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At the Free Verse Poetry Book Fair in London today? Pop along and say hello to our dear poet Kate Noakes who is selling Parthian books all day and then reading at The Poetry Café this evening! She's a star! The Fair and the daytime readings are from 10.30am - 4.30pm at Conway Hall. Daytime workshops and evening readings are at The Poetry Café - the evening readings are 6.30 - 8.30pm.  

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...

HomeAs if we would never arrive,we check our watches and connections.So many elsewheres as wewalk into abandoned roomsthat somehow have forgotten us.A window propped, half-openon a garden, stares. A birdas if to say, you’re here,glances its wings against the blueso far away, then becomes invisible.How they call to us, the lost places.Now I carry my life, as a snail might,slipping across grass and stone:the shrugged contours of her shell’s light spiral,the glistening of her bridal train.Like a half-remembered song,marking us, making us,words call us back, they call us on.To know the world in another languageis to never know the world...