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Llawn Festival: Llandudno

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‘Vertebrae’ launched in North Wales

On Thursday, at Provideo coffee shop in Llandudno, my first poetry collection was officially launched. The crowd spilled out the door and the start of the reading had to be delayed until everyone was able to find space, but the evening passed with some informal reading, some impromptu piano and some wonderful company.

The book has been received with great praise from significant poets in its first week and 1/2 of the initial print run has now sold within the first five days of becoming available.

Thanks to all who came to the launch or have bought a copy online. Your support has been thrilling.

‘Vertebrae’ is available from The Lonely Crowd website here.

 

Article on ‘Vertebrae’ launch in North Wales Pioneer by Duncan Rieder

Ysgol John Bright teacher Glyn Edwards to launch Vertebrae at Providero in Llandudno

By Duncan Rieder

AN YSGOL John Bright English teacher will take his seat at the table of the literary world with the release of his first poetry collection.

Llandudno poet Glyn Edwards will launch Vertebrae at a Providero Coffee House in Llandudno on Thursday, July 4 at 6pm.

With a poem for each of the 33 vertebrae of the spine, the collection offers insight into the backbone of the poet’s past five year’s work, touching on universal themes such as fatherhood, falling in love, death and more.

The 33 poem collection will launch on Thursday, July 4.

Mr Edwards, originally of Wallasey on the Wirral said: “I used to fear that was a finite amount of seats at the table and a rush to fill them. I have taken my time to choose a chair that feels right.”

“For me, the collection is a balance of poems that genuinely break new ground, and those that simply seek to examine the ground broken by all of us.

“Every person who has read the collection has elected an entirely different poem as their favourite, usually because it has sharpened a memory of a toddler with a winter cold, or it makes reference to a poet they studied in school.

“The poem about a voicemail I found from my grandmother a few days after she’d died seems to be particularly evocative.

“I had felt it was too personally poignant to be of any appeal to others, yet because grief is a universal truth, it has found relevance with many.”

This latest release adds to a successful year for Mr Edwards, whose poem A Single Atom in an Ion Trap was featured in an anthology published by Verve Press, Eighty Four, as well as a stint editing poetry magazine The Lonely Crowd in February.

With his poetry frequently published in a variety of publications, his work has also been included in the inaugural Poetry Jukebox outside the EPIC Museum Dublin – one of only seven in the world. He was also invited to take up a week long residency at the Dylan Thomas boathouse in Laugharne in 2016, with the poem Birthday Walk from that period appearing in the collection.

Mr Edwards added: “For a writer, the need to share work is crucial to the sense of satisfaction – sharing a poem in a well-read magazine is exciting, but sharing years of content with an anonymous audience is both tantalising and terrorising.”

His success has also rubbed off on his pupils, with his Year 13 Laura Satterthwaite’s poem Ecstasy being included in Cheval, an anthology of Welsh Writing, and was the youngest entrant into the nationwide Terry Hetherington Prize.

Mr Edwards work has already earned high praise from Poetry Ireland editor Martina Evans and former Wales Book of the Year winner John Freeman, as well as a blurb from fellow Welsh poet Jonathan Edwards.

The launch is free to enter, with readings featuring some musical accompaniment, and copies of Vertebrae for sale.

 

 

 

Full article: North Wales Pioneer

North Wales launch of ‘Vertebrae’

July 4th: Providero Coffee House, Llandudno 6-8

Please feel welcome to attend an informal launch of my debut poetry collection, published by The Lonely Press.

There’ll be music and coffee and a reading and a very high chance of a emotionally blackmailed purchase of a signed copy of the book.

See you there!

‘Divining’ performed in Manchester

 

My poem 'divining' became the libretto for @olliecomposer to compose breathtaking opera from. @JoeAshmore19 performed the 20 minute piece, accompanied by @MarvoloQuartet at @MusicStChrys in Manchester last night. It was stunning. #aneveningofchambermusic@McrWritingSchl @LitWales pic.twitter.com/IVQdB3ON4R

— glynfedwards (@glynfedwards) March 12, 2019

Notes from the event programme:

Divining was written in the summer of last year, when the prolonged dry weather exposed a forgotten history of the land. In news coverage each day, aerial photographs were divulging historical paths and archaeological sites; traces of the past were being revealed in tantalising increments.

My family moved house and began to explore the boundaries of a new village, creating a nomenclature based on our encounters with birds, with wildflowers and with a dense wood of ageless trees. My son was fascinated by his discoveries and his imagination burgeoned.

With Oliver and Joe’s project in mind, I took a notebook with my son one day and attempted to draft a wandering poem which pursued our various tracts, junctures and fractures; a poem that was ambiguously trailing my son’s innocence and loss of innocence simultaneously; a poem of rich musicality and of a growing quiet. Ultimately, the poem became the languishing summer that will define part of my son’s childhood; a summer in which he divined an obsession with the natural world.   

