Concrete Sea

The willingness to take risks with form and to push the reader's expectations of what a poem might be make EA Griffiths' poetry immediately distinctive. Here we find lyrical poems that are tiny, elliptical, often heart-breaking and utterly located in a sense of place that is at once home and yet the terrain of struggle.

Drawing on Welsh tradition and the complexity that spins from needing to learn your native language so that even when it becomes fluent it never becomes the language of dream, the collection also opens a dialogue with concrete poetry. It's a move that allows words to fragment, names to partially mirror themselves, breath to expand the possibilities of the poem on the page. The concrete poetry in this collection is as serious as a funeral, or electric shock therapy, yet it is also playful, generous and expansive.

Moving between the concrete and the lyrical, Concrete Sea is a cohesive, tightly-written debut that invites us to feel into the experiences of the poems, emerging with the sense of another's heart-print. EA Griffiths was brought up in the Rhondda Valley and lives there now with her husband. When she is not being inspired by the South Wales Valleys, she enjoys walking by the sea and listening to podcasts. She is also a Welsh speaker. This is her first collection.