It was a particular pleasure to launch my collection, ‘STAR: poems for the Christmas Season’ at Canton library because it’s my local library in Cardiff. And even more special because some of the poems in the book are set in nearby streets. Plus, I’m honoured to be Author of the Month for Libraries Wales https://libraries.wales/aotm/angela-graham-2
Libraries have been crucial to my development as a person and as a writer. My family couldn’t afford to buy books but the local library and Belfast’s Central Library enabled me to read widely. This is a kind of nourishment and without it my childhood and adolescence would have been stinted and stunted. It’s also, by a kind of osmosis, a lesson in the benefits of sharing resources.
I had the pleasure of doing readings and workshops with ‘STAR’ in 8 libraries in Northern Ireland and, just as here in Wales, that experience showed me time and again how a library sustains a locality.
Librarians deal in more than books. They are sources of information, support and encouragement and, crucially, they help people to help each other through many kinds of groups. Everywhere I sensed the loyalty and affection people feel for their libraries.
Launching ‘STAR’ in Canton Library, Cardiff
At every event people have enjoyed the images I present along with the poems. Martin Erspamer’s 15 beautiful linocuts in the book are always admired. And everyone likes the cover! I also show art works that relate to poems.
The local MP, Alex Barros-Curtis came along, so maybe ‘STAR’ will make it to Westminster!
Cardiff West MP Alex Barros-Curtis at Canton Christmas Fair
And Ward Councillor, Susan Elsmore came to the launch.
Canton Christmas Fair getting underway
I love presenting my work at events like this one because it is a wonderful way both to meet people and to see and feel how the poems are affecting those who listen to them.
I’m grateful to the very helpful and welcoming staff at Canton Library and to Libraries Wales.
Canton Library is a Carnegie building, opened in 1907, and is Grade II listed. I took the photo below when some stalls had packed up and things were quietening down. There’s such a feeling of spaciousness and light.
Every day from Monday 16th December till Tuesday 24th December, Christmas Eve, I’ll read a poem on BBC Radio Ulster’s drivetime programme, ‘Evening Extra’.
A bold idea, mixing headlines, weather reports and poetry!
The poems are from my collection, ‘STAR: poems for the Christmas Season’ (Culture and Democracy Press).
Monday 16th:
STAR is available online from The Books Council of Wales gwales.com https://tinyurl.com/37f4rruj or via No Alibis, Belfast; The Secret Bookshelf, Carrickfergus or Little Acorns, Derry or any bookstore.
Angela Graham is from Northern Ireland. She became a full-time writer in 2017, following a long career as a film maker in documentary and drama (BAFTA Cymru Awards, Oscar Foreign-language entrant). A Writer’s Bursary from Literature Wales helped Angela complete her collection of 26 short stories set in Wales, Northern Ireland and Italy, and A City Burning was published by Seren Books in 2020. It was longlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize 2021. Her 2022 collection of poetry, Sanctuary: There Must Be Somewhere, was also published by Seren Books.
Angela is Welsh-speaking, and divides her time between Northern Ireland and Wales. She has received an Honorary Life Fellowship from the Institute of Welsh Affairs for her work on media and democracy. Her second poetry collection STAR: Poetry for the Christmas Season was published in August this year by Welsh independent, Culture & Democracy Press.
The collection takes readers on a journey as ‘everyday Magi’ through a wide range of human experience – political power struggles; persecution and flight; the vulnerability of the innocent and of the planet – alongside celebration, wonder and friendship. At the book’s core are The Three Kings but also The Three Queens: women who are brought forward from behind the scenes, to be seen and heard. The collection is illustrated by powerful and sensitive linocuts from Martin Erspamer.
Thank you Angela for answering a few questions for Libraries Wales. Tell us a little about your background…
I grew up in working-class east Belfast. The local library was a big part of my life as there was no money to buy books. I loved reading and I wrote from an early age. At grammar school I had a wonderful English teacher for the first five years. Every type of writing we read we would then have to write in that style. It was a great training. We produced writing every week. The school also put a great stress on Shakespeare and every year we read a play and staged scenes from it in a school competition. We learned so much about theatre.