Outspoken – Neuadd Ogwen – Bethesda

On Friday, the inaugural Outspoken event in Bethesda took place to a sold-out Neuadd Ogwen audience.  I  quickly exchanged Dydd Santes Dwynwen cards with my wife at home then hurried along the read some alternative love poems at the new event.  Two of the poems can be read here. while another poem is available in Verve Poetry’s anthology on male suicide.

Tim ‘Double-Barrelled’ Humphreys-Jones had begun the evening with a breathless series of spoken word poems and ended on a slower note with verse on his grandmother’s final words.  The poets Karen Ankers and Ness Owen read about politics and place and equal rights. The session of guest poets was ended by Martin Daws who mixed his spoken word work with print poems on slavery and scenery and the central space of home.

An Open-Mic session was fully subscribed; a new event in North Wales’ poetry calendar secured.

Huge congratulations to Jess Melville-Richards for organising and compering the event and for establishing another platform to listen and share and speak and to be heard.

 

 

 

Books of the Year Recommendations

From The Lonely Crowd’s trio of articles on their contributor’s books of the year, here’s my recommended reading material from 2018:

The full article can be read at:

The Lonely Crowd: Books of the Year (part 2)

Unless it really can’t be helped, I prefer to concentrate on one book at a time.  Yet, at one point this summer, I had five books open simultaneously on my bedside table.  I was fortunate to be able to interview Jonathan Edwards, Andrew McMIllan and Christopher Meredith for Lonely Crowd projects and their writing, together with poetry collections by Ocean Vuong and Bernard O’Donoghue, formed my first non-linear reading experiment. In one burst, I’d read compelling story from Meredith’s Seren collection Brief Lives and the dense, lyrical prose would make me question the seeds of bravery in an acts of cowardice; then, I’d gather up Jonathan Edwards’ second collection, Gen, and absorb myself utterly in the sustained warmth of his portraiture: Harry Houdini and Edwards’ granddad in the same scene on Newport Bridge performing different magic tricks.  There was a poem in Bernard O’Donoghue’s The Seasons of Cullen Church, ‘You Know the Way’ that I read habitually for a fortnight.  The narrative sprang from title into a set of directions centred on familiar global places – New York, London, Dublin – but it was the clever demotic tone – imperative, declarative and interrogative all at once – at that reassured me I could re-visit it and walk those routes ceaselessly.

Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky with Exit Wounds is the singular, most-impressive collection of verse I have read.  I could eulogise it and investigate it endlessly and would urge all poetry readers to do likewise; however, as it was published in 2016 and the internet is already rich with reviews of Vuong, I’ll state that McMillan’s Playtime is my selection as Book of 2018. Because McMillan’s verse appears so differently on the page – at times it appeared a vacuum of punctuation – the collection demanded to be approached differently from other poetry; I began to read poems aloud rather than whisper them, or internalise their sounds. Because the topics were so intimate, the themes so urgent, poems exploring homosexuality transformed in poems simply exploring sexuality; then they became like the very best poems, exploring something new. Because McMillan’s ‘I’ was vulnerable, aggressive, elusive, flawed and heroic, his first-person narrative voice could transposed into the multifarious mouths of many speakers.  And, because of all this, Playtime became not just the ideal parallel to be read alongside other books, but a method of seeing each of them anew. I think Night Sky with Exit Wounds will the book that resides on my bedside table through 2019 also, yet without Playtime, I may never have shaped the precise need for it.

Glyn Edward’s debut poetry collection will be published by The Lonely Press in early 2019.

Books of the Year (Part 1)

Books of the Year (Part 3)

A poem included in ‘Eighty Four: poems on male suicide’ by Verve Press

The chance to write a poem on the barely speakable was powerful; the opportunity to be included Helen Calcutt’s Verve Press anthology is humbling.

Eighty Four is a new anthology of poetry on the subject of male suicide in aid of CALM. Poems have been donated to the collection by Andrew McMillan, Salena Godden, Anthony Anaxogorou, Katrina Naomi, Ian Patterson, Caroline Smith, Carrie Etter, Peter Raynard, Joelle Taylor, while a submissions window yielded many excellent poems on the subject from hitherto unknown poets we are thrilled to have been made aware of.

Curated by poet Helen Calcutt, the anthology features a host of male and female voices sharing their experiences of suicide, mental health, or grief – from those who have been on the brink of suicide, to those who have lost a loved one, or been moved more generally by the campaign. It is both an uncensored exposure of truths, as well as a celebration of the strength and courage of those willing to write and talk about their experiences, using the power of language to openly address and tackle an issue that directly affects a million people every year.

We hope this book will shed light on an issue that is cast in shadow, and which is often shrouded in secrecy and denial. If we don’t talk, we don’t heal and we don’t change. In Eighty Four we are all talking. Are you listening?

