Books published by Poetry Wales Press

Hannah Hodgson is a seriously ill poet, deploying the surreal and the medical to chart institutional truths vs the individual. 163 days is the length of her longest hospitalisation. Here we join her. At turns funny and hopeful, frightening and moving, this collection is an unusual look at impending mortality and the body/mind as separate selves.

Same Difference is Ben Wilkinson's formally acute second collection. Carefully crafted yet charged with contemporary language, the poems experiment with poetic voice and the dramatic monologue, keeping the reader on their toes and asking just who is doing the talking. Tough, gritty, and often moving, this is a collection for our times.

Michael O'Brien was a victim of a miscarriage of justice over a murder in Cardiff. He was driven to discover more about the many notorious and dubious convictions made in south Wales over a period of thirty years. This is the shocking result of his research into fifteen cases, and the Miscarriage of Justice Unit in the South Wales Police Force.

We Have To Leave The Earth, Carolyn Jess-Cooke's third book of poems, deftly interweaves the personal and the political. Climate change is confronted in a portrait of the Arctic with its 'wolf winters'. The House of Rest, is a history in 9 poems of Josephine Butler a pioneering feminist activist. There are also tender poems about family.

In Much With Body, Polly Atkin displays her gifts as a vibrant and provocative contemporary nature poet. The dramatic landscapes of the Lake District and the diaries of Dorothy Wordsworth give rise to these poems. A life-long negotiation with a set of chronic health conditions, brings urgency to her warning we can't expect nature to save us.

Set in the near East, Four Dervishes is a journey to understanding through layers of storytelling. Dark family secrets are laid bare, crimes committed, unknown links between a father and a son revealed, and the cycle - the circularity - of life is confirmed. All because a power failure forces the narrator to confront his present circumstances.

100 Poems to Save the Earth is a concise, eclectic and engaging anthology of poems in English addressing the climate crisis, edited by poets and enviromentalists Zoe Brigley and Kristian Evans and including poems from America, UK, Ireland and beyond, such as Roger Robinson, Rhian Edwards, Tishani Doshi, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, and George Szirtes.

Octogenarian language geek Vernon, who's never written a book, tries to find a way to write the story of his long marriage to Hannah. Under the comic surface of Vernon's pompous voice hides a story of murderous fantasy, obsession, passion and regret. A verbally brilliant tragicomic short novel with some surprising twists and a moving denouement.

Faced with two murders, industrial espionage, a sexual predator, a mining disaster, Thomas Chard must puzzle how these things fit together to capture a mysterious murderer, and avoid becoming the poisoner's victim himself. Gripping, authentic and atmospheric, Fatal Solution is the second Inspector Chard mystery in Victorian Pontypridd.

Karaoke King is a second collection from Cardiff-born, London-based poet Dai George, in which he ponders the state of the nations he moves through, muses on the music that he has loved since childhood, and considers the battered dreams of his generation, who are faced with a multitude of challenges: climate change, a fractured politics, a pandemic.

The Golden Valley is an exploration and a celebration of a small south Wales valley. The site of ancient tombs and settlements, its rural life was for just over a century taken over by the brutal occupation of coal mining before abandonment once more to nature. In well-chosen words and stunning photographs this is the story of one place, and many.

Real Oxford shows that there's more than dreaming spires and bicycles to the city. The grand buildings of the university are here, but Patrick McGuinness charts a personal history of the place which radiates into the suburbs and into the everyday of people's lives, past and present. Surprising, quirky, Real Oxford presents the city anew.

Auscultation is the act of listening, particularly to body sounds. In Pedler's case, a career as a veterinary surgeon has given her insight into human and animal relations. Experience as a mother and stepmother, a deep concern with listening and being heard as well as a vocation to caring, illuminate these beautifully clear and gripping poems.

Rosalind Hudis' poetry collection, Restorations, is a journey through memory. Suffused with colour, inspired by thoughts of people and places, by artefacts and how the passage of time shifts perspectives and erodes surfaces, these poems are beautifully complex explorations, full of curiosity and the adventure of seeing and listening.

Cardiff-based poet Abeer Ameer writes of her forebears in her first collection, Inhale/Exile. Dedicated to the "holders of these stories", the book begins with a poem about a storyteller on a rooftop in Najaf, Iraq, follows tales of courage and survival, and ends with a woman cooking food for neighbours on the anniversary of her son's death.

