The Gwent Levels line the north shore of the Severn in South Wales: Cas Gwent (Chepstow) at its head; its more famous cousin, the Somerset Levels, across the water; the Welsh capital, Caerdydd (Cardiff), at its feet. You could waste an hour crossing the Levels by motorway. Or brush aside the journey by train. But writer Marsha O'Mahony has chosen the slow route of foreshore, footpath, and country lane. Over the course of two years, she meandered from village to village collecting conversations and anecdotes as she went. The result is a remarkable oral history of this unique landscape and the people who live there.

No Far Shore is a rich exploration of various coastlines across England, Wales, Ireland, Canada and the US, in the form of travel writing, narrative non-fiction, memoir and poetry. In it poet Anne-Marie Fyfe visits the meeting place of land and sea, and takes in the maps, waves, lighthouses, islands, north, maps, journeys, boats and fishermen which mark this changing boundary.

She looks too at the work of a number of writers for whom the coast has been influential (and who in some cases have a surprising link to her hometown of Cushenden in Northern Ireland). They include Elizabeth Bishop, Herman Melville, Eavan Boland, Moira O'Neill, Robinson Jeffers, George Mackay Brown, C.P. Cavafy and Louis MacNeice. In addition, Fyfe also travels into her past, and that of her family, and charting her own relationship with a number of coasts and the way that they have shaped her life and those of others.

Living next to the sea brings almost as many subjects as the waves falling on to the land, from the quiet ease of fishing to the impact of the shipwreck of the Princess Victoria, from the lyricism of nature poetry to the specialism of morse code and cartography.

Rachael Clyne's You'll Never Be Anyone Else presents a voice that is direct and assured, and that considers what it takes to reconcile being different. Through her alter-ego Girl Golem, Clyne explores Jewish and lesbian identity, tracing childhood and coming-of-age through to experiences of ageing.

Grief's Alphabet by Carrie Etter is a shattering elegy for the poet's mother, opening a pathway through grief in spite of the impossible task of expressing such a loss. Beginning both chronologically and alphabetically, the collection moves from early life with the narrator's adoption, through to the mother's unexpected death and the banal yet painful tasks which follow, such as sorting clothes and arranging the funeral. The final section deals with life after loss, and the long work of grieving which culminates in the title poem. Evoking the complex, intimate relationship between mother and daughter, this raw yet deft collection celebrates love in the same breath as it weeps for its loss.?

Rooted in everyday life, the voice of Say It With Me is wry, candid and knowing. At once lighthearted and unafraid to speak of the darkness in our lives, these poems record and lament that which is miraculous, strange and ordinary. Most significant are the remarkable stories concerning love, suicide the body, parenthood, loss, memory and family.

Elizabeth?Parker's second collection, ?Cormorant, explores the bird of the title from all angles: from diving cormorants to cormorants in flight, cormorants in motion and also in stillness. The bird itself however is always untameable and irreducible to human impressions, but it becomes bound up with a family history, legacy, and losses. Human relationships, seen?through the varying lenses of family, are a key focus of this collection. In 'You Began', the poet tells her sons of?their ancestors from Ireland who crossed the Irish Sea to Liverpool Docks. The poem follows a lineage through place from The Midlands, the bloodlines meeting in London, then moving to The Forest Of Dean, and finally coming to the boys' mother, the poet, who has made her home in Bristol, a city which becomes a larger-than-life character in the book. Family is all-important?and other?poems in?Cormorant?tell of family rituals as in 'Paddy's Ashes' where a grandfather's remains are scattered to the wind. Sometimes rituals are more everyday, as in 'Saturday' where the poet's mother remembers her own mother and the routine of shopping in Liverpool. These small joys are balanced by grief for example in poems about a father suffering dementia, and by the theme of loss generally. The book is dedicated to the poet's late sister, the playwright Helen K Parker. The cormorant is the present and past, both part of and beyond these human stories.?'It is 'The Devil Bird' ('Dart'). Gathered together in a tree, cormorants are 'omens in a dying beech' ('Cormorant'), or in the water they are?the bubble of an underwater diver, the enemy of anglers, or perhaps just an elusive subject watched by humans. Parker plays close attention to the city of Bristol and its inhabitants whether they are human or more-than-human. There is a powerful depth to place here, which is full of carefully observed details about an independent natural world and how humans interact with it. This?is also a formally playful and innovative collection. Sequences, repetition, and echoes are?original techniques used to circle around the collection's main themes. 'Braids' uses the image of plaiting to weave together images and feeling, and to act as the central metaphor expressive of the closeness of the women speaking. Like many others in the collection, it is also a nature poem, where the braided hair of the women flows alongside the River Wye which runs through this collection. Through examinations of nature and?the human, their shared losses and histories, Parker shows us how to regard the world humanely, compassionately. As she regards the miracle of the cormorant, she reminds us of the importance of wonder, offering an uplifting antidote to difficult times.

