Cynefin - with folk musician Owen Shiers & poet Clare e. Potter

A night of story through music and poetry... Folk musician Owen Shiers & poet clare e. potter This cosy, intimate venue creates the opportunity to experience something truly special . Join us to see two of Wales' finest performers - folk musician and Ceredigion native Owen Shiers and South Wale's poet clare e. potter, as they weave a tapestry of Cymraeg and English; story, poetry and song. Owen Shiers 'Cynefin' (pr. kuh-neh-vin) is the creative vision of West Wales native Owen Shiers. Fascinated by music and history, it is a bid to give a modern voice to Ceredigion’s rich yet neglected cultural heritage. Starting out from his home village of Capel Dewi in the Clettwr Valley and traveling through the local musical landscape, Owen unearths seasoned songs, poems and stories, some never before recorded, and gives them new life in the present. Nominated for UK Folk Album of the Year 2025 with the latest album 'Shimli', Cynefin gives Owen a platform to ply his intricate arranging skills whilst taking him right back to his roots. “A quietly political antidote to the modern age” – ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ Folk Album of the Month, The Guardian"Beautiful” – ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ Top Pick, Songlines "Love It! - Cerys Matthews, BBC 6 Music www.cynefinmusic.wales clare e. potter clare e. potter is a writer and performer from a South Wales mining village. She lived for ten years in the Deep South where she studied an MA in Afro-Caribbean literature and taught in a progressive school in New Orleans. She won the John Tripp Award for Spoken Poetry, and the Jim Criddle prize for celebrating the Welsh language in Literature. clare has translated the work of the National Poet of Wales, was a Hay Festival Writer at Work for two years, and has performed at the Smithsonian Folk-Life Festival in the USA. She is currently working on a new poetry collection about craftspeople thanks to another Literature Wales bursary. clare has been widely published in magazines, anthologies and literary journals in the UK and USA and has acted in two films. Her biggest passion is working in schools and on community projects with other artists. "Clare E Potter is many elements all at once, fizzing and overflowing as she corrals them into a compelling stage presence. Her collection, Healing the Pack, was launched in May'24 and is an affair of the heart, eighteen years in the writing. Potter’s poems deal in memory, family, and trauma. They are hymns to the people and places she grew up around in Cefn Fforest, adult appreciations of childhood impressions that made her. Their language is the rainbow virtuosity of Valleys English, shot through with snatches of Cymraeg. (Her next collection, she tells us, will be in the language). There is rhythmic storytelling, filmic in its clarity and set beside poetic observations of majesty in tiny moments. The poems find beauty in hardship and caveats to joy. Potter’s performance inhabits that dichotomy as she ascends into certainty before cutting herself down to vulnerability and clambering back up, clinging to her beautiful words as a guide to redemption. An emotional high-wire act, she is as fierce as she is fragile, Mam and daughter at once. She is extraordinary, a Valleys Piaf." Ben Wildsmith, Nation Cymru