Three current publications
A Twist in the Stairs, June 2023
Steve Griffiths’ second poetry pamphlet with Rack Press, ‘A Twist in the Stairs’, responds to a time of political, psychological and climate crisis, criss-crossing and interrogating threads of optimism, certainty and error, wonder, defeat, resignation – and resilience. Some of the poems have appeared in Stand, in Poetry Salzburg Review and online in New Boots and Pantisocracies. Steve is also interviewed by Zoe Brigley in the Poetry Wales series ‘How I write a poem’ about the origin and development of one of the poems included in the pamphlet.
Weathereye: Selected Poems 2019
Steve Griffiths’ Weathereye: Selected Poems pulls together the best of seven collections published by Rex Collings, Seren Books and Cinnamon Press over forty years. It includes poems that have been honed and brought to completion over the decades since their first publication: Steve Griffiths questions his own work as he questions the society and the choice of narratives that shape us. There are poems of childhood and family, love poems – and a lifelong exploration of what’s going on around us, our fallibilities and fragilities against a backdrop of profound change. Among veins of loss, commemoration, and resistance to injustice, there’s a vision of what is possible with an informed generosity at its heart. Griffiths’ capacity to celebrate and lament develops and deepens as he calls increasingly on a lightness of touch with a smidgeon of mischief.
Read Jon Gower’s review in nation.cymru here.
Updrafts, 2020
The aim of this pamphlet, conceived for the Ludlow Fringe 2020’s Beautiful Earth project and published by Fair Acre Press, was to give the reader an uplift in the time of the pandemic – and beyond.
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 raised money for Ludlow Food Bank.
Latest News from Steve
Steve Griffiths interviewed by Zoe Brigley in the Poetry Wales online series ‘How I wrote’: ‘We need a definite programme’
Steve Griffiths interviewed by Zoe Brigley in the Poetry Wales online series ‘How I wrote’: ‘We need a definite programme’, now in Steve’s Rack Press pamphlet ‘A Twist in the Stairs’, available from https://rackpress.blogspot.com/. Steve talks about how a poem takes...
Steve Griffiths launches his poetry pamphlet ‘A Twist in the Stairs’ with Rack Press
Steve Griffiths launches his poetry pamphlet ‘A Twist in the Stairs’, published by Rack Press, on 16 June at the Music Room, 49 Great Ormond Street, London WC1, alongside pamphlets by Michele Hutchison, William Palmer and Tuesday Shannon. Find out more and order...
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...
