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EDITORIAL 2 024 is an exciting year for Poetry Wales. Via a New Audiences grant from the Books Council of Wales, six contributing editors will work in pairs across three issues, including three Welsh writers and three alumni from the Obsidian Foundation, a retreat for black poets of African descent. This issue, Welsh poet Taylor Edmonds teams up with American Tangie Mitchell, focusing on home in a time of ecological emergency, and it has been a joy to hold this space with them both. Look out for their brilliant conversation with the American writer Ariana Benson. Our literar y culture helps to define what home is, and the Poetry Wales team were relieved at the end of 2023 to receive generous franchise funding from the Books Council of Wales. I write with gratitude though I am sorry that worthy magazines like Planet: the Welsh Internationalist and The New Welsh Review have lost their funding. Many of us as new writers were affirmed by being published in these magazines. We find another kind of home in strong literar y communities. This issue features new voices writing in and about Wales including Adedayo Agarau, Lily Dyu, Natasha Gauthier, and Gwen Williams. We have a moving long poem by Damian Walford Davies and more great poems by Jeremy Dixon, Catherine Fisher, Jeremy Hooker, Mike Jenkins, and Hilary Watson. As a girl growing up in Wales, I remember visiting my father when he was working at the Temple of Peace (its full name The Welsh National Temple of Peace and Health) in Cardiff, created by Lord David Davies after horrific experiences in the trenches in World War One. Here, I first learned about Wales’s history of anti-violence advocacy. For the past six months, our second Wales Young Poets Award / Gwobr Beirdd Ifanc Cymru has been running in partnership with the Temple of Peace School Initiative on the theme of peace. Eurig Salisbury will be reading poets aged ten to seventeen on the subject. In such struggles, poetry has long been a medium for those who would be silenced. Auden, writing about Yeats, commands us to ‘Follow, poet, follow right / To the bottom of the night, / With your unconstraining voice’. The voice of the poet is perhaps not simply unconstrained but unconstraining – seeking to set others free. For this issue, Welsh poets like Abeer Ameer, Shara Atashi and Hammad Rind were keen to write about Gaza, high in Wales’s consciousness as last November 2023, the Welsh parliament called for a ceasefire of violence against Palestine. This past January 2024, the International Court of Justice issued an order that ‘all measures must be taken … to prevent … incitement to commit genocide’. In response. Ameer’s poem ‘Ghazal: My name’ speaks to the pain and horror of conflict, while blacked out passages remind us of constraints on speech – what we are or are not allowed to say. In a feature considering human rights and poetry, Atashi draws on the Persian poet Saadi Shirazi to consider what human rights mean today, and in Rind’s essay, the anti-violence sentiments of Audre Lorde and Mahmoud Darwish are explored. Alongside Rind and Atashi, So Mayer explores Ma¯ori poetry and the winning of personhood for a Aotearoa/New Zealand river, noting that poetry can disrupt the grammar of colonialism, while Sara Abou Rashed gives an account of how poetry lifts the voices of Palestinians, who are ‘not alone’ internationally in the violence they experience, but they are ‘lonely’ in terms of support. ZOË BRIGLEY 2 POETRY WALES
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For this issue, we wondered how poets would respond to the theme of home in a time of ecological emergency. Home as in a place beyond time, beyond our physical bodies; as something that can manifest spiritually and emotionally. Working across continents with my fellow editors, we received an influx of inspiring work. Although we put out this call for submissions before the escalation of the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, I found that many poems, perhaps unintentionally, spoke potently to what we’ve been witnessing through our screens. They speak to a deep mourning for land taken and destroyed, to the legacies of colonialism and its ecological destruction. I have sought comfort in these poems when in despair. My selection includes voices from Wales to the USA to India, and although writing from different corners of the globe, there are echoes between them. Echoes of oceans and rivers, of fallen trees, of ancestral longing. In a time where poets are targeted and feared, I’m reminded of the importance of bearing witness, of documenting, of echoing the truth across waters. It has been a joy to work with Tangie and Zoë on this issue. Thank you for trusting us with your words. TAYLOR EDMONDS It has been incredible to tend to this issue with fellow editors Zoë and Taylor — as we reeled from the human rights atrocities happening in Gaza, the Congo, Sudan, and to indigenous people around the world, I am grateful for their generosity of mind and spirit in envisioning an issue where the work calls us in, acknowledges our precarious ecological and socio-political futures, explicitly names the violences being carried out against humanity and their authors, and contemplates how we fight for and hold on to each other in the face of it all. Included here are poems that wander/wonder through rivers, oceans, gardens, the Arctic, the solar system, a Berlin bar, a New York City street, mud—all holding up to the light the strange condition of living amidst ever-heightening environmental devastation. In JH Grimes’ ‘UNDESERVED LIFE,’ the smoke from cigarettes and German wildfires blur the edges of urban vignettes marked by death, confusion, desire, and anxiety. Vasiliki Albedo’s ‘Perseverance,’ Lily Dyu’s ‘Pipistrelle on an April Afternoon,’ and Sophia Argyris’ ‘This is the Last House We’ll Ever Live In, Walled By Sky’ highlight the darker sides of humanity: our obsession with conquest and power (often at the planet’s expense); our panicked search for a scapegoat in moments of large-scale social unrest (like the COVID-19 pandemic); our self-involvement that often distracts us from the planet’s natural beauty, sowing seeds of neglect and miscare for the only home we have. Alternatively, Sharon Black’s ‘mud,’ Meg McManama’s ‘Ode to the Great Salt Lake,’ and Alexandra Malouf ’s ‘Red Cedar to The Gardener’ reflect the ancient, reverent relationship between people and the land, severing the mythic line between the human and nonhuman worlds. In these poems, the cedar holds us despite ourselves, we pray for the lake’s return, the mud is a keeper of our truths. Still yet, Rupinder Kaur Waraich’s ‘A Future Cry’ and Caleb Nichols’ ‘Persistence of Memory’ question what remains of us after our bodies, and our rivers, wash away. In all of these poems, the backdrop of a shrinking natural world activates awe, grief, hope, and unease concerning what we can cling to as ‘home’ — the answer as elusive as a grandparent’s memory, a bat flying in broad daylight, a suitcase lost to a flood. TANGIE MITCHELL 3 POETRY WALES

