Skip to main content

Happy Publication Day: This Common Uncommon

 

🌿
When a local common is threatened with development, one poet explores its secrets, discovering extraordinary natural treasures and wonderful people fighting to defend them.
Can they save this uncommon common?
This Common Uncommon, the second collection from poet Rae Howells is available now! Pick up your copy in your local bookshop or direct from our website.



A lovely 5 star review up on Goodreads today too:

'Howells’ poems shriek with the wonder of discovery ... She is intoxicated by the Common, forced to rework language in an effort to encompass what she finds ... I admire the collection so much, wild in every possible way ... But there’s an urgency to the work here for “this soft flank of earth” is under threat. Developers wish to transform the anonymous “Land North of Chestnut Avenue” into affordable housing in a process which will sweep the astonishing Common away. Local resistance is growing and these poems in part illuminate and record that effort ... But most of all the book asks what sort of future we want for our world ... Very highly recommended.' – Ewan Smith

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Wales Book of the Year Shortlist 2025: Little Universe

We're absolutely delighted for Natalie Ann Holborow , today shortlisted for the Wales Book of the Year Award 2025 for her third poetry collection, the stellar Little Universe . Thanks to all the judges and huge congratulations to all the other wonderful writers on the shortlist! If you'd like to get involved, you can vote for your favourite book on the shortlist. ‘Poems of true wonder, mystery composed with precision. Natalie Ann Holborow is a custodian of beauty in the ordinary and the fragility of experience. The lyric moments of her Little Universe made me lift my eyes from the page and consult the stars.’ – Oliver James Lomax ' Little Universe presents an intense voyage through a recognisable Welsh landscape of family, hospital wards, homes, beaches, love, and new life. The poems encompass mythology, the joys of the everyday and the personal inevitability of illness and grief. This is a poetry acutely aware of the specificity of vocabulary and of the unconstrained p...

The More Than Human Perspective in Environmental Poetry: A Poem and Interview with Susie Wild

Interview by Zoë Brigley Welcome back to our series on writing the #MoreThanHuman. We offer a set of interviews with poets and writers on how they approach writing about the environment. The more-than-human is a phrase that seeks to side-step traditional nature-culture dualisms and draw attention to the unity of all life as a kind of shared commonwealth existing on a fragile planet. It also reminds us humans that there is more to life, that there is more world, than the human. It relocates us in relation to the mystery. This week we meet Susie Wild , author of the poetry collections Windfalls and Better Houses , the short story collection The Art of Contraception listed for the Edge Hill Prize, and the novella Arrivals . She tells us she lives in Rhondda Fach “with a TBR pile almost as high as Llanwonno”.

high-piled books... The Work & Stuff update

Hello long-neglected blog. So, I've made it to the other side of teaching my first semester on the MA in Creative and Critical Writing at the University of Gloucs (and some undergrad bits and pieces there and at Cardiff MET)... and also to the other side of organising Griff Rhys Jones' Cardiff Cameo Club Book Launch, The Welsh Cultural Embassy at The Wheatsheaf, and trips to both Laugharne (Take 1) and London Book Fair almost intact, bar a sprained ankle - damn you rainy road potholes. Time for some R&R and a bit of a Spring shake up in between seeing friends and family. BUT first for two updates... ONE: THE WORK & STUFF UPDATE Lots of the books I - and my brilliant authors - have been working on over my last year at the editorial helm of Parthian have recently been, or will soon be, launched into the world and I've been meeting with my 2015 authors too. Congratulations to Craig Hawes who has been longlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize for his d...