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.

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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”.

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...

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