Wildlife

Diolch to Wales Arts Review for including Ness Owen's Moon Jellyfish Can Barely Swim in their pick of poetry Summer Reads! Moon Jellyfish Can Barely Swim   by Ness Owen (Parthian) Moon jellyfish live a life adrift, relying on the current to take them where they need to go. They are the ultimate survivors and one of the most successful organisms of animal life. So how do they thrive in the open ocean when they can barely swim? Ness Owen uses this poignant selection of poems to delve into questions of womanhood, language and identity, asking what it really means to move with the flow of an ever-changing environment.

  Tackling @thesealeychallenge this August?  Well we’ve got the stack for you!  Buy any poetry book from Parthian Books this August and get your second half price with code - SEALEY. www.parthianbooks.com

Nice to see David Hughes, Swansea and Working Out ( Parthian Books ) mentioned in The Friday Poem's article by Steven Lovatt on dialect poetry... I arrange to meet up with David Hughes in Swansea’s Queen’s Hotel, a long-time haunt of poets and other artists, and formerly a place where Swansea dialect would have been thick in the air between the dockers, fishermen and workers at the various foundries and copperworks that made the city’s name. It’s mid-afternoon and the bar is only half-full, mostly with retirees and tradesman on a break. I hear no dialect, though the accent is evident enough. David has arrived before me and thoughtfully bought the first round. We’ve met a couple of times before, at poetry readings and also by chance in the street. He has published two books of poems, Tidy Boy in 1998 and last year’s Working Out. Although mostly in standard English, both collections also contain poems representing the Swansea dialect and accent. The opening stanza of the poem ‘Tidy ...