We also read a lot of the latest local writing which was, in Northern Ireland of the 1960 and early ‘70s, of world-class calibre. We were taken to hear Seamus Heaney read just down the road. I remember thinking that here was a person like myself. If he could be a writer then so could any of us. And when we had exams in school I know now that the unseen poetry we were given to critique was absolutely hot off the press. I sensed it related to my life without knowing this at the time. This is a great gift to a child, to make clear that writing is for you.
What memories and influences stand out from your childhood?
The Troubles were the framework to my adolescence and young adulthood. From an early age, people such as myself understood from experience how important politics is – something that creates the conditions of life, whether work, housing, transport, education… And I learned early that words have consequences. They foster life or death.
Irish culture, of course, was very important. My mother was a Dubliner and I loved going south to what was then a very different part of Ireland from the North.
Journalism and broadcasting made a big impact because I could see how crucial these were to democracy. I worked as a TV documentary-maker for most of my working life in Wales and taught Documentary Journalism at Cardiff University.
As a young person, who or what influenced you?
I was an avid fan of Star Trek, particularly of Mr Spock. I even wrote a novel about the crew of the Enterprise coming to Belfast. I’d read extracts of it to my pals in school every day. It ended when I got the characters into a situation I couldn’t resolve. Early example of plot problems!
We had a wonderful set of English text books called English Through Experience. They introduced us to pieces from writers I now realise were cutting-edge: Rachel Carson’s ‘Silent Spring’ and the science fiction of Ray Bradbury. And all the time we were writing.
I loved art, though I couldn’t draw. We had a great Art teacher who got us to study history of art and of architecture. I loved that and it has remained a passion.
What influences you now?
Politics and poetry, and (with its roots in that early experience of societal collapse in Northern Ireland) the dynamic of confrontation and dialogue which is being played out on a global scale around us now.
I’ve lived in Wales for 43 years. As soon as I moved here I embarked on learning Welsh, as a mark of respect for the country and because I knew from the experience of Irish in Northern Ireland that language matters. Language, culture, the individual… From Wales I have learned another way of looking at the world, another history. I have access to the treasures of Welsh literature and culture.
When did you realise you wanted to write, was there an ‘eureka moment’, and did any particular factors make a difference?
I wrote my first poetry when I was six. It was a natural thing to do. And I wanted to be a writer. I read some books many times because I wanted to understand how the writers achieved their effects. I didn’t find out much because that was beyond me but I never had any doubt that writing was the thing to do.
I have read that some women of my generation in Northern Ireland were made to feel that poetry-writing in particular was not something open to them but, because of the hands-on attitude of my school, it never occurred to me that there was a barrier.
And, again, the public libraries were essential. I was about twelve when I first bought a book in a shop and I remember the experience vividly. An aunt visiting from America had given me enough to buy a paperback novel. A book of my own. Wonderful. But in the library there were floors of books! Without libraries I would not have had access to books other than those we had in school. I would have been starved.
Tell us a little about STAR: Poems for the Christmas Season, what inspired you to write this book, and what do you hope readers will get out of it?
I’m working on a book about the house in which I grew up, a tiny 2-up, 2-down. Christmas was no less special because the house was small. I wrote a poem about my father making Christmas something to remember for me and my mother with very few materials. That got me thinking about how Christmas is experienced in families.
And also, I love sculpture and I came across a photo of a twelfth-century carving from Autun Cathedral called ‘The Awakening of the Magi’. The sculptor had asked himself, What happened before the Three Kings from the Christmas story saw the guiding star. He carved a scene in stone on the capital of a pillar. It shows the moment an angel pokes one of the three sleeping kings and, with his other hand, point up to a star. This is the moment before the great moment; the moment before something is perceived and chosen. That fascinates me. So, maybe the book is an opportunity for the reader to become, as one of the poems puts it, an ‘ one of the everyday magi’ criss-crossing the city, on a journey of discovery, a search for a star.
Cathédrale d’Autun by Gilles Guillamot
That’s why the cover of Star is a linocut version of that carving by the wonderful Martin Erspamer. Fifteen of his linocuts accompany the poems.
Once I started speculating on the Three Kings I wondered who they left behind when they went on their journey, and so I ‘saw’ the Three Queens. Who were these women? I wrote them.
The poems in the book attempt to represent, but go beyond, the outer surface of Christmas, into the darkness that is always around it, to realistically consider what grounds we have for hoping for light.