Leaving the Hills by Tony Curtis is a collection full of stories from everywhere by a great Welsh poet at his best. From the Welsh mountains to the Hollywood Hills, these lyrical poems explore events from both history and modern life, questioning how far we've really progressed. Filled with dramatic monologues and personalities as various as Roger Bannister, Muhammed Ali, Billie Holiday and Claude Debussy, Leaving the Hills is a collection which explores and defines the times we live in. The title becomes a metaphor for that moment when we are forced to choose what to take and what to leave behind. Curtis chooses moments of brilliance, of epiphany, of knowledge and of vividness. In these poems, there is everything he would wish to save from the fire

Grahame Davies's A Darker Way ?is a collection of poems and songs which traces a hard-won but redemptive path between idealism and irony, failure and faith. Including 'Sacred Fire', set to music for King Charles' coronation, these poems are steeped in curiosity, self-questioning and compassion.

Taz Rahman's East of the Sun, West of the Moon follows a wanderer in the city who contemplates legacies of grief, intricacies of nature, improvisations of jazz, and the contingencies of language as a structure through which we seek to know the world.

Republic tells the story of a young woman growing up in West Wales the 1980s and 90s, following a boom in politics, culture and Cwl Cymru. Stories told, overheard, and handed down, mostly in Welsh, create an expansive portrait of the era, including challenges for women, Welsh-speakers, and other marginalized groups.

This beautifully produced book is sculptor David Nash's response to the three hundred year old yews in the gardens of Powis Castle.

After decades - in some cases centuries - without trimming some twenty yews by the castle have grown into fantastic, organic shapes not usually associated with the formally trained yews of traditional gardens.

The plasticity of these striking trees instantly challenged Nash when he first saw them: now the resulting drawings, reliefs and sculptures are collected here, together with a brief essay by Nash and a short history of the Powis Castle gardens by art historian Sarah Blomfield.

With bilingual text in English and Welsh, printed on high quality paper and case bound in fine linen this exclusive book is sought after by readers interested in art and gardens alike.

David Nash is an internationally acclaimed sculptor, based in Blaenau Ffestiniog, north Wales. His work can be found in major collections around the world.

Schoolteacher Rhian Evans doesn't doubt that a Welsh love affair, as it is often noted, is only made up of 10% sex. For the three long years of her husband's absence, she has stayed true to her strict chapel upbringing and has lived in celibacy. But Rhian wishes she was more like Ilona Hughes, her scandalous lodger. With her great appetite for life and men, Ilona is a breath of fresh air, and when her zestful spirit begins to influence Rhian, the ripples are felt throughout their small coastal town. Perceptive, funny, and moving, this novel reveals the poignancy of love in the midst of war.

