Updrafts – pamphlet published August 2020
Updrafts: the aim of this pamphlet, conceived for the Ludlow Fringe 2020’s Beautiful Earth project and published by Fair Acre Press, is to give you an uplift at a time of pandemic – and beyond. Nicholas Murray writes: ‘this is poetry attentive to the world, its rhythms, its planetary movements, its seas and hills, its chastening weather’.
Jean Atkin writes: ‘Here is an exceptional pamphlet, studded with some of the very best of Steve Griffiths’ work. Updrafts explores the richness of the poet’s lifelong connection to place – and wider skies – in poems of spare but deeply felt and vivid imagery. The landscapes of Anglesey and Shropshire feature here, but so too, do ‘three herons, slow/ and upside down over Harringay’ as the poet exercises in his flat. These poems celebrate life, and remind us there is ‘no joy but in recognition and discovery.// No resilience/ but in the delicate’. The pamphlet has raised money for Ludlow Food Bank
Weathereye: Selected Poems – published Spring 2019
Steve Griffiths’ Weathereye: Selected Poems pulls together the best of seven collections over forty years. Out of Anglesey, Ynys Môn, then London, Spain, Ludlow. Growing up slowly. Growing up again. Poems of being alive and conscious. Perhaps above all, a long quest to understand what’s going on round here: the nature and fragilities of community against a backdrop of the deep changes that are shaping us and challenging our beliefs. Veins of loss, resistance to injustice, commemoration, self-questioning. Learning how to celebrate and lament. The Late Love Poems. Lived landscape, interrogated history. From all this, a half-imagined place, a transformed village that became a great power, a fitful, flickering Utopia: al-Chwm. Learning, sometimes, a lightness of touch and a mischievous glint.
Latest News from Steve
Steve Griffiths reads his poems in a series of videos: 7, Certainty
This is a ten-minute recording of ‘Certainty’, a poem I struggled to write through 2001, exactly 20 years ago. In the autumn of that year, 9/11 broke over it as I worked to understand what would have caused my half-imagined, book-length Utopia, ‘An Elusive State’, to...
Steve Griffiths reading at Poetry Upstairs, Abergavenny, 18 September
Steve Griffiths read at Poetry Upstairs, the Trading Post, Abergavenny, on 18th September, with Jeff Cloves, Alicia Stubbersfield, and Phil Bowen. Organised and presented by Ric Hool. It was great to be back in the saddle.
Steve reads his poems in a new series of videos: 6, What you took home with you from the night shift
This is a poem about a cleaner. It is at least partly about not being fully seen. View here.
