Inpress Catalogue 2010

Page 1

Inpress 2010 C ata l o g u e


“Inpress is an efficient and necessary operation, which brings poetry and literary fiction publishers together in a collective, and in the process greatly benefits its members as well as their audiences. It is a powerful force for good, matching diversity with high quality, and old technologies with new. It deserves widespread support and admiration.” Sir Andrew Motion, poet, novelist and biographer Poet Laureate 1999–2009


Contents

Poetry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Fiction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77 Non-Fiction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93 Magazines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 Publisher Profiles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120 Distribution & Sales Representation . . . . . . . . . . 122


Inpress is the sales and marketing agency for

independent publishers. We sell our publishers’ poetry, fiction and non-fiction to the UK and international book trade through our specialist sales team. We sell direct to the consumer through our website. Inpress also delivers book events, audience research, e-marketing and publicity campaigns. We are proud to be supported by Arts Council England. Rachael Ogden Managing Director


[M os co w] G la s Bloodaxe Books [Tarset]

Iron Press [Cullercoats] Inpress Flambard Press [Newcastle] Smokestack [Middlesbrough]

Arc [Todmorden]

Route [Pontefract]

Comma [Manchester]

Smith Doorstop [Sheffield]

Dedalus [Dublin] Salmon [Cliffs of Moher]

Cinnamon [Blaenau Ffestiniog]

Alcemi [Aberystwyth]

Modern Poetry in Translation Waywiser [Oxford]

Egg Box The Rialto Elastic Press [Norwich]

Rockingham Press [Ware] Seren [Bridgend] Two Rivers [Reading]

Acumen [Brixham]

Aflame Banipal Hearing Eye The London Magazine Menard Naked Punch Penned in the Margins Tall Lighthouse [London]



Poetr y


P oet r y

The Skiers: Selected Poems Jill Bialosky

On the Brink Robin Ford

“[Bialosky] combines the best aspects of confessional and lyric poetry.” The New Yorker

Third collection from popular Isle of Wight poet.

The Skiers: Selected Poems is a selection from Jill Bialosky’s three collections published in the US, plus a body of new work. Drawing on her experiences of childhood and adolescence, of childbirth and death, of motherhood, love and sexuality, she creates poems that are at once moving, unflinchingly honest and marked by a consummate technical skill. She has been described by Gerald Stern as “the poet of the secret garden, the place, at once, of grace and sadness” and her poetry has a dignity, a magic and a passion that makes it utterly distinctive. Jill Bialosky was born in Cleveland, Ohio. She has published two collections of poems, Subterranean (2001) and The End of Desire (1997); two novels, The Life Room (2002) and House Under Snow (2007); and co-edited the anthology Wanting A Child (1998). She has received a number of awards, including the Elliot Coleman Award in Poetry. She is currently an editor at W.W. Norton & Co. and lives in New York City.

Arc Publications | Hardback and Paperback | £12.99 (hb) £9.99 (pb) | 978-1-904614-93-7 (hb) 978-1-904614-43-2 (pb) | 138x216mm | 142pp January

Ja n u a r y | 8

On the Brink is a remarkable collection from a mature and deeply humane voice. His subjects include surviving mental illness and the particularities of island life. Ford’s sequence on Faustus fizzes with humour, delightfully twisting language and astute observations of human psychology. This is a noteworthy collection from a superb voice. Robin Ford started writing poetry in his mid-fifties after several too close encounters with the Asyla that form the subject of this volume. He worked teaching teenagers for many years and is from the Isle of Wight. He has been published in a wide range of magazines including Envoi, Ambit, Magma, Tears in the Fence, Poetry Review, The Interpreter’s House, The Wolf and a wide range of others. This is his third collection, following After the Wound and Never Quite Prepared for Light. Robin runs the group ‘High Tide Poets’ for people recovering from or with continuing mental illness and also runs an open mic event for poetry and music at Quay Arts in Newport, Isle of Wight.

Cinnamon Press | Paperback | £7.99 978-1-907090-01-1 | 216x140mm | 64pp January


poet r y

Six Slovak Poets Igor Hochel (editor) An ideal introduction to the ‘here and now’ of Slovak poetry.

