A NEWPORT poet has released a number of books online to showcase his work from the past 40 years.
Alan Roderick, who is involved in Cwtsh Arts Centre and organises showcases at Ye Olde Murenger Pub in Newport city centre, has released the three poetry books on Amazon.
“I wanted to do something out of the usual run of poetry books and use photographs, illustrations and drawings to compliment the poems,” said Mr Roderick.
The three books are titled After You’d Gone, which covers poems written between 2015 and 2020, Selected Poems 1978-2015, and Twelve Days in Intensive Care.
The material in After You’d Gone was written by Mr Roderick following the death of his wife Božena on Christmas Eve in 2015. They deal with the aftermath of the “devastating event, the days immediately after the funeral and my attempts to come to terms with my loss,” he said.
The poems also describe the places he visited in the UK and abroad in the years that followed and imagines Rosa Luxemburg, the political firebrand, and soul singer Gladys Knight travelling to Newport, revisit the Orpheus legend and the impact of Hitchcock’s film Vertigo on Mr Roderick.
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Selected Poems is a collection of some of the best of Mr Roderick’s repertoire between 1978 and 2015. He has written about Romans and Ancient Greeks, Wales and its language, Cardiff, Newport, love, cats, flowers, birds and animals, food and drink, Slovenia, Gaelic speaking islanders, Elvis Presley, Bruce Springsteen, mobile phones, painters and paintings, German language poems and haikus created by Mr Roderick.
Twelve Days In Intensive Care is a poetic diary of the stressful time when Mr Roderick’s wife Božena was rushed to the Royal Gwent Hospital in Newport in October 2010. The poems are a record of Mr Roderick’s daily thoughts and feelings while awaiting diagnosis which would eventually be a return of Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, which Mrs Roderick was able to beat again and live for a further five years.
There are three different versions of each book available. These are a Kindle edition, a ‘budget’ edition and a ‘deluxe’ edition which will contain a number of colour illustrations.
To purchase the books, you can visit https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=alan+roderick&ref=nb_sb_noss_2