Full list of poets included (A-Z):

Full list of poets included (A-Z): Anthony Anaxagorou, Romalyn Ante, Casey Bailey, Abie Budgen, Lewis Buxton, David Calcutt, Helen Calcutt, Louisa Campbell, Diana Cant, Garry Carr, Stewart Carswell, Gram Joel Davies, Michelle Diaz, Glyn Edwards, Carrie Etter, RM Francis, Alan Girling, Salena Godden, Emily Harrison, John Hawkhead, Martin Hayes, Alastair Hesp, Shaun Hill, Paul Howarth, Rosie Jackson, Janet Jenkins, Helen Kay, Asim Khan, Charles Lauder Jr, Hannah Linden, Jane Lovell, Nick Makoha, Liam McCormick, Andrew McMillan, Abegail Morley, Katrina Naomi, Antony Owen, Isabel Palmer, Ian Patterson, Mario Petrucci, Zoe Piponedes, clare e.potter, Peter Raynard, Brenda Read-Brown, Victoria Richards, Belinda Rimmer, Bethany Rivers, Stephen Seabridge, Richard Skinner, Caroline Smith, Janet Smith, Joelle Taylor, MT Taylor, Christina Thatcher.

          Eighty Four: Poems on male suicide,vulnerability, grief and hope

• Helen Calcutt Ed.

• 17 Jan 2019
• PBK: £9.99
• ISBN: 978 1 912565 13 9
• 108 pages 216 x 138 • 53 poems
• Market: General/trade
• Genre: Poetry Collection
• Pre-ordering a copy of 84 from Verve Press

Call for entries: The Terry Hetherington Prize 2019 / Cheval 12

 

A writer charges to their teens with a pen in hand, trying to score something permanent about the implausible self on the impossible earth. In diaries, journals, blogs, sketchbooks, this writer excavates channels of self-discovery me my I me my I. Gradually, painfully, they become so fluent in digging that they seek instead to build. Though, there being so little time to build and so, so many structures to ape, that a writer briefly forgets they are a writer, and fills their hands with books and bricks and baby’s bottles. Soon, they forget why they wrote. Next, then they forget that they wrote. Then they forget.

The Terry Hetherington Prize was created to encourage writers to the realisation that, should they dig further and dig longer, should they take their time in prudent planning and blissful building, that there would be cityscape for such structures to survive in. Over a decade later, the trustees of the Prize under the careful dedication of Aida Birch have ensured that hundreds of writers, at an age when the noise of the world around could have muffled their prose or starched their verse can neither forget their craft, nor their potential for craft.

Cheval 11 is this year’s architecture – the statue in its town centre, standing taller than his legacy, pen in hand, is the poet Terry Hetherington.

This year’s judging panel would urge you to visit ‘The Silver Darlings’ by Katya Johnson and Thomas Tyrell’s ‘Sometimes in Summer’ and ‘Young Tommy’ by Michael Muia. In your second sitting, please enjoy the commended entries ‘The Barren Land’ by Thomas Baker and ‘Tylluan’ by Nathan Munday.

We hope you enjoy your stay and return often.

Glyn Edwards and Rose Widlake

Editors

 

Details of how you can apply for the 2019 Terry Hetherington Prize and submit your work for Cheval 12, can be found here.

Copies of Cheval 11 can be purchased at the following Parthian Books link:

 

 

The Lonely Crowd: Guest Ed – call for subs

Not conscious

that you have been seeking

suddenly

you come upon it

RS Thomas’ ultimate place poem, Arrival, could be equally describing the discovery of any ideal: a lover, a view, a gift. It is also a fine analogy for the seeking and finding of a poem.

As Guest-Poetry Editor of Issue 11, I am eager to receive poems that seize something ordinary and make it transcend for a unique moment, or explore the habitual so it is changed forevermore. Having no preference of theme, register or content, my sole agenda is to appreciate with fresh eyes and to respond. I greatly look forward to reading up to three of four poems, or one longer poem, in each entry, and to giving your poems the opportunity of wide and engaged readership.

The Lonely Crowd is a literature magazine where academic essay and photographic narrative are on consecutive pages, and where one story may have been written by one of Wales’ foremost authors, while another could have been penned by someone utterly uncertain of their pedigree. Having had my poetry published in the magazine in the past, I can assure all contributors that the prize for being printed in such a collection is affirmation. And, for writers, as for everyone, affirmation is transformative.

Glyn Edwards

There is everything to look forward to.

The same submission rules for poetry in regular editions of The Lonely Crowd apply: work must be previously unpublished; simultaneous submissions will be considered; contributors to the issue will receive a complimentary copy of the final issue.

Please attach your poems in a Word document, include a short biography, and send your email to glynfedwards@hotmail.com; I hope to respond to all submissions within six weeks.