Books published by Poetry Wales Press

Operation Violet Oak was the police name for its investigation into a child abuse ring in Cardiff. Except the ring never existed. Glascoe's account of false accusation raises important questions about the criminal justice system and police investigations. It is also a moving account of the pressure the accused men lived under for three years.

Famously the 'town of books' and home to the Hay Literature Festival, Hay-on-Wye is a unique rural town. Noakes uncovers the many quirks of this quirky place and explores its rural hinterland: the Black Mountains to the south, Herefordshire to the east, Brecon to the west and Kilvert's Clyro to the north. A book full of unexpected discoveries.

Author Sue Gee explores the wellspring of creativity and practice of twelve prominent but various writers, including Penelope Lively and Anna Burns.

Andre Mangeot's debut poetry collection for Seren, Blood Rain, is partly inspired by his love of the Brecon Beacons and Snowdonia. Beautifully crafted, these poems address the natural world, its endangerment and other pressing global issues from multiple perspectives, and with great lyrical power.

Penned in a distinctive lyrical style, this collection of poems concerns itself with how the living haunt themselves. Each of the pieces are formed around a vivid image--among them, a child's signature in the dust of an old guitar, the stone plinth where a cafe once stood, a white balloon, and a chateau, still furnished with the belongings of its vanished owner. With a powerful and haunting voice, the concept of love underscores the commonplace in this moving and memorable collection of verse.

Sheenagh Pugh's poems continue to entertain and delight her many admirers. In Stonelight, her ninth collection, the keynote is celebration. The opening section includes a moving series called 'Arctic Chart' which commemorates the various people (and one ship) who gave their names to features on the Arctic map. Also here is 'Envying Owen Beattie' (winner of the Forward Prize for Best Poem of 1998), where the discovery of a frozen explorer under permafrost inspires some unusual thoughts. The middle section, including 'The Faithful Wife', makes up a sequence of persona poems in the character of a middle-aged woman in love with a young man. Other poems deal with what Sheenagh Pugh calls "the usual suspects: Shetland, Cardiff, mortality, slightly weird and misplaced people." There are also more of the poet's fine translations from the French and German. "Sheenagh Pugh's work's accessibility is a feature of the clarity and inevitability with which she can pursue intuitions into territories of luminous significance."Poetry Review "Savour the richness of this collection: here is a poet who plays with words seriously and light-heartedly to build fine bridges between the external world and the inner world of imagination." Poetry Monthly Sheenagh Pugh is known to thousands of poetry readers for 'Sometimes', her much anthologised 'poem on the underground' and for her Selected Poems, a set text in schools. She currently lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Glamorgan, and has won numerous prizes for her work, including the Babel Prize for translation and the ACW Book of the Year in 2000.

In the central sequence `Cuts' in Tamar Yoseloff's collection The Black Place, a cancer diagnosis arrives around the same time as news of the Grenfell Tower disaster. This conjunction of the personal and political is uneasy territory but one that the poet moves through with flair, fashioning a new urban noir, darkly glittering and memorable.

In Footnotes to Water (Seren) poet Zoe Skoulding follows two forgotten rivers, the Adda in Bangor and the Bievre in Paris, and tracks the literary hoofprints of sheep through Welsh mountains. In these journeys she reveals urban and rural locales as sites of lively interconnection, exploring the ways in which place shapes and is shaped by language.

Mary J Oliver goes in search of her father through the few memories she has of him and discovers an unfulfilled life tinged with the tragedy of his partner's death and an orphaned daughter in Canada. Using the few documents of Jim's life and a mix of poetry and prose Oliver creates a fascinating and engaging book, unlike any other memoir.

For the past 25 years Daniel Butler has lived in a sixteenth century farmhouse in the Cambrian Mountains near Rhayader, where he has kept hawks for almost as long. The Owl House, however, is his account of his relationship with two wild birds, barn owls which have nested at the farm over the years. In that time they have become tame, allowing unusually close observation, and Butler is able to record the lives of these two birds and his familiarity with them in extraordinary detail. This intimate relationship becomes the starting point for an exploration of how the landscape around Butler's farmhouse - and further afield - has altered over the years, and with it the fortunes of all kinds of wildlife, and in particular those of birds. The changing face of the British countryside is a story of habitat loss, human development and increased traffic and roads; increased housing; noise pollution (especially important for owls); changing farming techniques and land use; the use of agrochemicals; and human indifference to the effects of this. The Cambrian Mountains may be one of the most remote and sparsely populated parts of Britain but it is not immune to physical change and the loss of local tradition and ways of living. The Owl House is a book of multiple but interwoven themes, including pastoral writing; the relationship between man and bird; environmental exploration. Daniel Butler's knowledge of birds, the natural world and his particular locale meld these into an evocative and informative book.

A stunning debut novel exploring the ethnic cleansing of Yugoslavia's ethnic Germans - Schwabians - after WW2, in which a young woman sets out to uncover the past of her grandparents, who fled to America. Ford has written a moving narrative of emigration and identity, realpolitik and relationships, and asks what happens when the truth is unspoken.

An account of the tumults of a Jewish woman's life during and after World War II is related in this powerful autobiography. Beginning with her childhood struggle to protect her younger siblings from the terrors of Nazi Germany, her story follows her harrowing escape to Britain via the Kindertransport, her new life with foster parents in Wales, and her efforts to establish a family as an adult. The tale provides an impassioned look at the difficulty of her life and times, vividly portraying the horrors of the German air raids, the instability of life during a premature and unhappy first marriage, and the heartrending search for surviving Jewish family in Austria, Israel, and the United States.

Author and photographer Phil Cope takes his camera on a journey through the sacred wells of Scotland from the Borders to the Orkney Islands. On his way he discovers wells in city centres and, quite literally, in the middle of nowhere - on mountainsides, in deserted valleys, on the coast, in sea caves. They include healing wells, cursing wells, and wells named for saints, Satan, witches, angels, fairies, friars, nuns, hermits, murderers and hangmen, even a well of the dead. His luscious and atmospheric photographs are accompanied by folk tales, myths and legends, conversations with well-keepers and poems inspired by Scottish wells.

Ibrahim is walking from Cardiff to London. So is Reenie. Neither of them is doing it for charity. But when their paths cross just outside Newport, worlds collide. Ibrahim and Reenie is an intensely human novel from David Llewellyn.