Bøger udgivet af Poetry Wales Press

In this emotional follow-up to" The Zoo Father, " a daughter is haunted by her mentally ill mother until a series of remarkable transformations help her to conquer painful childhood memories. Over the course of the collection, the feared mother becomes a rattlesnake, an Aztec goddess, a Tibetan singing bowl, a stalagmite, a praying mantis, and then a ghost orchid, yet in the central poem the daughter becomes a cosmic stag and escapes her mother-huntress.

This book evokes the life of the Italian community in south Wales from the end of the 19th century to the end of the Second World War, when the Italian cafe was central to the social life of many small communities in the industrialized valleys. It follows the fortunes of Italian families like the Bracchis, the Bernis, the Contis, and the Sidolis and explores their influence on Welsh society. Hughes explains why so many Italian immigrants from the Bardi region came to settle in south Wales. The rise of Italian temperance bars in nonconformist Wales and the economic and social factors that lie behind the rise and fall of the Italian cafe are discussed. Also included is information on the treatment of Italian internees during the war and the tragic case of the "Andorra Star, the ship carrying many of them to Canada that was torpedoed by a U-boat. Included are archive photographs that produce a revealing and accessible history of the recent past.

This impressive debut includes poems on a wide range of themes: from recollections of a return to Fiji, to sharper memories of an adolescence in a rural town in Wales; from dark ruminations on farm life to tender and unconventional love poems. Owen Sheers has a talent for visual imagery, a flair for narrative and a grasp of the personal as acute as his awareness of the wider world. His astute portraits of relatives and contemporaries entice us into other lives. The Blue Book is a startlingly good first collection by a young writer of considerable ability and promise. "This vivid and potent debut collection from Owen Sheers is populated with characters trying to come to terms with themselves and others and with the difficult journeys they find themselves taking. It is a moving experience, which he makes sense of in finely wrought verse that is tough, but also lyrical. A distinctive new voice for the year 2000.">"Owen Sheers writes controlled, suggestive poems. This is thoughtful work, attentive and responsive to the world, and with a subtle music of its own">"It is the truth in the details that suggests indisputably that Owen Sheers is the real thing, a poet of promise whom we are sure to hear much of in future. Buy, buy." >"Owen Sheer's poetry is contemporary, yet imbued with a strong, surprising, sense of memory. His characters are not merely vehicles for a poet's perceptions, they live - from Fijian preacher to farm workers and edgy adolescents in rural Wales to the sleeping girl who brings love to the night bus. He has a knack for capturing the cruelty of life's lack of tidy resolution but, best of all, Sheers has the courage to be tender." >Owen Sheers was born in 1974, spent a portion of his childhood abroad, then returned to live on a farm in Abergavenny when he was nine. Educated at Oxford, with an MA in Creative Writing from the UEA writing programme, he has worked in television in London and Wales. He hit the limelight in 2000 when for The Times of January 1st, 2000, David Bailey photographed the foremost practitioners in the arts and sciences together with their choice of the person they expected to carry the discipline forward: Poet Laureate Andrew Motion selected Owen Sheers as the poet to watch. His first book was shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize Best First Collection and ACW Book of the Year 2001. Skirrid Hill, his second collection, won a Somerset Maugham Prize in 2006 and was longlisted for Welsh Book of the Year.

The poems of one of the great British writers of World War II are compiled in this collection of war poetry whose brilliance and scope transcends its genre. Widely considered the last works in the Romantic style, the poetry is characterized by a vivid realism and emotional power. The poems spans the length of its artist's late adolescence and early adulthood, tracing the developing mastery of the poet and serving as a tragic testament to the lost potential of a literary figure whose accidental death at the age of 28 prevented him from reaching the full height of his artistic power.