Great artworks and artists inspire many of the poems in this new collection, from early religious icons to expressionist canvases, from a buttery girl in a Flemish landscape to the contemporary chainsaw sculptures of David Nash. The title piece is a moving tribute to World War II veterans on a D-Day memorial excursion, while other pieces focus on the lush landscapes of and personal reflections on the author's travels to California and Tuscany.

While the town awaits the arrival of the Company Man, a stranger appears in the windswept dunes, singing songs to the sea. This is just the start of three days of unearthly events in Port Talbot that see the Teacher soothe a suicide bomber and the dead rising from the walls of an underpass. In The Gospel of Us, Owen Sheers reimagines his three-day dramatization of the Passion for the National Theatre of Wales.

A tour of the obvious and the oblique, the monumental and the downright quirky, this guide to Swansea explores and uncovers the eclectic, gritty, whimsical, and rich history of the city in postindustrial south Wales. Once a dynamic and thriving imperial port and later famous for a vibrant artistic life, Nigel Jenkins combines civic and social history with his own autobiographical reminiscences, bringing to life a place which mixes Dylan Thomas's heritage with rugby and football passions and the natural beauty of the Bay and the Gower with the dereliction of the industrial valley. There is no better way to discover Wales' second city.

Nature-writer and hiker Julie Brominicks takes a year-long walk around the edge of Wales and discovers places she thought she knew can be viewed in many ways. She reflects this in her new book, which combines the lenses of history, travel, the environment, and nature to look at Wales, and the world, with fresh eyes and understanding.

An inclusive selection of women's poetry in English that features writers from 1900 through the present, this collection reflects aspects of women's lives, such as work, childhood, God, and lust. Classic poems from Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, and Sylvia Plath complement those from recent prize-winners Alice Oswald, Deryn Rees-Jones, and Carol Ann Duffy. Showcasing the range, craft, intelligence, and skill of women's poetry, this compilation contains authors from Australia, Canada, the Caribbean, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

A vivid, witty, and darkly humorous account of of the city of Liverpool, this work explores the various facets of the city--its maritime and merchant histories, class divisions, sectarian divides, Celtic influences, and the siege mentality underpinning the celebrated Scouse humor. Nor does this reference flinch from Liverpool's dark side: the drugs, the urban blight, the fallout from Thatcherism, and the internecine violence. In addition, the narrative is underpinned by a strong autobiographical element--detailing the author's birth and formative years in the city, his movement away from it, and the abiding pull it exerts--and features interviews with many people connected closely to Liverpool, from personal friends and family members to artists and workers. From the Wirral to Warrington, Anfield to Everton, Bootle to Diddyland, this memoir criss-crosses the city by the ferry and through the tunnels, from John Lennon airport to the racecourse and down the docks, building a picture of a city which, whatever its faults, is never dull.

His writing revolutionized the music of composer John Ireland while other testifying admirers have included Oscar Wilde, H. G. Wells, Siegfried Sassoon, John Betejeman, film-maker Michael Powell, cellist Julian Lloyd Weber, and Barry (Dame Edith) Humphdes. Through his stories of the supernatural and his reworking of the Arthurian Grail legend and his Angel of Mons series he became a cult figure in America, while The Terror made him the precursor of recent quasi-scientific novels in which animals conspire to destroy Mankind.

To turn, to dig, to plough, to upset, to translate... Bend, lap, journey, time... The Welsh word troeon unfolds meaning after meaning. In TROEON: TURNINGS, two poets confident in their own traditions meet in the hinterland between translation and collaboration--Cyril Jones from the disciplines of Welsh cynghanedd, Philip Gross from the restless variety of English verse. Rather than lamenting the impossibility of reproducing any language's unique knots of form and content in translation, they trust each other to explore the energies released. In the cloud chamber, atoms tear, spin, split, translate the past and future into spirals, spun silk, sheer release, the heart of the matter. In the same spirit, Valerie Coffin Price plays an equal part with striking letterpress designs that surprise the language of both writers into new awareness of its possibilities.