Books published by Poetry Wales Press

With over 100 recipes elevating traditional Spanish food and drink to new heights, Bar 44 Tapas y Copas is a celebration of things Spanish. Restauranteurs Owen and Tom Morgan's recipes and stories of their experiences in Spain are accompanied by beautiful food photography and design by Spanish artist Andi Rivas, in a book in a class of its own.

Poet and psychogeographer Peter Finch undertakes 20 walks around his native city, picking out features en route and providing interesting stories, historical and contemporary, about life in the city past and present. His sharp eye and compendious knowledge of Cardiff is illustrated by photographer John Briggs' images in a lively guide to the city.

The title of this Mslexia Prize-winning Pamphlet for 2022 is Angola, America, the name of a prison in Louisiana in the southern United Sates. In these strikingly original, thoroughly contemporary, and deeply moving poems by poet Sammy Weater, we are immersed in the world the inmates must endure. From the first poem, when we witness a home-made tattoo and understand that this scarring and incision is a "map in the connective tissue of pain and loss", we are drawn into this world in a way that is carefully observed and beautifully empathetic. What is particularly convincing about these poems is the moral fervor that accompanies an ear that delights in the complexities of language and the music of syntax. It is an emphatic voice, observant to the smallest details and yet steps back from an intrusive 'authorial' presence to let these prisoners and landscapes breathe and be. We observe with the author the society that builds these institutions in which the protagonists survive under extraordinary pressures. We come to acknowledge that we are responsible for the contemporary establishment and continuance of these places. The 'Prison Industrial Complex' is excoriated through artful conceits. There are poems about handcuffs, the Louisiana State Flag, the electric chair. Throughout, the fate of the body is aligned with the fate of the landscape, we see Louisiana's famously endangered coastline, prone to hurricanes and oil-spills. As many of the prisoners are African American, there are some poems that pull historical and cultural references to bear upon themes of whiteness and blackness. Formally, the work is adept, with many 14-line proto-sonnets and then longer-lined free verse poems that are nevertheless, wonderfully compact. it conveys anger without hysteria, empathy without condescension, and pulls us through its compelling narratives with style and flair.

Darkly suggestive of animal dens, shelter and secretive havens, Lairs is inspired by mathematics, the poem becoming a kind of nest, a beautiful accumulation of dense detail. The poems are complex, introspective, reminiscent of fervid lockdowns as well as offering a subtle strand on post-Brexit life, a mocking of establishment conservatism.

Escape Room is the startling debut collection from Bryony Littlefair, following her award-winning pamphlet Giraffe. Littlefair combines clear-eyed observation with wry, surreal humour. Everyday life, work, therapy, graduation and lapsed Christianity are transformed into the comedic and absurd, with warmth, humanity and a deadpan delivery.

An intelligent and beautiful book, Goliat offers absorbing stories of a precarious world on the brink of climate emergency. Employing startling imagery and a deep sense of history, these poems explore the irreplaceable beauty of a wild world, and the terrible damage that humans might do to each other and the earth.

Sanctuary is - urgent. The pandemic has made people crave it; political crises are denying it to millions; the earth is no longer our haven. Even our minds & bodies are not refuges we can rely on. Angela Graham & 5 other poets from Wales & Northern Ireland explore Sanctuary from the inside, asking how we can save the earth, ourselves and others?

The power of song, to sustain the human spirit, resonates through As if to Sing. A trapped caver crawls back through songs to the sea; Welsh soldiers pack their hearts into a song on the eve of battle, âEUR¿for safe-keepingâEUR(TM); a child crossing a bridge sings âEUR¿a song with no beginning or endâEUR(TM).... Blurring past and present, a âEUR¿torchsongâEUR(TM) of music and light intensifies in âEUR¿The Boys in the BranchesâEUR(TM), a moving sequence to the poetâEUR(TM)s sons where three boys scale a tree to manhood, to âEURœcarve their names on the late sunâEUR?. The collectionâEUR(TM)s closing cadence includes the long poem âEUR¿The Key to PenllainâEUR(TM). Set on the Ceredigion coastline in the summer of 1969, its apocalyptic dream stages a search for a key which could save the planet. This tenth collection is rich in the musical lyricism admired by readers and fellow poets, As if to Sing is an essential addition to this poetâEUR(TM)s compelling body of work. Henry has honed his technique still further; he uses traditional and local elements which hymn Wales and gives them to the reader freshly seen.