The sixth in Arc’s acclaimed series of bilingual anthologies focusing on the ‘smaller’ languages of Europe, this book features the work of six of Slovakia’s leading poets: Ján Buzássy, Mila Haugová, Kamil Peteraj, Daniel Hevier, Peter Repka and Ivan Štrpka. They lived through the difficult times that followed the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, through the political, social and cultural transformation of the past twenty years since the fall of the communist regime in 1989, and through the division of the country in 1993 which gave birth to today’s Slovak Republic. The work of these poets continues the experimentation with form and language of the pre-war Central European avant-garde, with added elements of myth, legend, folk tales, and references to religion and the natural world. Also integral to their work is philosophical reflection and an exploration of the moral issues raised by the circumstances in which they worked. The result is a densely woven, polythematic free verse, one which represents the poetics of a generation that has been central to Slovak literary life for four decades. This bilingual edition features the Slovak original and the English translation on facing pages.

Arc Publications | Paperback | £10.99 978-1-906570-38-5 | 156x234mm | 172pp | January

The New Order George Szirtes (editor) Celebrating the 20th anniversary of political change in Hungary.

This first major gathering of the younger poets of Hungary pays witness to the poetics of a new post-1989 Europe. Prize-winning poet and translator George Szirtes has selected work from eleven of Hungary’s leading young poets for this bilingual anthology, the publication of which coincides with the twentieth anniversary of the destruction of the Berlin Wall. The culmination of a five-year project between poets in Hungary and the UK, its contributors include: István Kemény (b.1961), Szilárd Borbély (b.1964), András Imreh (b.1966), Mónika Mesterházi (b.1967), Krisztina Tóth (b.1967), Virág Erdos (b.1968), Jáos Térey (b.1970), G. István László (b.1972) and Anna T Szabó (b.1972), along with Owen Sheers, Anthony Dunn, Clare Pollard, Matthew Hollis and Agnes Lehoczky. Their work sits alongside writers long associated with the translation of Hungarian poetry: George Gömöri, Clive Wilmer, Peter Zollman and the editor, George Szirtes. George Szirtes was born in Budapest in 1948. His first book, The Slant Door, was published in 1979 and won the Faber Memorial prize the following year. He has published several books and won various other prizes including the 2005 T.S. Eliot Prize for his poetry collection Reel. Arc Publications | Paperback | £12.99 978-1-906570-50-7 | 156x234mm | 352pp | January

9 | J ANUARY


P oet r y

The Seer Sung Husband Bob Beagrie

Collected Poems: 1987–2010 Paul Birtill

“An antidote to the plague of anecdotes wishing they were poems.” Sean O’Brien

“If you believe that one of the uses of poetry is to make you feel less alone, then read Paul Birtill.” Poetry News

The Seer Sung Husband tells the story of the Pilgrimage of Grace, the 16th century Northern rebellion that briefly defied the authority of Church and State. Tobias Shipton, carpenter and husband of the Yorkshire witch and soothsayer Old Mother Shipton, weaves a wyrd tale of love and loyalty, rebellion and royal retribution. The Seer Sung Husband is a book about folklore and myth, imagination and belief. It’s a magical realist verse-epic, a portrait of England at a time of radical social, religious and political crisis. It’s a book about witchcraft and statecraft, religious faith and political betrayal. “Bob Beagrie gives a convincing voice to the common man unwillingly caught up in uncommon times… a work of remarkable insight and invention.” Oz Hardwick Bob Beagrie’s previous collections include: Gothic Horror (1996), Masque: The Art of the Vampyre (2000), Huginn & Munnin (2002), Endeavour: Newfound Notes (2004), The Isle of St Hild (2004), Perkele with Kalle Niinikangas (2006) and Yoik (Cinnamon Press, 2008). He lives in Middlesbrough, and teaches at the University of Teesside.

Smokestack Books | Paperback | £7.95 978-0-956034-14-4 | 197x127mm | 64pp February

F EBRUARY | 1 0

Paul Birtill’s new Collected Poems features a selection of the poet’s work published by Hearing Eye since 1987. These are dark poems based on the poet’s experience: often dealing with universal themes of family, love and the desire for anonymity. “Bleedin’ fabulous.” John Cooper Clarke “Darkly comic pieces.” New Statesman Paul Birtill was born in Walton, Liverpool in 1960. He moved to London in his early twenties and apart from a brief period in Glasgow has lived there ever since. His poems appear regularly in national newspapers and literary magazines, and he has read them on national radio and at poetry venues nationwide. He has published a number of collections with Hearing Eye, including Odd Behaviour and Willing to Change. He also writes plays, five of which have been staged at Pentameters Theatre Hampstead, including Squalor, which was shortlisted for the prestigious Verity Bargate Award, Time Out Critic’s Choice The Lodger and Happy Christmas, which has been staged at the theatre twice.