What are your favourite reading genres, and what book are you reading at the moment?
I love Victorian novels, heavy with plot and wildly inventive. And I read a great deal of contemporary poetry.
Do you have suggestions of how to encourage children and young people to read more for pleasure?
I believe that linking reading to writing is key. It’s boring to read only and not try things out yourself. And reading plays is great, and then writing your own, and acting out ‘the greats’. Nothing should be presented as too difficult. It’s always a horizon that might be reached.
Do you have a quote that inspires you?
Seamus Heany’s words from 1975, ‘Whatever you say, say nothing.’ That poem captures the reality of life in Northern Ireland at that time and his observations apply to any society where there is great tension because a lie is being maintained in order to keep some group dominant. Once this negative dynamic is named and outed it becomes less effective. I keep in mind this positive face of such a negative line. Whatever I say, I try to say something worth hearing.
Thank you Angela.
STAR: Poems for the Christmas Season was published by Welsh independent, Culture & Democracy Press, 22nd August, 2024.
More information about Angela’s work on her website.
“Is there anything left to say about Christmas?” exclaimed a fellow writer (not unkindly) when I mentioned that it is the theme of my new book. I was taken aback because it had never occurred to me that this particular challenge existed. My reply was, “Once I started writing I couldn’t stop.”
Responses to the book have shown me that readers are indeed surprised to find in it things that they consider novel or surprising. If I’d been aiming for novelty I’m pretty sure it would have eluded me. The book was prompted, in fact, by something that is more than nine hundred years old; something I’ve seen only in a photograph.
In the twelfth century, Gislebertus, the stonemason/architect of the cathedral at Autun in the heart of France, took advantage of the flat surfaces of the capitals on some of the pillars supporting the building to carve scenes from the bible, including aspects of the Christmas story. The journey of the ‘wise men from the East’(or kings, or magi) took his fancy. He must have asked himself how their story began. How did the notion of following a star to search for ‘the infant king of the Jews’ come to them? He himself had imagined a whole cathedral into being. Perhaps he had explored the genesis of that extraordinary journey of his own.
He depicts that instant of inspiration by placing The Three Kings in bed together. Two are asleep but one has been prodded into consciousness by the finger of an angel. The awakening king has opened only one eye. He hasn’t yet turned to see that the angel is also pointing to a star. As a result of his choosing this moment just before the ‘action’ begins, it’s we who supply what happens next – the groggy coming-to; the search for what has disturbed him; the sight of the wonderful star; the excited rousing of his companions …
Each of us creates within us a unique set of images in response to this one piece of art; each of us has a dialogue with the elements of the story on, and in, our own terms. Our inner world is affected – in my case it has resulted in a poem, and then a book, prompted by that depiction of the moment before the ‘big moment’.
AUTUN CATHEDRAL, MAGI
Does the sky have tent-poles?
And some cathedrals are forested.
God walks in their depths on a December afternoon
while the topmost branches brush the undersides
of planets fixed mid-orbit
– those stained-glass windows fruiting overhead.
Here no one thinks of weight, of downwardness
and how the roof desires it.
God pauses among the pillars
at a carved capital that always lifts his heart:
an artist like himself, from this blunt-cornered oblong stone,
gives us a bird’s view of a bed
draped in a ruched counterpane, three kings tucked in,
but the eyes of one, popped open, register
Why? Who? still unaware
of the angel at his shoulder, stroking his hand,
whose other index finger points at a star.
God sighs, at the weight borne by the moment
after such a moment; at how he waits
for a man to look up at the sky
and recognise and seize
the chance of joy.
I am in awe of the confidence with which Gislebertus takes control of an awkwardly shaped, trapezoid stone facet. He breaks its confines by placing the star both inside and outside the ‘frame ‘ of the piece of stone. He exploits difficulty, turning a blank surface into something beautiful. Isn’t this what writers try to do? I allowed myself to follow his method, to imagine other moments in the story of The Three Kings.
Two aspects of the story struck me particularly: who do they leave behind when they set out on their journey westward and why do they seem so politically naïve?