Renowned poet/novelist Christopher Meredith's new poetry collection Still, uses the title word as a fulcrum to balance various paradoxical concerns: stillness and motion, memory and forgetting, sanity and madness, survival and extinction. Lively and thought-provoking, this is a beautifully crafted, humane and intelligent collection.

TROEON:TURNINGS is a creative conversation, in Welsh and English, between two renowned poets, Philip Gross and Cyril Jones. Also featured are text designs by artist Valerie Coffin Price. Various rivers run through this work: amongst them, in Gross's case, the Taff, the Severn in south Wales, and in Jones's the Arth and the Glasffrwd in west Wales.

'Uruk's Anthem' has been described as beautiful, powerful and courageous and at the same time apocalyptic and terrifying in its unwavering scrutiny of, and opposition to, oppression and dictatorship wherever it occurs in the world. Fusing ancient Arabic and Sumerian poetic traditions with many innovative and experimental features of both Arabic and Western literature, Uruk's Anthem might best be described as a modernist dream poem that frequently strays into nightmare; yet it is also imbued with a unique blend of history, mythology, tenderness, lyricism, humour and surrealism. It took twelve years to write (1984-1996). During eight years of that time Adnan was forced to fight in the Iran-Iraq War. Many of his friends were killed and he spent eighteen months in an army detention centre, a disused stable and dynamite store, dangerously close to the border with Iran. Parts of 'Uruk's Anthem' were adapted for the stage and performed in 1989 at the Academy of Fine Arts and in 1993 at the Rasheed Theatre in Baghdad where the play received wide acclaim but angered the government. Adnan fled the country with his family and sought asylum first in Amman, then Beirut and then Sweden, where extracts of 'Uruk's Anthem', together with the poems of Adnan's friend, the Nobel Laureate Tomas Transtroemer, formed a play which was performed in 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2014 as well as in Egypt 2007 and 2008. It was also performed in Morocco 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2014. A smaller selection of extracts from 'Uruk's Anthem' (translated by Jenny Lewis and Ruba Abughaida) was published in English for the first time in 'Singing for Inanna' (Mulfran Press, 2014) a first step towards this important, more comprehensive translation. 'Let Me Tell You What I Saw' includes notes to the text and an introduction by Jenny Lewis, and a note from Ruba Abughaida, translator.

Many of the characters in 'A City Burning' face decisions about embracing a fuller life, though at a cost to themselves. Others are witness to events in which they must decide to be involved or pass by. These are stories, especially the ones set in The Troubles, where the reader is bound to a character's dilemmas by tellingly empathetic writing.

Cambridge, ancient academic centre and fenland community, science/tech centre and centre of radical religious and political thinking, home to grand museums and agricultural cottages. With an American war cemetery, folk festival, iron age fort, evensong and Reality Checkpoint, it is a place alone as former student Grahame Davies finds on his return.

Like the rest of the UK, lockdown in Wales meant human tragedies and unforeseen pressures on our lives. How did we manage? What was the cost to people and to the country? What did it say about the place we live in? Will Hayward has the insider account of personal loss and government strategizing, key worker heroics and political fall-out.

Left wing, working class radical Elaine Morgan was a trailblazing woman writer, especially in tv writing where her credits included Lloyd George. She also wrote about feminism and anthropology, with The Descent of Woman and The Aquatic Ape. This new biography celebrates her achievements and looks at the person behind the writing on her centenary.

Eating well, eating affordably, eating sustainably are three contemporary issues. In The Seasonal Vegan Sarah Philpott shows us how, with delicious recipes geared to seasonal crops, and some year-round menus. Illustrated by beautiful colour images, Philpott's recipes reduce environmental impact, spare our wallets and enjoy tasty and wholesome food.

Universally captivating, Sir John Soane's museum in London is a labyrinth of evocation and imagination. Robert Seatter conjures it up in a personal and poetic trail, capturing the tragic story of the man who created it and the eclectic collection he gathered within its walls. With collaged elements from images of the museum artifacts.

Rhian Edwards won Wales Book of the Year for her debut poetry collection, Clueless Dogs. The Estate AgentâEUR(TM)s Daughter is her eagerly awaited second book. Acute and wryly observed, the poems step forth with a confident tone, touching on the personal and the public, encapsulating a womanâEUR(TM)s tribulations in the 21st century.

Katrina Naomi's poetry collection, 'Wild Persistence', written after a move from London to Cornwall, considers distance and closeness, and questions how to live. She dissects 'dualism' and arrival, sex and dance, a trip to Japan. There is a strong section of poems about the aftermath of an attempted rape. Her voice is convincing and contemporary.