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EDITORIAL

2

024 is an exciting year for Poetry Wales. Via a New Audiences grant from the Books Council of Wales, six contributing editors will work in pairs across three issues, including three Welsh writers and three alumni from the Obsidian Foundation, a retreat for black poets of African descent. This issue, Welsh poet Taylor Edmonds teams up with American Tangie Mitchell, focusing on home in a time of ecological emergency, and it has been a joy to hold this space with them both. Look out for their brilliant conversation with the American writer Ariana Benson.

Our literar y culture helps to define what home is, and the Poetry Wales team were relieved at the end of 2023 to receive generous franchise funding from the Books Council of Wales. I write with gratitude though I am sorry that worthy magazines like Planet: the Welsh Internationalist and The New Welsh Review have lost their funding. Many of us as new writers were affirmed by being published in these magazines. We find another kind of home in strong literar y communities.

This issue features new voices writing in and about Wales including Adedayo Agarau, Lily Dyu, Natasha Gauthier, and Gwen Williams. We have a moving long poem by Damian Walford Davies and more great poems by Jeremy Dixon, Catherine Fisher, Jeremy Hooker, Mike Jenkins, and Hilary Watson.

As a girl growing up in Wales, I remember visiting my father when he was working at the Temple of Peace (its full name The Welsh National Temple of Peace and Health) in Cardiff, created by Lord David Davies after horrific experiences in the trenches in World War One. Here, I first learned about Wales’s history of anti-violence advocacy. For the past six months, our second Wales Young Poets Award / Gwobr Beirdd Ifanc Cymru has been running in partnership with the Temple of Peace School Initiative on the theme of peace. Eurig Salisbury will be reading poets aged ten to seventeen on the subject. In such struggles, poetry has long been a medium for those who would be silenced. Auden, writing about Yeats, commands us to ‘Follow, poet, follow right / To the bottom of the night, / With your unconstraining voice’. The voice of the poet is perhaps not simply unconstrained but unconstraining – seeking to set others free.

For this issue, Welsh poets like Abeer Ameer, Shara Atashi and Hammad Rind were keen to write about Gaza, high in Wales’s consciousness as last November 2023, the Welsh parliament called for a ceasefire of violence against Palestine. This past January 2024, the International Court of Justice issued an order that ‘all measures must be taken … to prevent … incitement to commit genocide’. In response. Ameer’s poem ‘Ghazal: My name’ speaks to the pain and horror of conflict, while blacked out passages remind us of constraints on speech – what we are or are not allowed to say. In a feature considering human rights and poetry, Atashi draws on the Persian poet Saadi Shirazi to consider what human rights mean today, and in Rind’s essay, the anti-violence sentiments of Audre Lorde and Mahmoud Darwish are explored. Alongside Rind and Atashi, So Mayer explores Ma¯ori poetry and the winning of personhood for a Aotearoa/New Zealand river, noting that poetry can disrupt the grammar of colonialism, while Sara Abou Rashed gives an account of how poetry lifts the voices of Palestinians, who are ‘not alone’ internationally in the violence they experience, but they are ‘lonely’ in terms of support.

ZOË BRIGLEY

2 POETRY WALES

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