Susie Wild's Blog: Wildlife, page 8

New Poetry 2025: The first three poetry titles on our 2025 list are...

 

All three are available to pre-order from Parthian Books... 

GIG ALERT: Gorwelion In Bristol

One to add to your diaries! Join us for the Bristol launch of Robert Minhinnick's important climate-change anthology Gorwelion: Shared Horizons at The Greenbank, Easton on the 29th of January for a 7.30pm start.

Parthian New Season. Hello 2025, Hello New Books...

 

New Year, New Books...

A snow-dusted weekend thinking about the year ahead in literature, reading these and making a dent on the submissions, drinking tea…

POETRY COMPETITION: The Borzello Trust Poetry Prize

Just a reminder that the Borzello Trust Prize for Poetry is open for entries until 31 January 2025. Niall and I look forward to reading your words...

This year we are thrilled to open a second category of the New Welsh Writing Awards with many thanks to the generous support from The Borzello Trust. Supporting in the development of yet unpublished poets living, working or from Wales, the winner of The Borzello Trust Prize for Poetry will receive a £500 development publishing contract with Parthian Books/The Borzello Trust. Including mentorship from Susie Wild to develop a poetry collection that (following publication) will be distributed via The Borzello Trust to over 250 Welsh libraries and schools. There will be a £150 cash prize to the five highly commended entries and publication in a special anthology collection published by Parthian Books.Winner: £500 as an advance on a book development contract with Parthian Books, for publication on their poetry list, plus mentorship/development with press editors, aiming for a full-length poetry collection.Runner-up entries: Five runner-ups will receive £150 cash each and publication in a special poetry anthology published by Parthian Books.Judges: Susie Wild and Niall Griffiths

GIG ALERTS: Natalie Ann Holborow

 

Two gigs. Chase away those January Blues with an evening (or two) of poetry... 

Nation.Cymru Cultural Highlight 2024: This Common Uncommon

'Continuing with the themes of nature, the writer and poet Rae Howells wrote her poetry collection This Common Uncommon, as a response to the threat of a housing estate being built on a piece of common land near to where she lives, in West Cross, Swansea. We discover the creatures which make the common their home as well as the people that walk there and delight in the life they find. Life that may soon be covered by concrete. To me, the book is an example of how words can be a powerful tool of communicating these ever-present issues, how words can be used as an act of resistance.'

Thanks to Gaynor Funnell for picking Rae Howells' poetry collection This Common Uncommon as a Cultural Highlight of 2024. available now from Parthian Books.

BEN'S NEW BOOK: From the Senedd to the Roofs

Ben’s new book has arrived, if you want it in the first post after Xmas and a video message for the day get in touch! Signed copies now available in Storyville Books, Pontypridd.

Nation.Cymru | Letter from Caerleon: On a 90th Birthday

1996, Sam Adams’s ‘Letter from Wales’ column has been appearing in PN Review, one of the most highly regarded UK poetry magazines, offering insight and appreciation of Welsh writing, culture and history.

Now out in paperback, Letters from Wales: Memories and Encounters in Literature and Life collects a quarter century of work and offers one of the most unique, independent and passionate critical voices on the writing and cultural output of Wales during this period. Turning 90 last week, Adams offers his reflections on a life in letters…

BOOK REVIEW: 'A good anthology is a fine buffet.'

‘A good anthology is a fine buffet. A good anthology of poetry in translation is a buffet of dishes that are probably new to you. A good anthology of contemporary poetry in translation is a buffet of dishes that are new to everyone at the party. And Tempo: Excursions in 21st-Century Italian Poetry, published in 2023 by Parthian and edited by Luca Paci, offers a delectable overview of a specific literary scene that can’t be easily sampled elsewhere, at least not in one place.

‘Paci, a translingual poet and translator who teaches Italian Studies at Cardiff University, has an in-depth knowledge of the poetry world in both languages, making him a perfect guide and mediator. His selection of poets currently working in Italian is highly representative—these are well-established figures, most of them mid-career—yet covers a range of very different styles and subject matter. We find poems that are experimental, lyrical, written for performance, in prose form, in rhymed quatrains; about politics, spirituality, sexuality, grief. They draw their words from antiquity and ad slogans, from the dissecting table and the factory floor. The country’s strong tradition of dialect poetry and its overall linguistic diversity is also represented, with poems in Sardinian, in Venetian, or incorporating Somali.’
Thanks Johanna Bishop for this intelligent review of Tempo: Excursions in 21st-Century Italian Poetry