This year, if you are looking for a poetry gift, please think of checking out some of these books from our current contributing editors at Poetry Wales:
Fahad Al-Amoudi, when the flies come
Shortlisted for the Michael Marks Pamphlet Prize
In this rewarding debut pamphlet, Fahad Al-Amoudi blurs the lines between national and personal memory. These finely crafted poems are rooted in the specificity of family and place, with the trappings of myth and fabulation. His speakers are restless, yet alert to the minute details of the world – movements of insects, the intricacy of jewellery, the bloom and spoil of fruit – against which we experience their coming of age.
“These poems are stubborn refractions. Al-Amoudi weds together disappeared, intertwined pasts and presents, departures and returnings, catching hold of historical resonances and their spectral tendrils. Language is lustrous. Here, it glistens with yearning, possessing the imaginative flair of the scavenger. The abyss becomes the perfect launch pad.” – Momtaza Mehri
Taylor Edmonds, Back Teeth
Back Teeth is the debut pamphlet from the phenomenal Taylor Edmonds, examining girlhood, the feminine body, and the dark place within that snarls and roars with veined gums. Edmonds uses these startling poems as vehicles for identity, nature, and womanhood, unearthing an enchanting and frightening landscape. Edmonds’ bold, fierce poems give way to discovery through her sharp, vivid imagination. This is poetry that questions and challenges the world around it, pushing the limits of the known and creating new ground on which to walk.
Back Teeth is a gorgeously grotesque emergence from that deep, dark place inside every woman and girl. The book’s unexpected twist on the often-confusing transition from girl to womanhood is a welcome, fresh perspective. This bold debut collection will leave you breathless with a mouth full of bittersweet flavours.”
— Hanan Issa, National Poet of Wales
Des Mannay, Sod ‘Em – and Tomorrow
Zakia Carpenter Hall, Into the Same Sound Twice
Into the Same Sound Twice displays how language, like the world it witnesses, is something radiantly prismatic.” – Fiona Sampson
American poet Zakia Carpenter-Hall’s stunning debut Into the Same Sound Twice is a place where ‘the ordinary rules of motion’ don’t always apply. What ensues are words, bodies and environments that thrum with new music. In language that is at once precise and tender, Carpenter-Hall leads us into rituals of care, ancestral memory, a rainbow that coruscates and various forms of rupture and repair.
Borders can become meaningfully blurred. In ‘Shakespeare Honours My Grandmother’, a play’s burial scene merges with a funeral taking place four-thousand miles away. The language of dramaturgy is then used to describe both. ‘Big Talk’ counters the unfathomable vastness of space with the sensuality of a kiss. The collection creates its own multi-sensory language and landscape.
A tour-de-force sequence, ‘The Earth-Eating Fire’, is a reflection on wildfires all over the world, from California to Australia. The poem considers how human beings impact the outside world and vice versa in a way that’s both hauntingly delicate and powerful. Captured in these poems – both intimate and vast – is the sense of how much we do not know, how much there still is to be achieved – but sometimes the body, rhythm and poetry itself can be a conduit.
Kandace Siobhan Walker, Cowboy
Shortlisted for the Forward Prize Best First Collection 2023
The poems in Cowboy are knowing, millennial, internet-sick, funny, with deep undercurrents: of embodied and disembodied spiritualities; of the knowledge of animals; of familial mythologies; of grief and longing; of autism and navigating diagnoses; of early and enduring disappointment; of the wildness underneath the smooth glass-and-chrome surfaces of contemporary life.
The echo of a question permeates the collection – where does a person grow up? – moving restlessly between rural Wales, London and the American South; between the esoteric spaces of the internet; between the artlessness of childhood and adolescence transfigured inexplicably into a disquieting adulthood, with its attendant weirdness of rent-paying, cohabiting, the churn of mindless work and alienation.
Zoë Brigley 
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