The Blue Book [Paperback]

A level-headed pair, rather than the wild-eyed romantic cliche, Andrew Motion and Owen Sheers share a strong desire to make poetry more accessible. Motion, 47, was appointed successor to Ted Hughes as Poet Laureate in June 1999. A controversial appointee, he has broken with tradition by writing poems about the TUC conference as well as the wedding of Prince Edward and Sophie Rhys-Jones. He is convinced the future of poetry lies in more people having the chance to see whether it speaks to them. He was keen to be photographed with Sheers, championing his work as "sharp, fresh, clear and ambitious." Sheers, 25, is a poet from South Wales... He believes poetry will continue to inspire people into the next millennium. "With stronger marketing," he argues, "there is no reason why poetry should not be as much a part of public conversation as the contemporary novel"

This vivid and potent debut collection from Owen Sheers is populated with characters trying to come to terms with themselves and others and with the sifficult journeys they find themselves taking. It is a moving experience which he makes sense of in finely wrought verse that is tough, but also lyrical. A distinctive new voice for the year 2000

Vogue book of the month

Welsh poet, Owen Sheers's first collection has already garnered much critical acclaim. He was selected by The Times as Poet of the New Millennium, and this book won the prestigious Eric Gregory Award, given to first collections. At once, an exquisite observation of the life-affirming landscape that surrounds him, Sheers' poetry too describes the fruitless cruelty and suffering caused by human frailty. The ghost of death looms large in many of the poems, where memory and language struggle to contend with the enormity of emotion. And yet, his own language is driven by the need to get to the root of physical life and emotion -- his language raw and organic, eschewing the traditional aesthetics of nature with sensual and faithful evocations. This is a new collection of significant poetic value and resonance.

In the short space of a year, Owen Sheers has made a name for himself as one of the most exciting new talents to emerge on the British literary scene. For the Times of January 1st, 2000, David Bailey photographed the foremost practitioners in the arts and sciences together with their choice of the person they expected to carry the discipline forward: Poet Laureate Andrew Motion selected Owen Sheers as the one to watch. Seren are delighted to be the publishers of his first collection.

This impressive debut includes poems on a wide range of themes: from recollections of a return to Fiji, to sharper memories of an adolescence in a rural town in Wales; from dark ruminations on farm life to tender and unconventional love poems. Owen Sheers has a talent for visual imagery, a flair for narrative and a grasp of the personal as acute as his awareness of the wider world. His astute portraits of relatives and contemporaries entice us into other lives.

Owen Sheers was born in 1974 in Suva, Fiji, spent a portion of his childhood there and in London, then came to live in Abergavenny, Wales when he was nine. He was educated at New College, Oxford and the University of East Anglia. He now lives in London, where he works in television as a freelance writer. The Times Poet of the New Millennium
Welsh Books Fortnight Selection
Winner Vogue Talent Contest for Young Writers
Eric Gregory Award
BBC Wales The Slate, April 19th
Nightwaves, Radio 3, March 21st
Sunday Best, Radio Wales, April 2nd
Voice Box, Troubadour, Cardiff Bay Festival readings

Unfinished Business

We often saw him pass the classroom window,

bunking off, jumper alive with ferrets,
two thins dogs snapping round the hem of his coat.

At fifteen he bolted from a tattoo parlour,
down on the docks in Swansea;

bursting into the light before the tattooist could start the S,
sprinting down the street, ATAN still bleeding on his head.

He tried to make sense of it in biro,
appearing at the gates, the crucial letter scratched in,

and despite our fear (we knew he'd dropped a breeze block onto
some bloke's unconscious face,

attacked a teacher with a Stanley knife,threatened
to fill in his kids and fuck his wife) we still laughed;

though it was always he who provided the punch lines -
usually ten or twenty times before someone could drag him off.