STEVE GRIFFITHS                                                                POET

 

Contact details:  Email by clicking here

                               

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                  Selected Publications:                                               

 

              Anglesey Material: Poems, 1975-78 (Rex Collings, 1980) 

 

              Civilised Airs (Seren, 1984)

 

              Uncontrollable Fields (Seren, 1990)

 

              Selected Poems (Seren, 1993)

 

              Landing (Rack Press, 2008)

 

              An Elusive State: Entering al–Chwm (Cinnamon Press, forthcoming,

             October 2008)

                                            

                                 

                                   Spring

 

Viewed from above in early spring

the oaks have a shifting, softened quality

that gathers itself for green.

Spaced at our feet

the birdcalls rise at intervals

and the urgent, airy thump

of wingbeats punctuates

complaint with escape.

                                      

A rustle of wind

moves up the hill towards us,

recedes through the mix

of trees behind us, all

the senses awakened.  

 

I had thought my capacity

for happiness was limited.

It is good to have arrived here

even if a little late,

discovering a language

I was exiled from,

waking with the ground

strewn with clouds and flowers

and images with their names

that are breaking cover, unafraid.        

 

                                         From ‘Landing’, Rack Press pamphlet, 2008

 

 

 

Steve Griffiths was born in Trearddur Bay, Anglesey, in 1949. He has published four collections of poems since 1980, the last being Selected Poems (Seren, 1993) (www.seren-books.com).     Read a poem from it by clicking here. In the Nineties he took a long break from writing and publishing, before an intense period from 1999–2004 when he wrote An Elusive State: Entering al–Chwm, creating a booklength imaginary Utopia, one that does not always work and is subject to transformations and shifts backward and forward in time. Steve describes it as:

 

 "…a book about maturity, history, mistakes, places, death, democracy, power, laughter in the dark, science in the context of these matters, glasses half full or half empty, cups overflowing and the advantages and disadvantages of this…"

 

It will be published by Cinnamon Press in October 2008 (www.cinnamonpress.com). It was also given extensive coverage in Poetry Wales (starting in issue 39/3, Winter 2003/4). Read extracts from Steve Griffiths' new work by clicking here,  a description of the work by clicking here, and an audio extract by clicking here. Here are some early responses to the manuscript:

 

"…let me say how much I enjoyed the manuscript – it was a real breath of fresh air – genuinely individual…"                              Don Paterson

 

"…Challenging, refreshing…the tangential world we really inhabit…ambitious, demanding and should be seen…"

                                                                            Robert Minhinnick

 

“A parallel universe, a magical epic, a comfort, a mystery”

                                                   Laura Thomas, Producer, BBC Radio                              

 

Steve has recently completed a new book which traces a movement from darkness into light, mostly lyrical and playful poems of renewal written during 2006/8.  Some appeared in Poetry Wales in April 2007, others in The Rialto: the book has not yet gone out to publishers, but the new note of optimism can be sampled in his pamphlet, Landing, from Rack Press (January 2008) (rackpress@nicholasmurray.co.uk).    

 

He has appeared in a number of anthologies, including the Library of Wales Poetry 1900-2000, (2007, Parthian Books, featuring 100 twentieth century Welsh poets writing in English) (www.libraryofwales.org).

 

More Biog

 

See www.academi.org/writers-of-wales for more about the writers of Wales.