From the first question came my conception of The Three Queens. Couldn’t there have been women involved in this quest? At the heart of the book is a set of six long poems: one for each of the queens, giving a glimpse into their experience and perceptions; and one for each king, so that the six poems play off each other in terms of content and character.
Secondly, I allowed myself to pull at a thread in the Gospel account (Matthew’s) that has long bothered me. The Kings arrive at Jerusalem, go straight to the palace and expect the incumbent to be pleased that a potential rival has been born. Shouldn’t they have had a plan for coping if he turned out to be eager to get rid of the child? They mis-read the local political scene completely and they endanger everyone they meet.
The Christmas story is shot through with elements we easily recognise: political expediency of a murderous kind and a topsy-turveying of people on the fringes of society and those on its heights. There is violence and exile, heartless exploitation and selfishness here. So you’ll find in the book poems about climate change, refugees, the suppression of women and other aspects of what I call ‘the dark hinterland’ of Christmas.
It is this grounding in the cold realities of life that gives Christmas, for me, its authenticity. The story is one about love and what it costs and what it offers, or even guarantees. It’s not about mere sentiment.
For these reasons I find Christmas an inexhaustible source of inspiration.
Above image, artwork copyright Martin Erspamer
In designing the book I very much hoped to have Gislebertus’s Awakening of the Magi as the cover image. I am thrilled to have Martin Erspamer’s wonderful linocut version and, even more so, to have fifteen of his sensitive images alongside the poems. I especially like what I think of (to myself) as the Awakening of the Family, a sort of companion-piece to the Autun work. It depicts Jospeh, Mary and the baby asleep in a bed just like that of Gislebertus, with the same angel poking Joseph but pointing westward, towards exile.
I have also used this book, my metaphorical block of stone, as a space in which to bring together some of the tongues of the British Isles. You’ll find a poem here in Ulster-Scots, and a little Irish, Welsh and Scots. It’s a small canvas but then a manger is small too.
STAR: poems for the Christmas Season was published August 2024 by Culture And Democracy Press. £10 ISBN 978-1-0686946-0-8
“It takes a real poet to make those of us jaded by Christmas reimagine the season. Angela Graham performs the feat of translating the festival into an urgent challenge, fraught with our contemporary problems and yet full of joy. This book, with its lovely illustrations, will be used for a very long time.”
“In these intimate contacts with the so-very-strange tale of Christmas, Angela Graham refreshes the familiar with an array of characters and forms drawn from her own eclectic gathering of aesthetic influences – the three wise wives, the woman at the well, cards arriving for lost former inhabitants, departures of friends, innocence, languages (including Welsh, English, Ulster-Scots, Irish). Accompanied by wry and knowing linocuts by Martin Erspamer OSB, her poems enact much of the mesmeric pull of the season on young hearts, as well as the melancholic longing more jaded spirits bring to the festivities.
These are lyric poems of poignancy and some pain, alert to joy, the unexpected and the promise of better lives, more grace, greater love, even for those who accidentally encounter the wondrous, through no fault of their own – the best way to meet good poetry: “It’s fitting that the angels sang in the open countryside/but maybe someone, in the over-crowded streets nearby,/looked up and heard the stillness/when they drew breath/between each stanza of their praise.”
It is a wonderful gathering of poems … such a lightness of touch with the old tropes, so much music and energetic imagination at work, so many new notes sounded. Not a line is predictable or a thought expected…”
You might think that there is nothing new to say about Christmas, yet this collection shimmers with relevance for us today.
Drawing on the world of nature, on seasonal rituals and on the nativity itself, Angela Graham brings original and re-invigorating perspectives to the Christmas story. For instance, present giving re-negotiates its commerciality when ‘we give each other presents, wrapped because/ Love always must emerge, / fresh as when we first discovered it: / shy saviour of the world.’ (‘Opening Christmas Gifts’)
Her poems give an authentic voice to many (some in an Ulster Scots, Welsh or Irish tongue), including a remarkable central sequence, Three Kings’ and their ‘Three Queens’ in their search for meaning. Caspar’s wife recalls on his deathbed how he had changed after their journey: ‘But, Caspar, you know, you must know, / that you came back more tender,/ humbler, sweeter, /wiser,/ as though you had some inner guiding star.’
