Paul Henry

Poet

Welcome

Paul Henry is a Welsh poet and songwriter whose poems have been widely anthologised and translated. The author of eight UK collections, his selected poems, The Brittle Sea, was recently reprinted by Seren. He's read his work at festivals in Europe, Asia and the USA. A former Creative Writing Fellow at the University of South Wales, he’s presented arts programmes for BBC Radio Wales, Radio 3 and Radio 4.

"One of the most important Welsh poets now writing." - Carol Ann Duffy.

TLS Poem of the Week: 'Chattels'
Guardian Poem of the Week: 'The Black Guitar'
'Notes of Solidarity' Wales Arts Review
Interview with Poetry Wales here
2nd - 7th June 2025: Garsdale Retreat, Yorkshire Dales: 'Writing Poetry' course. Guest reader: Maura Dooley. Click here for details/bookings.
Click here for Jude Rogers' Guardian feature on the 2024 Poetry & Songwriting course tutored by Paul Henry and Brian Briggs.
From 'The Glass Aisle' - a short film by Nick Fallowfield-Cooper, Click here
A song version of the poem 'Kicking the Stone', co-written with Brian Briggs, can be heard on 'Stornoway's' new album 'Dig The Mountain!' released October '23. The original poem appears in Paul's collection 'Boy Running'.

The Glass Aisle

"This haunting, elegiac collection, about music, and made of music, leaves a reader's mind full of phrases, in both senses - verbal, and tonal - and exactitudes that catch the heart and lodge in the memory" Gillian Clarke

"In this virtuoso new collection, Paul Henry, poacher-like, tracks the journeys of the heart through landscape, love and loss. He takes his place as one of the most important Welsh poets now writing." Carol Ann Duffy


"An obsessive look at time and all the loss it carries... Henry's rich, wise and regretful poems should be better known than they are and this is a good place to begin." The TLS

"Henry is working at the core of lyric poetry, with love and loss and the 'deeper river'." The Poetry Review

Boy Running - shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year 2016.



The Brittle Sea: New & Selected Poems.
reprinted 2013, 2016, 2023.

"The Brittle Sea spans a sleek twenty years. Gesturing equally backwards and forwards, it marks Henry's quiet rise as a major lyric poet while whetting the appetite for what is sure to be a very rich later career..."
- 'Poetry Review'
www.serenbooks.com/book/the-brittle-sea