Betty Doyle: How I Wrote ‘Announcements’
“It raced through my mind, unlocking all the bars, yelling ‘no compromise – you must and can and will write’”
Content warning: pregnancy loss, childlessness
Category: Poems
Peter E Murphy: How I Wrote ‘Bad History’
“I have a hiraeth for Wales which, cliché alert! nourishes my soul and gets my muse all excited.”
Content warning: mentions of suicide and addiction.
Forward Prize Commended Poems
Meet the Poetry Wales poets featured in the Forward Book of Poetry 202
B. Anne Adriaens: How I Wrote ‘The sea giveth and the sea taketh away’
“Writing long-hand in a notebook feels like a safe space, if only because I’m usually the only person who can read my messy handwriting!”
Content warning: mentions of drowning, death of a child
Ìfẹ́olúwa Àyàndélé: How I Wrote ‘The Dreams of Grandfather and Me’
“The answer I got was the dream. That dream, a cherished ambition, becomes a kind of symbiosis connection between my grandfather and me.”
J.S. Dorothy: How I Wrote ‘Double-Empathy Problem’
“It’s therefore frustration that compelled me to write this poem, and a desire to illuminate how deeply compassion can be felt even when it’s not always immediately apparent”
Jane Houston: How I Wrote ‘Ponies’
“The poem is about a human experience of illness, due to a virus in the human body. But the illness itself takes a human form, and our abuse of shared ground gives the poem its monochrome palette.”
‘The Epic of Cader Idris’ by Samatar Elmi
Poetry Wales are delighted to share here a video featuring poet Samatar Elmi who performs the title poem of the upcoming poetry collection The Epic of Cader Idris (Bloomsbury/flipped eye, 2024)
Mason Lloyd: How I Wrote ‘Is this ok?’
“[No] matter how many words I put down, it didn’t touch on what I was trying to get to. Instead, what I have tried to do is not say it, but use the space in-between, the felt space, and use that as a vehicle to get me, and hopefully the reader, closer to something.”