A dramatic monologue that succinctly transports the nativity into today’s desperate circumstances, is spoken in the voice of a belligerent houseowner when he discovers a couple in his outhouse:
‘Not in here you’re not, I yell. But
he’s gawpin at the baby. She’s out of it.
Pack it in! The wife. From nowhere. Shift yourself,
she says to me. We gotta keep her warm.
She’s on her mobile, to Pam-I-used-to-be-a-midwife.
What’s her name? she asks the bloke
but it’s something she can’t catch so it’s love, this; love that
Love, it’s a boy. OK? You’ll be ok, love.’ (December)
Many of the poems highlight the extraordinary in the everyday. They spin a luminous thread through the dark end of the year, aware of the hardship and heaviness of heart that many encounter, yet asserting that ‘In darkness, any light is LIGHT’.
The power of this collection lies in the scope of the poet’s imagination and her ample skill to realise it on the page for the reader. The striking folkloric images by Martin Erspamer which accompany some of the poems enhance the sense of human story and ongoing quest.
STAR is aptly named, as Angela Graham’s collection shines a light on the core values of the nativity, deftly revealing “the kernel – love.’
In STAR Graham gives us fresh and vital takes on familiar themes, leading us through the Christmas season, illuminating dark corners, casting wonder in everyday imagery and moving us with her deft poetic repertoire.
These are warm, hopeful, delicious poems that celebrate the spirit of the winter holidays. Observing that moment when the world pauses to reconsider what life and human fellowship could be, this collection is better than a Christmas card and offers more longevity than many gifts given. Read Star: Poems for the Christmas Season every year to remember the deeper values beyond the commercialism that sometimes dominates Christmas.
A rich collection celebrating so many different aspects of Christmas: the material – gifts, decorations, shopping – is seen as an extension, a reflection of its spiritual heart, rather than, as more cynical commentaries often imply, in conflict with it, or even contradicting it.
Although each poem has a distinct character and mood, the collection seems informally linked by certain recurrent themes – like the door or narrow entrance which we must pass through to the realities of Christmas – ‘stooping under the lintel’ ‘waiting beyond the door’ ‘through a shabby stable door’: the importance of the pleasures and promises of Christmas lies in their recurrence – ‘are renewed every year’ ‘tell each other every year since then, a nightly choir’ ‘Ah could aye gie ma pipes a guid skirl neist year’…: the merging of the stars with the idea of revelation – particularly potent in the poems about the Magi and their wives. I especially liked the first-person narratives of the wives of Caspar and Melchior, contrasted with the third person for the wife of Balthazar who can no longer speak for herself…
The linking of church interiors and woodland or forest is very effective, especially when trees and stars are drawn so near to each other. The Christmas card is most moving, with its delicate subtlety, carefully avoiding too much pathos; the quote of ‘Come all ye faithful’ is a perfect example of the way you use familiar Christmas tropes in an original way, to deep and refresh perception.
The poems demand, and richly reward, close reading, especially In the shopping arcades, ‘What is it carries you/through this arcade?… ‘
Sian Best, librarian and writer. Author of A Whim Set In Concrete, Seren Books
….. clearly intelligent and inventive, what marks these poems out for me are their lightness and brightness, transmuting the ‘heaviness’ of the festive season, with its political wars all around, and price wars on every avenue of possible advertising, into something more aligned to caring, community, and love. Beautiful print illustrations illuminate and lift these themes further, with the end result that you feel refreshed and reinvigorated after reading. Star is a gorgeous book by a gifted poet and a great one to get as a gift this year, for another, for yourself, or, ideally, for both.
Mab Jones, Buzz Magazine
….. In her hands the commonest experience resonates … Her characters stay in the mind, as do the characters of her short stories. Her writing is at once very accessible and truly profound.
STAR, a collection of thirty-two poems, is a gift. These expertly crafted poems, how they stir astonishment, wonder, reflection, and speak with the accompanying illustrations is utterly compelling. I enjoyed this book as much for its physicality as I did for Graham’s poetic skill.
The illustrations, linocuts by Martin Erspamer, OSB, are exquisite and purposeful, adding to the already rich depths the poems conjure…
The poems in this collection interlink like strung lights, with words or images, concepts flowing from one poem to the next and just like the decorating of a Christmas tree, it’s when you step back and consider the whole that the gift is really received.