Fargo Hawkins is 20, he's Harry Swaine's gardener. One day, after he sees a fight between Harry and his wife Anne, Fargo steals a car and he, Anne and a dog called Radar go on the run. They are chased across England by Harry, a firm of detectives and their emotions. Eventually, at a caravan site in Wales, the climax between Fargo and Harry unfolds.

New and Selected Poems is a landmark volume which collects key poems from the career of Hilary Llewellyn-Williams, one of the outstanding poets of her generation in Wales. In addition to the classic sequences 'The Tree Calendar' and 'Book of Shadows', the book also includes new work, such as a cycle of poems devoted to the Benedictine hours.

In 1994 two girls are pen-pals. Then Victoria's letters from Rwanda stop; in Paris Iris can only wonder why. Twenty years later journalist Iris pitches a story to her editor: haunted, to look for Victoria. As she researches, questions about Rwanda & about her father emerge & she is forced to revisit her childhood memories. Can she find Victoria?

Cardiff-lover Peter Finch spent the first lockdown walking the edge of the city in which he was confined by the restrictions. He thought he knew Cardiff, but it was a revelation. Here are new discoveries about the capital's places and history, drawn from Finch's walks, knowledge and his personal history, and an exploration of the nature of borders.

Disturbance is a novel-in-verse, based on a true story, about a man who kills his wife, son and then himself, leaving a daughter as the family's sole survivor.The story features poems in a kaleidoscope of voices from those involved: from the victims to the killer's relatives to the police investigators touched by the tragedy. There is mystery and intrigue, too: this was a well-to-do, well-connected family, suddenly torn apart by violence. This is a very dark book, but a courageous one, ultimately about evil and its presence in our everyday lives.Ivy Alvarez was born in the Philippines, and grew up in Tasmania. After spells in Scotland and Ireland, she moved to Wales in 2004 and became a British citizen in 2010. Her first collection, Mortal, was published by Red Morning Press in 2006 (ISBN 9780976443926). She recently appeared at the 2013 Oxford Literary Festival, and was a featured writer at the Seoul International Writers Festival. She lives in Cardiff.

The Visitations is the follow-up to Kathryn Simmonds' Forward Prize-winning debut, Sunday at the Skin Launderette. The poems are entertaining, amusing and accessible, but unafraid to bring in darker themes and worlds unseen. The tone shifts throughout between the elegiac and the sharply satirical, lit up with life's moments of sudden illumination: a life coach finds an old passport, an infant teeters on the brink of speech."This playful and knowing first collection is fuelled throughout by a strong sense of lyricism." - The Guardian on Sunday at the Skin LaunderetteKathryn Simmonds' first book of poems, Sunday at the Skin Launderette (Seren, 2008; ISBN 9781854114617), won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Felix Dennis Prize, and was shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award and longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. Her pamphlet of poems Snug was a winner in the Poetry Business competition in 2004 and subsequently published by Smith/Doorstop (ISBN 9781902382678). She lives in London and works as a freelance writer, editor and teacher.

Everything I Have Always Forgotten is an idiosyncratic memoir of a Swallows and Amazons-style childhood in north Wales in the 1940s and 50s. Owain Hughes grew up in the family's large but dilapidated house, son of the novelist Richard Hughes - whose circle included Bertrand Russell and Mick Jagger, aristocrats and spies - and the artist Frances Bazley, a member of the Howard family which includes the Dukes of Norfolk. Under their 'benign neglect', Owain's adventures include, aged just 12, a three-day hike through Snowdonia with a friend that ended up with the pair marooned for two weeks on Bardsley Island off the north Welsh coast. There are also trips to the Dyfi Estuary and Clough Williams-Ellis's folly village of Portmeirion. The stories that result perfectly capture a period of post-war British life that looks back to Brideshead Revisited but also forward to kitchen-sink drama and angry young men.Owain Hughes was born in 1943 was educated at Shrewsbury School and Oxford, after which he spent many years travelling, particularly in Africa and the Middle East. The author of two novels, he now lives in New York and Mexico.

A lavishly illustrated celebration of the harp in Wales, the iconic musical instrument central to the culture and identity of Wales, and including interviews with leading harpists and harp makers, this book is the essential guide. Foreword by Catrin Finch.