Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru
Black Shiver Moss
Black Shiver Moss
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Disgrifiad Cymraeg / Welsh Description
Degfed casgliad o gerddi Graham Mort yw Black Shiver Moss . Enillodd Mort ddoethuriaeth mewn Ysgrifennu Creadigol o Brifysgol Morgannwg, a bellach, mae'n athro ym mhrifysgol Caerlŷr ac yn sylfaenydd Canolfan Ysgrifennu Trawsddiwylliannol yno. Mae'r gyfrol hon yn cynnwys cerddi sy'n arddangos ei gynildeb deheuig a'i sylwgarwch hardd ynghyd â straeon byrion arobryn.
Disgrifiad Saesneg / English Description
Black Shiver Moss is his tenth poetry collection by Graham Mort, who gained a PhD in Writing from the University of Glamorgan in South Wales. Now a professor at Lancaster University and founder of their Centre for Transcultural Writing, Mort writes subtle, deft, beautifully observed poems as well as prize-winning short stories.
Manylion y cynnyrch / Product details
- ISBN 13
- 9781781723869
- Gwales Code
- gwales.com.9781781723869
- Gwerthwr / Vendor
- Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru
- Long Title
- Black Shiver Moss
- Awdur / Author
- Mort, Graham
- Current Price ex VAT
- £9.99
- Current Price inc VAT
- £9.99
- Availability Status (EN)
- Non-Stock Item - Ordered on request
- Availability Status (CY)
- Archebir yn ôl y galw
- Dyddiad cyhoeddi / Publication Date
- 2017-06-29
- Cyhoeddwr / Publisher
- Seren
- Media Type (EN)
- Paperback / softback
- Media Type (CY)
- Clawr meddal
- Pages
- 72 pages
- Language Code
- English
- Categori / Category
- CY: Barddoniaeth (yn Saesneg) | EN: Poetry (in English)
- Is-gategori / Subcategory
- CY: Beirdd Unigol (yn Saesneg) | EN: Individual Poets (in English)
Adolygiad y Cyhoeddwr / Publisher Review
Like much of Graham Mort’s previous work, the new poems in Black Shiver Moss travel: across the world, through history, through landscapes. A number are prominently rooted in South Africa while others roam through the north of England and Europe. It’s a book of great energy, not least due to the use of form. Poems are rarely shorter than a page and use long sentences broken across lines to carry their ideas. Add to this a preponderance of verbs ending in '-ing' and you’ve got a collection always on the go. An example is ‘An Old Flame’: a single sentence that runs over thirty lines exploring the way fire grows, consumes, dancing between literal and figurative states. Many poems feature water: heavy rain, rivers in spate: ‘streams unchoke, foaming after that last drench of rain, their other language clamouring.’ (‘Stella Rossa’) As water courses, so do the poems, pouring down the page. But this movement doesn’t prevent the poetic eye from stopping to observe, keenly, the world around us, as seen in some wonderfully sharp images. Here are a few of my favourites: the titular ‘Earthworm’ is ‘an inner-tube/of blood and shit’; spring’s ‘garlic stink’ ‘Rain at Franschoek’); after black-berrying, ‘Our hands are gangland/killer’s mitts’(‘Brambles’); and quarrelling blackbirds are ‘cocksure duellists in tight frock//coats’(‘A Rising’). Some poems lack a discernible viewpoint or narrator, seeming deeply rooted in the landscape they’re describing, but in others an ‘I’ provides a focal point, and I had a strong sense of a couple’s experiences but not in a way that excludes a reader. Unease runs through quite a few poems, the feeling that life is on a knife edge. Reading ‘Steeplejacks’ I held my breath, certain disaster loomed for the two souls who climb a church spire with ‘wind tugging, hearts/hammering’. During shrub-burning in South Africa, caution is ignored: ‘a guy in winkle pickers went past/teetering on a sloping stone with a camera as his family/watched. One slip , we said, but they just laughed’. (‘Fire Management’) Such near misses become more personal in poems concerned with illness and recovery. ‘Veldtschoen’ is a fantastic poem that begins by exploring the history of well-loved boots but shifts to a revelation about a heart bypass, using the hinge of a comparison between tightly-laced boots and ‘thoracic scars’. A later poem, ‘Bypass’, has a speaker haunted by their closeness to death: ‘I’m cycling home to show you that I’m still alive: a breathless revenant, not six years dead.’ Such darkness is lightened by the collection’s many poems about the redemptive power of animals, birds and insects: all the living joy of the natural world. The ordering of poems is very well considered, moving between light and shade, humour and tragedy, and, in some ways, saving the best for last. The collection ends with ‘Aphasia’, a richly meditative sequence that explores the history of lives lived along the River Swale in Yorkshire, and the industries supported by the river: ‘cotton towns’ chanting ‘litanies of servitude’, a rubber mill ‘of hot intractable machines’, chemical works, lead mines. People leave, history becomes nostalgia, and de-industrialisation hollows out a place to be reclaimed by nature. Through the long story of this community an ‘I’ leaves and returns, over-laying personal experiences and digging down into the language of place. Old grave stones do for paving now: ‘the means of//remembrance forgetting itself’. But in charting forgetting, these poems keep memory alive.
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