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Retired
When my parents went back to their roots, to low ceilinged views of a pub with ducks, a shop, a Cotswold stone church, painstakingly restored they found their kind long gone. I see them in a neighbour’s lounge among devotees of sipping of dispensing conversation in morsels. Mum bears h …
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The eighteenth year of us
The clementine rise of new acquaintance: you were all lilt, all eye-bright charm – the dance of an autumn. And the fire breathed yes and now and I want something the seasons cannot deny – a burnish that looks like flame but is dying embers. We relit at Christmas, your wind-rapped cheeks told me stic …
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Return Journey
‘Hullo?’ the call connects as a child screams through the funnel of the carriage. ‘It’s me,’ I say. a man pulls the armrest down ‘I got your message.’ treads on the side of my foot. ‘Uh-okay,’ you say, I stare out ‘sorry.’ someone rips a window open ‘There’s been a delay.’ ‘What? …
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Man-eyes
Get your gross man-eyes off my poem with your numb-drum dumbing literal mind behind which hides no sincerity. My ma had a hundred times your brains but sat and smoked them stupid at a table in the suburbs: foxes, jam tarts and no travelcard. Back then, if you wanted a train, you bought a ticket. Not …
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The Hare Book and The Hedgehog Book
In an essay in the current issue of New Welsh Reader [Issue 124], I confessed to my obsession with hares. And I drew on Jane Russ’ The Hare Book for information, particularly about the poet William Cowper’s three pet hares, Bess, Tiney and Puss. I also have a love of hedgehogs, who have sometimes ne …
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My Mother Taught Me How Sing and Graveyards in My Closet
Welsh boys and their mothers, eh? A cup of milky tea, a hunk of barabrith and mammy’s becardiganed cwtch – these have a Proustian ability to melt the heart of even the most hardened rugger-loving Brains swiller. Even if they can’t quite bring themselves to admit it. No such qualms in Daf James’ radi …
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Kidnapped by my Father: BBC One Wales
Yemen is one of the world’s shadowlands. We only see it on the news, usually under a pall of smoke after mortars or aerial bombings. It’s a source of …
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Plague Dreams of the Future City
Plagues kill citizens. They reconfigure cities. An outbreak of yellow fever in Buenos Aires in 1871 emptied the southern districts of wealthy resident …
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What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About #MeToo: Essays on Sex, Authority and the Mess of Life
With extensive experience in journalism and editing at the Nation, the American author seeks out her own topics of interest in this exciting insight i …
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We Could Be Anywhere by Now
The poems in Katherine Stanfield’s second collection bristle with curiosity and the desire to understand the world through personal experience. Embedd …
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Telling your father at Bwlch Nant yr Arian
We’re going to have a baby, I told your father, just days since I’d felt his ribs slot like coins between mine. We were toeing a mou …
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Rivers Joining
Freshwater mussels, coffee bean brown, cleaned by oyster catchers that jostle where the Wenning brunts the Lune. We gaze upstream at the Howgills, the …
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Women’s Rights
Don’t try to introduce my skin to your skin cause such introduction doesn’t let the light get in. Don’t try to prove me as your servant while getting …
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