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For their New Welsh Writers series, The Cardiff Review's Jamie Gillingham interviewed Roberto Pastore (Hey Bert) about all things writing. The series 'speaks to new voices in Welsh literature, delving into how they got their start and what advice they might have for other emerging writers.'

Roberto talks about his writing routine, his inspirations, and his experience of the route into publishing.

by Sydney Whiteside

The second day of the 2020 Seren Cardiff Poetry Festival opened on Saturday morning with the New Poetry Showcase, a spectacle of new poetry from authors with recently published or forthcoming collections. Featuring five writers, both debut poets and those on their second or third collection, the showcase was a brilliant start to a dazzling Saturday of poetry in Cardiff’s Temple of Peace.

Cardiff poet Roberto Pastore was the first to read, sharing poems from his new collection Hey Bert, out now with Parthian. Pastore’s poems burst with energy and humour, highlighting the beauty in the everyday and reminding us of our ‘all too humanness’. Among the poems read was ‘Heart Poem’, a beautiful look into memory and the often impossible expectations we place on ourselves.

Kittie Belltree, who was born in south London and now lives in Wales, followed with readings from her debut collection Sliced Tongue and Pearl Cufflinks, also out now with Parthian. Her poems explore domestic trauma, history, and mother-daughter relationships with paralyzing detail and wit. Belltree closed her reading with ‘Magician’s Daughter’, a beautifully haunting piece about sexual abuse that makes whimsical diction dangerous and twists words into unexpected and wonderful combinations.

Roberto Pastore published his first full collection of poetry, Hey Bert, with us in October. He was recently featured in the Western Mail's Author's Notes and here is the interview with Jenny White in full: Tell me a bit about yourself – where you grew up, how you came to Cardiff, when you started writing poetry. So I grew up in and around Milton Keynes, England, we moved around a lot growing up. My family comes from Italy, my father lives there now. My poem Show Homes is about my parents fondness for looking around houses. It was the era of...

Hello Book Lovers! A very happy Monday to you all. I have some news... for those of you living in the city or visiting there will soon be more poetry in your life with the addition of five (soon to be six) poems in our shopping arcades for the next year including work by Topher Mills, whose Selected Poems will be released through Parthian in the summer, and João Morais, whose debut short story collection Things that Make the Heart Beat Faster is available through us now... Literature Wales write: 'Cardiff is the City of Arcades and soon enough those...

'I am fortunate in having two rooms to write in: one is the loft of our Grangetown home, from which I can hear the wheeze of approaching trains and oversee movement on the platform at Cardiff Central station; the other, far less cluttered, is pictured here. It is the basement of a house in Rabós, a small village in the Alt Empordà region of Catalunya. I am split between two countries, and two homes. It is a privilege, of course, but I run the risk of feeling as though I am permanently coming up against my own absence. I am...