I’m delighted to be appearing on a panel at the Jaipur Literature Festival – Island of Ireland JLF International. On Saturday 23rd May at 1pm along with Cauvary Madhavan and Máire Zepf I’ll be discussing how writing can draw on experiences of duality and change, and how literature, in its many forms, becomes a home for identity, inheritance, and connection, in conversation with writer and editor, Elaine Canning.
2pm Saturday 16th May I’ll be reading from my new poetry collection
Poetry Reading with Angela Graham | Events at Waterstones Bookshops
I was delighted to launch ‘Exposure’ at Corrymeela, the centre for peace and reconciliation which is only a short walk from my Ballycastle home. And particularly pleased that the event was held in An Croí, the wonderful building whose name is Irish for ‘The Heart’ and which expresses the welcoming and inclusive approach of the centre. It was designed by Norman Hawthorne in 1979. The photograph of it at the head of this article is from a post by his son Corin Hawthorne.
Yes, that is indeed Saunders Lewis, top left, depicted as an evangelist, in the company of poets, R.S. Thomas and David Lewis and the composer William Mathias. This bold interpretation (R.S. Thomas was alive at the time) concerned the church authorities so this set were moved to the underground columbarium and David John, the wood carver, was asked to do a second set. This time he portrayed composer, Alan Hoddinott (also alive) and poets, Vernon Watkins, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Wilfrid Owen.
I am very pleased that an article of mine that was published years ago has a new lease of life as the church of All Hallows in Miskin, south Glamorgan, approaches its 30th anniversary in May. It is beautifully re-presented, with a new set of photographs, on the website of the archdiocese.
When I first visited the church it was brand new, in 1996. I was filming for a tv documentary. The church design and the works of art in the church were excellent but there didn’t seem to be a record of who the people behind these were.
I was intrigued to find that the faces carved on the front of the lectern, which one might expect to represent the evangelists, were (if I wasn’t mistaken) the faces of Welsh poets. How fascinating.
I am always interested in the choices made by artists and architects so I set out to discover who these people were – because there is always a a story worth hearing. I found them and interviewed them. It was a wonderful experience. I arranged for a photographer to take pictures of everything and David John, who did the many wood carvings, kindly met me in the church so he could walk me round himself. I wrote up the results of my research as a substantial article which was published in a magazine in 2009.
At an event in the Irish Consulate in Cardiff, June Ryan of Henstaff Conferencing Centre, near Miskin, told me she remembered that I had mentioned knowing something about the art works and asked if I could find the information in time for the anniversary. I did find it, and the current parish priest has reproduced it in a new format for the website of the archdiocese with new, and first-rate, photographs.
Continue reading Treasure Trove of Art In Miskin
Angela Graham considers the influence of her career as a documentary-maker on her poetry collection Exposure: war, media, democracy from Culture and Democracy Press.
This appeared in nation.cymru (without Enemy in the Woods images) on 22.3.26
My new collection of poetry, Exposure: war, media, democracy began from my response to a photograph of a dead Russian soldier on the outskirts of Kharkiv. It was taken on the invasion’s third day, but he had died on its first afternoon.
As I saw more and more photographic coverage of this one death, there before me was evidence of how the choices made by the photographers were emphasising particular aspects of the scene. Changes in the weather were powerful influences – snow loomed, arrived, dominated, melted; as were changes in access – front line crisis, aftermath, stasis. Each variable was likely to touch one rather than another emotional chord in the viewer. Every image was ‘true’ but many images considered in relation to one another revealed the complexity in the circumstances, making them more challenging to decipher – the truth deepened; or the truth undermined?
Continue reading Documentary poetry
I was interviewed about ‘Exposure’ by Delyth Liddell on the BBC Radio Wales multi-award-winning weekly programme ‘All Things Considered‘.
Poet Profile: Angela Graham
08 Mar 2026 6 minute read
Angela Graham
Angela Graham is a BAFTA Cymru-winning filmmaker and journalist who turned to writing poetry full-time in 2017. Her work has appeared in The North, The Honest Ulsterman and Poetry Wales, amongst many others, and her first collection – Sanctuary: There Must Be Somewhere – was published by Seren Books in 2022.
To mark the February release of her latest collection – EXPOSURE: war, media, democracy – Graham joins us here for our ongoing Poet Profiles series in which we pose our burning questions to writers shaping the modern literary landscape.
Poetry has always been part of my life. I wrote my first poems aged six – short rhyming verses – and my mother was so surprised that she typed them up. I still have them. She submitted one of them to a weekly magazine and it was published. Because I was so young my headmistress had had to write and confirm my identity and age but she claimed I was eight. The editor stated beneath the poem, ‘Authenticity vouched for in the usual way’ but I knew our fearsome headmistress was lying – in print! So I learned something about unreliability.
And those words had such an intriguing sound, ‘Authenticity vouched for …’ What did they mean? This was my first encounter with ‘vouched’. And my poem was suspected of being not real in some way? I took words seriously while finding them very pleasurable.
I love Gwyneth Lewis’s work, in Welsh and English. She has a forensic sense of which word is just the right one for the task in hand. This precision appeals to me. She does the work of weighing experience and emotion and intellect and giving to each proportionate heft within a poem. Her, ‘Treiglo’ (Barddas, 2017) is a masterpiece of sustained attention to a subject and of using a metaphor (that of linguistic mutation and other sorts of change) to support and deepen her engagement with the subject. Her most recent collection, ‘First Rain in Paradise’ (Bloodaxe Books, 2025) is a pleasure throughout. Her excellent prose memoir, ‘Nightshade Mother’ (Calon, 2024) won the Wales Book of the Year 2025 Creative Non-Fiction Award.
