Bøger udgivet af Poetry Wales Press

With over 100 recipes elevating traditional Spanish food and drink to new heights, Bar 44 Tapas y Copas is a celebration of things Spanish. Restauranteurs Owen and Tom Morgan's recipes and stories of their experiences in Spain are accompanied by beautiful food photography and design by Spanish artist Andi Rivas, in a book in a class of its own.

Poet and psychogeographer Peter Finch undertakes 20 walks around his native city, picking out features en route and providing interesting stories, historical and contemporary, about life in the city past and present. His sharp eye and compendious knowledge of Cardiff is illustrated by photographer John Briggs' images in a lively guide to the city.

The Gwent Levels line the north shore of the Severn in South Wales: Cas Gwent (Chepstow) at its head; its more famous cousin, the Somerset Levels, across the water; the Welsh capital, Caerdydd (Cardiff), at its feet. You could waste an hour crossing the Levels by motorway. Or brush aside the journey by train. But writer Marsha O' Mahony has chosen the slow route of foreshore, footpath, and country lane. Over the course of two years, she meandered from village to village collecting conversations and anecdotes as she went. The result is a remarkable oral history of this unique landscape and the people who live there.

Magnum photographer David Hurn is one of the world‿s most influential photographers. He covered the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, and was at Aberfan in 1966. He has shot iconic portraits of The Beatles, Hollywood stars such as Sean Connery and Jane Fonda, and leading figures across the arts, politics, science, and sport. During the seventies he established the acclaimed School of Documentary Photography at Newport. Throughout his life, he has worked tirelessly to document and interpret his homeland. His current project, Wales: The Land, is a definitive portrait of the landscape of Wales. The work collects a lifetime of material from David, with accompanying text from Richard King, author of Brittle With Relics (Faber, 2022). Representing the interface between the landscape of Wales and human intervention in it, the book is celebratory in tone, whilst also exploring attitudes towards the landscape and how it is used to represent Wales to the Welsh and to others.

After a plot to assassinate the Czar of Russia is foiled by government agents, Inspector Thomas Chard must find a lone assassin being protected by a group of anarchists in Glamorganshire. Chard‿s efforts to find his man are frustrated by several apparently random murders. Can he figure out the killer‿s true objective before it‿s too late?

Born into a world of pickets and poverty, Girlo Wolf dreams of being a poet. But mental health challenges and an underworld of sex, drugs and alcohol threaten to stand in her way ‿ until she discovers that words are exactly what she needs. Set in post-industrial Wales, The Crazy Truth is an authentic story of one woman‿s journey to empowerment.

Grief's Alphabet by Carrie Etter is a shattering elegy for the poet's mother, opening a pathway through grief in spite of the impossible task of expressing such a loss. Beginning both chronologically and alphabetically, the collection moves from early life with the narrator's adoption, through to the mother's unexpected death and the banal yet painful tasks which follow, such as sorting clothes and arranging the funeral. The final section deals with life after loss, and the long work of grieving which culminates in the title poem. Evoking the complex, intimate relationship between mother and daughter, this raw yet deft collection celebrates love in the same breath as it weeps for its loss.?

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.