving: Derick Mattern reviews Pomegranate Garden by Haydar Ergülen, edited by Mel Kenne, Saliha Paker, and Caroline Stockford, Parthian, 2019. 'Haydar Ergülen is the most prominent of a group of poets that emerged during the 1980s in Turkey, an era woefully underrepresented in translation. Drawing on some forty years of work, this selection of nearly eighty poems is the first volume of his work – and the first major work of his generation – to appear in English. 'A poet of deep affections, this selection highlights Ergülen’s love poems, his summer poems, his nostalgias, his constant connection to the...

Representatives from the Cardiff poetry scene, Literature Wales and the British Council were at St Canna's in Cardiff yesterday to welcome the Turkish poet and writer Haydar Ergülen to Wales and share a cultural exchange with readings from his new selected poems Pomegranate Garden as well as poetry about Cardiff, about Wales, about place and about love. All with a bonus buffet and wine! It was a superb way to spend a Sunday lunchtime. Featuring tanslator, editor and poet Caroline Stockford alongside Cardiff-based poets Topher Mills, J. Brookes, Kate North, Roberto Pastore, Luca Paci, Mab Jones and Susie Wild. Thanks to...