HYMNAL

New 2023 - my first poetry collection - published by Parthian - pre-order here: https://www.parthianbooks.com/collections/pre-order/products/hymnal

‘These full-throated poems bring to resonant life the story of a daughter whose father’s calling “sits on all our shoulders like a fog”. Bewildered by severities at odds with her body, she wonders at Jonah breathing inside a whale while on land “I do not know which way is up ... The surface is so far down.” Yet the desires of the queer self unfolding in thrilling detail here refuse to be extinguished – the phrasing in Hymnal glistens with the rich clarity of stained glass.’ – John McCullough

Late in the 1960s, before Bell was born, her father and mother visited Aberaeron, a small fishing town on the west coast of Wales. Here, her father heard a voice – which he knew to be God – directing him to minister to the Welsh. Six months after she was born in the early 1970s, they moved to Aberaeron where he took up his first curateship. Over the next eighteen years, they would move to various parishes within a forty-mile radius: first to Llangeler a predominantly Welsh-speaking parish in the Teifi valley, then back to Aberaeron where Bell’s father became vicar, and then to a larger and more Evangelical church in Aberystwyth.

This unique memoir in verse offers a series of snapshots about religion and sexuality. In verse because it’s how Bell remembers: snapshots in words strung along a line, which somehow constitute a life. Snapshots of another time from now, but from a time which tells us about how Bell got here. Not the whole story, but her story. Of an English family on a mission from God, of signs and wonders in the Welsh countryside, of difference, and of faith and its loss.