I wrote earlier in the month about books by our new contributing editors, and I just wanted to highlight publications from colleagues in the office as well as my own current and upcoming projects.
EMPTY TRAINS BY GEORGE SANDIFER SMITH
First is our Reviews Editor at Poetry Wales George Sandifer Smith, who has two great books. The first one, Empty Trains, looks at the notion of spaces altering to accommodate changes introduced during the pandemic. While avoiding the pitfalls of Covid poetry, Sandifer-Smith deftly traces the poetics of space into a contemporary setting. Empty Trainsdoes more than offer a frame through which to view such spaces: it challenges us to look at the spaces in which we live, work, and think with fresh eyes.
“ [A]live with the static of wit charts a series of lyrical journeys through nights of changing light; […] shot through with startling images set against ‘the rolled green glass of the sea’ and the blue patchwork of the Pembrokeshire landscape.”
– Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch
nights travel at the right speed by george sandifer smith
Nights Travel At The Right Speed is the debut poetry collection from Welsh poet George Sandifer-Smith. Seeking to explore smaller moments through spaces and objects, this collection shines a light on the art of recollection, how voices change with age, and the seemingly-galactic scope of the single instance – the crackle of tape, the glimpse of Mars through a skylight, the roaring eardrum after a rock & roll concert.
“George Sandifer-Smith’s luminous poems inhabit the spaces between things, ‘these gaps around / our little islands’ where experiences and words have lain hidden, waiting to be unearthed. We tune into the static of lost recordings, try to recreate missing episodes of Doctor Who from the tantalising fragments left behind. He has an eye for the larger stories held by glimpses and is adept at interrogating the act of reconstruction, revelling in its surprises and fallibility. This is a hauntingly elegiac collection but one shot through with humour and twists of absurdism. We roam Pembrokeshire and Rwanda, Hammersmith and Aberystwyth, celebrating and mourning the drama of this ‘mayfly life’.”
– Katherine Stansfield
THE ESTATE AGENT’S DAUGHTER BY RHIAN EDWARDS
“Fast-talking, wise-cracking and worldly wise” – Zoë Brigley
The Estate Agent’s Daughter is Rhian Edwards’ eagerly awaited follow-up to her multi-prizewinning debut Clueless Dogs. Her voice is both powerfully personal, local to her Bridgend birthplace, and performative, born to be read aloud. In the title poem, the protagonist has become a surrealist house, with dream-like details ‘carpeted with sycamore seeds and cherry blossom throughout’; the sturdy realism of a writing desk ‘nudged/ to the brink of the bay’, as well as points of sharp irony: ‘all mod cons’. This poem foreshadows both the heartbreak (a shattered first marriage) and joy (the birth of a daughter), that feature in the work that follows. We also have pieces of sly irony, of disillusioned dating. There is an engaging diptych devoted to a recently deceased grandmother and grandfather, who died within months of each other, whose vivid personalities with all their tragi-comic elements, shine through. The author combines her visceral skill for description, for these are poems based in the body, with a feminist forthright courage to speak of difficult things.
FAMILY NAME BY MITCHELL, MCFARLANE, AND BRIGLEY
Family Name features three unique poets – Jenny Mitchell, Roy McFarlane, and Zoë Brigley – who consider the act of naming, alongside explorations of family, whether biologically linked or chosen. They also question how names are twisted and debased to dehumanise in domestic and historical settings.
Mitchell conjures the experiences of mothers, grandmothers and foremothers who practise an inherent alchemy to recover power and autonomy, especially in relation to the body. She examines how identity may be stolen, but can also be hard-won.
McFarlane returns to forebears dedicating poems to Chet Baker, Sylvia Plath, the men of the Ellesmere Canal Yard, and, in the moving ‘Haibun for The Fields’, to Ishmael Zechariah McFarlane (“my life father”). McFarlane also tackles language, place and conquest, as in ‘Call me by my name’ where a hurricane refuses the Briticised monikers (Charlie, Gilbert, Dean) allotted it.
Brigley’s poems explore Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797): her life, her family and the background that created this pioneering feminist. Wollstonecraft is so much more than suggested by Horace Walpole’s callous naming of her as a “hyena in petticoats”.
Family Name offers a call to arms, a refusal to accept injustice and a determination to reclaim identity as a site of power.
LYCANTHROPE BY Zoë Brigley
“In her new pamphlet, Zoë Brigley explores the animistic energies of the wolf. Via the medium of a long-distance love affair, she weaves a web of associations around female sexuality, and around the varied ways women are scolded and scorned for their sexuality. She shows us that the archetypal figure of the wolf has many aspects, is not merely the ravening wolf, but the nurturing mythical wolves who raise an abandoned child. The poet speaks movingly of her own sons as wolf-cubs.
“The sense of a voice speaking late at night and texting across time-zones to a listener both loved and trusted is beautifully and movingly held. While one lover sleeps, the other is awake, and this distancing underlines the pain of separation.
“Legend is drawn upon with an exact touch while the shadow of a former and broken relationship haunts the pages. Using all the resonances of wolf, the poet follows the knowledge path that pain and challenge unroll before her.
“In these courageous and insightful poems, the Lycanthrope stands for a core region where love is a transformation/restoration of the self; it reminds us that the natural world, however despoiled by humans, is our key to renewal and understanding and to being understood. These are telling and profoundly-realised poems.”– Penelope Shuttle
Zoë Brigley 
You must be logged in to post a comment.