Category Archives: Uncategorized

Praise for ‘Exposure’

October 1, 2026Exposure, Uncategorizedangela

An exceptional collection. With deep attention to different kinds of conflict, Angela Graham helps us see how poetry resists what Auden called the “curse” that has to be redeemed, the magnetic pull of violence in human affairs.

Rowan Williams, poet and theologian

Angela Graham’s EXPOSURE manages to do the seemingly impossible: open our desensitised hearts to feel the loss of each life needlessly sacrificed to the futility and brutality of war. Her inspired decision to write the collection in the tradition of photopoetry, but with the photographs deliberately left out, allows language and the reader’s imagination, with devastating emotional accuracy, to capture the careless tragedy of violence − a timely, challenging and beautiful read.

Anne Tannam, Poet in Residence with Poetry Ireland, 2023 −2025

Angela Graham has done something unique and extraordinary in poetry here in managing to find a kind of agency in documentation and tribute. Agency in the face of a hopelessness that it is all too easy to feel in the light of such huge global powerplay. It is a work of conscience and empathy and deserves to be widely read.

Maureen Boyle, Fortnight review

Graham asks us to go into and then to go beyond the simple newspaper or television image. She demands that we react. Because ‘No image / will change the world. / We do that /or not.’ Visceral yet deeply reflective. A remarkable, moving collection where images inspire words that inspire images. Once read, these images can’t be unseen.

Tim Hartley, journalist and author

EXPOSURE testifies ‘Proof in the Form of Images’ and truths of ekphrastic compulsion in which photography’s ‘raw material’ … is media via which, modulated by poetry’s act, ‘something / of someone else’s life can speak / through you’.

Natasha Cuddington, poet

Brilliantly imagined, her poems take us beyond sloganeering to individual portraits of individuals under fire … but even in darkness, Graham seeks ‘the drift of water, the feather-shedding snow … all the gentlenesses’. Her gorgeous lyrical dexterity takes us beyond destruction towards ‘something indestructible’, in which each human life is ‘a living word’. This is nothing less than essential poetry.

Liam Carson, poet

Graham’s specificity makes this work exciting. She zooms in on each scene to isolate its finer details: the steel finish of an armoured vehicle, or the sun setting behind wholesale sheds in Ukraine. Meaning is not imposed but emerges instead through the poet’s careful attention to her subjects … a testament to the role of poetry as witness… rigorous, innovative and thoughtful… marked by moments of profound clarity and beauty.

Nation Cymru review

a remarkable collection of poems that explore war photography with the moral responsibility of a documentary film maker… Humanity tested in extremis is at the collection’s core… this book leaves as permanent an impression as any photograph.

The Morning Star review

Exposure reviewed in Fortnight

July 7, 2026Exposure, Poetry, Portfolio, PortfolioPrint, Uncategorizedangela

Maureen Boyle is a poet and former committee member of the John Hewitt Society.

Her review is published in Fortnight magazine issue 502 July 2026

STAR is Book of the Month

January 8, 2025Poetry, Portfolio, PortfolioPrint, Star, Uncategorizedangela

My poetry collection, ‘STAR: poems for the Christmas Season’ has been chosen as the adult, English-language Book of the Month by The Books Council of Wales.

The main objectives as a Books Council for Wales are to support the publishing industry in Wales and promote reading for pleasure.

It was established as a national charity in 1961 in Aberystwyth and employs around 40 members of staff.

My Life In Books, Belfast Telegraph

December 23, 2024Portfolio, PortfolioPrint, Uncategorizedangela

On 7th December The Belfast Telegraph carried a feature which allowed me to share something about the books which have inspired me over the years. Maybe there are some of your favourites here!

https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/life/books/i-love-biographies-of-writers-their-ups-and-downs-show-that-there-is-no-magic-at-work-in-a-writing-career-but-a-lot-of-hard-work/a586241341.html

BBC RADIO WALES Christmas Meditation

January 15, 2024Uncategorizedangela

On Christmas Eve five of my poems featured in ‘Christmas Meditation’ from BBC Radio Wales

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001tq1c

December 28th – Childermas

December 28, 2023Online, Poetry, Uncategorizedangela

After Christmas – always – Childermas:*

Slaughter of Innocents; Threat Neutralised.

The Prince of War, glistening with success,

allures us. This, he says, is what you want.

Not a stable, sheep-herding losers, a star.

On the website of https://thelonelycrowd.org/2023/12/28/new-poetry-december-28th-by-angela-graham/ The Lonely Crowd December 28th.

The image is part of a depiction of the Slaughter of the Innocents on the floor of Siena Cathedral, 1481.

Sanctuary in New Poetry – Cardiff Poetry Festival

August 15, 2022Uncategorizedangela

Cardiff Poetry Festival took place over the last weekend in July. I was delighted to read from my collection Sanctuary: There Must Be Somewhere alongside Hannah Hodgson and Ben Wilkinson in a session of poetry newly published by Seren Books.

Hannah Hodgson’s 163 Days employs an innovative format to chronicle her hospital stay and treatments for a devastating illness: extracts from doctors’ notes are juxtaposed with her impressions of the same events. The objective and subjective side by side. Ot, it should be said, the supposedly objective.

The interplay between patient’s and doctor’s perspectives gives the reader a seldom experienced stand point. We spot the subjective seeping into the medical records of treatment – the doctor’s take, not simply on the symptoms, but on the patient who is experiencing them. This either clarifies or clouds the decisions taken. To hear the patient’s voice almost simultaneously is to encounter a different kind of authority, that of the suffering subject, who is perfectly capable of reading the symptoms the doctor (unconsciously) presents but who is accorded little recognised power. Power, its facets and its use, is a constant throughout the book.

