Awen Publications

Deftly folding in scholarship, historical names, and references without overloading the verse, Kuzminsky traces the 12th-century story of Abelard and Heloise in a series of verse ‘letters’ based on existing letters that the two figures exchanged. Except that Kuzminsky’s stanzas are from Heloise alone. We hear of Abelard through them, not from him. Heloise’s love, her insights, her ambitions, her entreaties, and the events themselves are wrought skilfully into a language tha

What a contrast!! After agreeing to write this blog entry on Irina Kuzminsky’s Heloise Speaks: A Verse Novel, I rushed to my bookshelves to retrieve a translation of The Letters of Abelard and Heloise. Alas, The Letters proved to be florid, circuitous, and unwieldy. What a joyful deliverance to then read Heloise Speaks! Here Kuzminsky adopts Heloise’s persona and grants her a voice easy for a modern reader to grasp. Heloise du Paraclet begins telling us her story, that of an

Three years ago I moved back to England (to Trowbridge, Wiltshire) after 24 years of living on the east coast of America. And I am very happy to announce that a new collection of my poems, Labyrinth from Amethyst Press, is out on Kindle and in print. The labyrinth is my psychic journey out of England and into New England, which forced me to expand my understanding of myself, and of the shadow and the gifts of both cultures. The book includes an introductory essay in which I e

'Although nearly all these poems appear in print here for the first time, reading the eight voices included, all strikingly distinct, offers a pervasive sense of united poetic intention. The anthology’s subtitle, ‘Righting the land left’, reflects an earth-centric and regenerative perspective among a group of writers who have regularly met for nearly two decades to share their work, and with whom I too collaborated. The group evolved, as Dr Kevan Manwaring explains in his int

Helen Moore’s third major collection of poems, The Mother Country, is published by Awen on 1 May 2019. Helen is a poet of passion, power, and precision. She writes with a commitment to the world – the ecological, the political, the spiritual...

Join us on Saturday 4 May for Jay Ramsay: A Celebration of his Life in Music, Poetry and Words at St Lawrence Parish Church, Stroud at 7pm (6pm for vegetarian Indian food)...

My poems were still in the bottom drawer of my desk, and the very idea of performing them was challenging, when I first met Jay, around 30 years ago. Like many other poets before and after me, I got to experience Jay’s extraordinary kindness and

The title of the collection is Out of Time, which seems poignant now that I know that he ran out of time on 30 December 2018, just over ten years later. On the dedication page are several quotes, all of which now seem prescient...

I can’t yet believe he’s gone. He will leave such a big space in the healing and poetry communities of which he’s been such a leading light. He was Awen’s biggest champion, just as he championed and encouraged so many individuals on their creative and spiritual...

by Anthony Nanson The scale of Kevan’s output of poetry of this kind is prodigious, ranging from individual lyrics to ambitious epics....

On 19 August 2018 we gathered in the Ale House in Stroud to celebrate two things: the launch of Awen’s newest title, Silver Branch:...

By Kevan Manwaring (Lughnasadh 2018) Silver Branch: Bardic Poems and Letters to a Young Bard is published on 19 August 2018. It will be...

Jay Ramsay has made a short film about his experience of the cancer journey, including some of the poetry it has inspired. He was due to...

We walked alone together up the steep hillside, finding our own desire paths through the boggy heathland, climbing our own mental...

Jay will be reading from the book at Hawkwood College, Stroud, on 20 April as part of an event with Andrew Harvey on the theme of sacred...

by Ken Masters ‘Hello everybody, assuming you can hear me! I am the ghost of Aristotle, and I haunt the Elwin room at BRLSI, especially...

by Kirsty Hartsiotis When I first saw the cover image for Charlotte Hussey’s Glossing the Spoils, that’s exactly what I thought we had....

by Anthony Nanson Charlotte Hussey’s Glossing the Spoils is rather more than a collection of poems. It will have a particular interest,...

By Robin Collins Britain, this great mnemonic, land of the English, Celt and flint knappers of another age. The seas wrap around her...

By Dawn Gorman How appropriate for a Words & Ears falling on a hot, hot evening that we should find ourselves among Liz Watts’ Beached...