I am enjoying Menna Elfyn’s trilingual, ‘Let the World’s People Sing / Caned Pobl y Byd’ (H’mm Publishing, 2025). She writes in the introduction, ‘The original Welsh poems were rendered into English and subsequently crossed another bridge; that of Arabic.’ by means of writers Rawan Sukkar and Lara Matta. Elfyn declares the book to be ‘a clarion call for people of all languages to respect their neighbours’ ‘mother tongue’. This appeals to me because I’ve always seen language as a bridge rather than a barrier. In each of my books there is at least one language other than English. In my new collection there is a trio of poems, for instance, which begins in Ulster-Scots, moves to Welsh and then to English. It’s a huge pleasure to be able to use the characteristics of languages to ring changes on the act of expression through language. Each has virtues and strengths for the writer and reader to enjoy.
Currently there is an exhibition in Belfast’s Linen Hall Library of poems commissioned for its Fragments of Scotch Poetry Project. I was one of ten poets asked to read through their collection of Enlightenment poetry (which includes Burns and contemporaries) and write in response. I was struck by the political passion of these writers. So, using Standard Habbie metre, a strict rhyming form very popular in that period and well-known as the ‘Wee, sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous beastie…’ of Burns’s ‘To A Mouse’, I wrote about a stage in Netanyahu and Trump’s dealing with Gaza.
Images. I wish I was a talented painter. I have to use words to ‘paint’. I’m often inspired by paintings, photographs and film. I worked in documentary and feature film and that involved handling thousands of images. My new collection, ‘Exposure’ is prompted by journalistic coverage of conflict, often through still or moving images, and I find the contemplation of these endlessly challenging and rewarding.
I’m working on my next book, a prose/poetry memoir, for which I have received a grant from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. I’m also preparing an essay for the Journal of Cross-border Studies in Ireland, drawing on my forty-five years in Wales to consider language issues in Northern Ireland (Irish, Ulster-Scots and English).
Since I’ve been writing about images, I’ll share this poem from ‘Exposure’. I’ve felt from an early age that the images we allow into our minds, or are forced to let in, have the potential to affect us deeply. We have to be vigilant about our role in what an image might achieve in us. No matter how manipulative a photographer or film-maker may be, we have some control over how we respond. We live in a deluge of images (hence the title of my collection, ‘Exposure’) so that control is often hard-won, and it’s precious because we don’t want to be hard, impermeable. Maintaining compassion and avoiding cynicism – staying open – is a major task in modern life.
DIALOGUE
In a pail of water I am looking up at myself looking down.
Does the water know?
The saint in the icon appears to return my gaze
but the painted pupil is a door, opening ….
Does the photograph return my scrutiny?
As a window reflects. I bring myself to what I see.
Whichever hunger dominates the heart
prompts the human gaze to flinch, devour or savour…
The eye of the photographer knows this, invites
collusion – cruel, compassionate or joyful –
but always there are ripples it will never see, and can’t control,
for the gaze hosts image upon image and,
even if the photographs are cached,
they are still, in your life and in mine, proliferating;
never neutral;
like a kiss from Christ or Judas.
My latest book is EXPOSURE: war, media, democracy 74 poems, from culture & democracy press, due in February 2026. It brings together my journalistic and literary experience.
These poems are prompted by photo-journalism, documentary film, radio, tv and social media reports of war – the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the Israel/Gaza war as well as conflict at home.
In the latest issue of The Monthly | CAP Arts Centre you’ll find two pieces about Exposure and a link to a video interview with me by Taz Rahman
Through LaVA – Literature and the Verbal Arts – Community Arts Partnership organises arts facilitation projects in schools and communities in Northern Ireland.
Two of those projects are the Poetry in Motion projects (Schools and Community) which place working poets into short residential placements in schools and communities.
Supported by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, the Arts Council Lottery and Belfast City Council, these successful programmes are now in their fourteenth year.
Community Arts Partnership’s Poetry in Motion programmes include the The Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing (via Poetry in Motion Community) and the The Seamus Heaney Award for Achievement (via Poetry in Motion Schools) which are officially supported by the Seamus Heaney family.
It’s a week ago that ‘EXPOSURE’ launched in Cardiff. I am writing about it only now because it has been an exceptionally busy time.
Jon Gower, pictured top left above, was a wonderful interviewer and host. He made it very easy for me to talk about the book, and with such a receptive audience it was a pleasure to read poems from the collection. I felt a strong sense of engagement with the audience.
Publisher, Phil Cope, of Culture & Democracy press, has been enormously generous in the time and attention he has devoted to this book. His faith in me has moved mountains.
I received the beautiful yellow roses below from one of the Ukrainians present.
And I’m grateful to the many people who braved a wet night on a rugby weekend, heavy traffic and the resulting atrocious parking conditions to help launch this book!
I feel immensely privileged to have this support. Thank you.
THIS, AND THIS TOO
Night. I walk a shred of the Milky Way,
a luminescent path of scattered white.
Like sugar on a slate, the stars’ display,
while here pale limestone lays a track of light
along the boreen between hedge and hedge,
a grosser version of the road above.
Brightness from rock: this seems to me a pledge
that nothing is impossible to Love;
and earlier, on the beach, the setting sun
struck swarms of tiny stars from the damp sand.
I walked on constellations as they shone
in a beige sky, a heaven on the strand.
Both these are true: I walk in doubt or dread;
I walk on stars with stars above my head.
Exposure can be ordered from Culture and Democracy press