Although one might say that the poetry in this book resides in the patient’s contributions, which employ devices typical of poetry as contrasted with the prosaic and precise medical use of language, part of the book’s appeal is that the affect-less medical notes acquire an emotional intensity as they collide or elide with the poetic voice.

This voice is robust but never strident. This admirable self-control achieves a great thing: it allows the reader to supply the anger, bafflement, hurt.

A memorable, epic journey.

Same Difference

Ben Wilkinson’s new collection examines relationships, sometimes from a wry perspective, as a poem’s protagonist grows in self-knowledge – painful as well as uplifting – with a deft handling of a variety of forms.

It is particularly interesting to see a contemporary poet ‘coming to terms with’ a long-dead one, in this case, Verlaine: proof that poetic voice can remain vital, challenging and inspiring.

Running (an art or a sport?) is here given a poetic ‘voice’. One way for those not devotees to get inside an activity that can seem from the outside supremely individual.

Reimagining Rabbie – Reimagining Myself

November 18, 2021Uncategorizedangela

How did I first encounter the poetry of Burns? I wouldn’t have been able to tell you till a few days ago. I came across a small school exercise book, carefully covered in brown paper, on which I’d written the word ‘Songs’ on one cover and ‘Poems’ on the other. I would have been seven years old and the teacher must have written on the blackboard for us to copy down texts in our very best handwriting.

The poems are a mixed bag. The first, I have carefully noted, is by ‘Lord Tennyson’, and I will pass over it because I wasn’t impressed. One of his weaker ones. Didn’t he have better things to do, I wondered. Among the poems was a long one by Thomas Campbell, The Irish Harper. It’s a lament for ‘poor dog Tray’. I know now that Campbell was a Glaswegian (1777 – 1846) who despite a very small poetic output managed to exert much influence on the poetic scene of his day.

Here I’m making a wee aside to recommend Duke Special’s rendition of On Account of My Dog Fido (” oh my dog what have you done? and why have you forsaken me?”). This is a genuinely affecting dog lament from the Francis J. Bigger collection in Belfast Central Library. It’s on A Note Let Go, a marvellous album made with Ulaidh which includes some poem/song work and mines the Bigger collection .

https://www.ceolmusic.ie/products/ulaid-duke-special-a-note-let-go-cd-lp

I’ve blogged previously about other aspects of the album here.

The poems in my school jotter are not the best nor the worst examples of the art but it wasn’t among them that Burns appears. He is in the Songs section. Following on from Puff The Magic Dragon is: Ye banks and braes… (two songs of loss!). There are several Scottish songs in this homemade anthology and a couple in Irish, written conventionally and phonetically. This is how it should be: one language alongside the other.

It was through the song versions of Burns’s poems that I got to know his work. I seem always to have known My luve is like a red red rose… And a Scottish friend singing For a’ that blew me away. Simply delivered, with conviction, the refrain convinces us that the truth is simple: it’s not outward show or possessions that count because every individual is inherently worthy by virtue of being human. The poem, or song, makes its confident assertion that, ultimately, right values will prevail.

Then let us pray that come it may,

As come it will for a’ that,

That sense and worth, o’er a’ the earth,

May bear the gree, an’ a’ that.

For a’ that, an’ a’ that,

It’s coming yet, for a’ that,

That man to man, the warld o’er,

Shall brothers be for a’ that.

I also heard a punchy version of this from a group of young men with the rough sea off Portstewart prom as their background. They had few listeners in inasupicous weather and the singer was battling against the odds but that performance has stayed with me because it was encountered unexpectedly and it gave no ground in asserting Burns’s proclamation.

The fashion in poetry today leans towards free verse which doesn’t lend itself to singing as a predictable rhyme scheme does. The poem that works as a song acquires an extra lease of life and a wider audience and, crucially, delivery in common. The refrain, in which the onlookers join the performer, to become part of the performance, heightens the sense of experience shared.

The poet, Ben Okri in an article in The Guardian 12th November, called for ‘existential creativity’. ‘We must write as if these are the last days.’ He states, ‘Faced with the state of the world and the depth of denial…’ artists have to find ‘new forms of creativity and human imagination.’ He believes that, ‘As a writer, everything I write should be directed towards the immediate end of drawing attention to the dire position we are in as a species.’

Burns and his contemporaries faced crises and Burns responded by asserting a humanity held in common and the ‘political’ responsibilities that follow from that. Yes, he’s a bard of passion and good company but he is also political. He saw that the individual is not separate from society.

For myself, as a poet, to reimagine Rabbie means letting his work inspire me to reimagine myself, my society and my role in that society. As a writer, what am I for? What is my purpose? I won’t ignore the lesson Burns offers that poetry as singable lyric extends the poem’s reach and expands it beyond poet and solitary reader.

I was asked by The Linen Hall Library in Belfast to record a Burns poem for their event celebrating the 120th anniversary of their acquisition of the Gibson Collection of Burns material, Rabbie Reimagined

https://linenhall.com/events/rabbie-reimagined-gibson-burns-and-belfast/

I’ve chosen another poem that is also a song, John Anderson, my jo, John.

This is a poignant yet celebratory account of a long relationship. And a lovely song.

Angela Graham is a film maker, writer and poet. Her short story collection A City Burning (Seren Books) was longlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize 2021. Her poetry is widely published.