STAR then, is a book you read and then re-read, stepping back and taking in not only the hope that resounds but also to consider not only what it means to gift, but to be a gift.
To value our inner light, our potential to change and receive and give. To become the eye open to the call to follow ‘the god of new beginnings.’
Buy this book for your loved ones for Christmas. It is full of promise for a more hopeful future. The promise that things can be better in our world.
Here are 32 poems with 15 wonderful linocuts by Martin Erspamer.
Once I started to write about Christmas I couldn’t stop. Far from being a schmaltz fest, I find Christmas to be pulsing with clear-eyed realism. It’s a story of fragility amidst tough circumstances; of people on the edges being brought right into the heart of things; of political ruthlessness and high-minded, clumsy idealism; of flight and terror, as well as peace and joy.
The Three Kings arrive in glamour but they depart in fear and secrecy. Who was waiting for their return, I wondered? Their wives, perhaps. I’ve discovered for these women a presence and charted their influence. The Three Kings and Three Queens are at the heart of the book. We meet them having travelled through the bright lights of the season and we go on into ‘the dark hinterland of Christmas’ of treachery and exile, but hope has survived in the form of a child.
The cover image is Martin Erspamer’s take on a carving I love. In the 12th century, the mason/architect of Autun Cathedral, known as Gislebertus, took the capitals of some of the pillars supporting the Cathedral roof as opportunities to explore the Christmas story (and other biblicial tales). In his ‘The Awakening of the Magi’ Gislebertus imagined a point further back than the gospels record, the moment before the moment when for the very first time one of the Three Kings saw the star that would lead them to Bethlehem.
I regret I have no copyright details for this image
With wonderful ingenuity, he depicts the three kings in bed, asleep while the star blazes outside. Except that one king has responded to the prodding finger of an angel. He has opened one eye but not yet turned to look.
Gislebertus exploits here the extraordinarily fertile moment before the key action begins. The very threshold of the point of change. In Martin Erspamer’s beautiful linocut I found the ideal cover for this collection.
ISBN 978-1-0686946-0-8 • 22 August 2024 • Pback • Poetry • £10.00
The TRIO International Poetry Competition is open until 31st October. I have the happy task of judging the entries.
Last year’ s competition was judged by Mike Jenkins, a former editor of Poetry Wales, a winner of Wales Book of the Year and currently co-editor of Red Poets. First Prize was won by Jim Green; Second Prize went to Jenny Mitchell and Third to Glen Wilson. The winning poems can be read here.
All entry fees will be used to purchase books and equipment for the first school to be built on Uganda’s Agaria Island. Pictured is Lucy who is a Primary 2 pupil at Agaria Island’s provisional school, working from temporary premises until the new school is completed. Lucy writes poetry and stories… when she has pens and pencils. (Image used with permission).
The competition is organised by Jon Sait who won the Poetry Society’s 2004 National Poetry Competition with his poem ‘Homeland’. Read his poem here. Jon is Treasurer and UK Co-ordinator of the volunteer-led charity, Trio Uganda.
My poem is in Ulster-Scots with an English translation and is prompted by the 9th-century Irish poem, ‘Int en bec’, known in English as ‘The Blackbird of Loch Lene’ and the paraphrase of it in Ulster-Scots by John Erskine. I was intrigued to see the Irish rendered into contemporary Ulster-Scots and that got me thinking about some themes that last across the centuries and about the way meaning swims between languages.
‘Following last year’s festival success, the Thomas Carnduff Appreciation Society offers its second literary Summer Yard Session. This year’s theme is Borders, Boundaries and Barriers.’
‘The session features a panel of renowned authors, chaired by Dr. Connal Parr and featuring Rosemary Jenkinson, Wendy Erskine, Tony Black, Heather Currie and Eddie Currie, with Stephen Knox as MC. Together they will celebrate the rich literature and language traditions of Northern Ireland and across our shared Isles.’
My sonnet, DO Unto Others is mentioned in co-editor Nuala O’Connor’s introduction in which she asserts the truth-telling mission of poetry:
“The poets in this volume are fearless in this project … These are poems where … one courageous, newly-enlightened poet – Angela Graham – proclaims: ‘I am my Gorgon. I must turn to meet my stare …'”
