The Seren Poetry Podcast · Alternative Stories

Glyn Edwards: 'In Orbit'

·46 min·2 clips

A book of poems narrating grief when a teacher dies, with narratives suggesting something deeper—unrequited love explored through innovative forms.

In Orbit comes through grief first. Rhian Edwards introduces Glyn Edwards through his second collection, his first with Seren, and its unusual forms for writing about loss. The conversation does not rush him. Glyn talks about grief as the lens that keeps returning, even when the poems turn toward environmental change. The blank page gives him somewhere to put feelings that ordinary conversation cannot always hold. He can examine them there without explaining everything at once. Tennyson gives the episode its quiet depth. Glyn remembers learning more about the background to In Memoriam and finding a way to think about grief as something that can lead, painfully, toward self-knowledge. He is interested in how poetry can reveal and hide at the same time. That distinction matters here. Art does not have to strip the writer bare. It can choose how near the language gets to the wound. Rhian keeps the space calm and attentive. Her questions move from influence to process, then toward the shape of the book. Near the end, Glyn is clear that In Orbit is meant to be read from the beginning, not dipped into at random. His wife gives him the phrase linear narrative, and it fits. The poems gather pressure as they go. The result is a warm, careful conversation about craft, grief, disclosure, and attention to the world outside the self.

As heard by us

A calm conversation about loss, form, and the blank page.

Glyn Edwards brings In Orbit into view as work shaped by loss without being boxed in by it. The episode stays close to form: traditional stanzas, prose poems, shape poems, and the shift from teen years to the present, when Edwards is teaching.

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Why you'd press play

If you want poetry that uses inventive forms to explore loss, this is for you.

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