Hearing Eye | Paperback | £12.00 978-1-905082-55-1 | 129x196mm | 148pp February


poet r y

To the New World Valerie Duff New collection from Boston poet and editor of Salamander magazine. “This is poetry full of absolute physical celebration – galley stoves, flour, slabs of meat, pollens, a tarnished boat – a gift, really. By turns these poems are violent and sweet, representing many journeys. They are surreal, joyous, startling, and fierce.” Cheryl Follon “… sharp-edged, ironic, and canny poems… This is a book of liminality, of speakers at emotional and spiritual thresholds of all sorts, certain only that there is nothing absolutely lasting. Thus this is also a book of departures and arrivals, of highways and sea-lanes, of taxis, gates, and doorways, and what is sometimes glimpsed in the rearview mirror… a vivid portrait of how we move and shift and pass our days, each heading for better or worse to our own new worlds.” Fred Marchant Valerie Duff is the poetry editor for Salamander magazine. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Harvard Review, PN Review and elsewhere. Valerie is a freelance writer and editor for Bedford/St. Martin’s Press. She lives in Boston with her husband and two children.

Salmon Poetry | Paperback | £10.00 978-1-907056-28-4 | 210x134mm | 76pp February

Ljubljana Meta Kušar (translated by Ana Jelnikar and Stephen Watts) One of Slovenia’s leading poets. Ljubljana is Meta Kušar’s city, where she has lived, wandered, bought and cooked her food, thought, written and loved. When she travels, it is to Ljubljana that she returns and this city, her constant home, has become her muse. Ljubljana, in its 77 untitled poems, reflects all of this. It is a sensual yet spiritual book, full of all the contrasts and contradictions one might expect to find in a city, and yet full of wisdom and beauty too. Meta Kušar, poet and essayist, was born in Ljubljana in 1952. With three collections of poetry in print, she is one of Slovenia’s most popular and successful women poets. Since 1980 she has regularly contributed to Slovene National Radio and RAI-Trieste with cultural and historical talks. She has also directed a musical performance of her poetry, The Throne of Poetry, which was staged in Slovenia, Washington (1991) and London (2000).

Arc Publications | Hardback and Paperback | £12.99 (hb) £9.99 (pb) | 978-1-904614-92-0 (hb) 978-1-904614-41-8 (pb) | 138x216mm | 112pp February

11 | FEB RUARY


P oet r y

Spear-Fishing on the Chatanika: New and Selected Poems John Morgan Alaskan poet and contemporary of Robert Lowell. Spear-Fishing on the Chatanika: New and Selected Poems is the culmination of over forty years of writing by the distinguished Alaskan poet John Morgan. It opens with a gathering of recent work, ranging from poems of family and travel to explorations of landscape, dream and history. Generous selections from Morgan’s three previous books follow. “[Morgan’s poems] are strong and full of carefully controlled feeling. They are tender and precise evocations of the moral and sensory life of man.” Annie Dillard Born in New York City, John Morgan studied with Robert Lowell at Harvard, where he won the Hatch Prize for Lyric Poetry. He has since been awarded the Academy of American Poets’ Prize and the Discovery Award of the New York Poetry Center. In 1976, he moved with his family to Fairbanks, Alaska. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, The Paris Review and many other magazines, as well as in more than twenty anthologies. He recently served as the first writer-inresidence at Denali National Park in Alaska.

Salmon Poetry | Paperback | £12.00 978-1-907056-24-6 | 210x134mm | 136pp | February

Keir Hardie Street Alan Morrison A journey on the hidden Sea-Green line on the London Underground. Allan Jackdaw, an unremembered early 20th century poet, undertakes a fantastical journey on the London Underground. Along the way he meets various shady and variously shaded characters, including the accidental capitalist Short Shanks the Shopkeeper, the scribbling Hermit of Hercules Buildings (William Blake), the Turpentine Prophet (Robert Tressell), and the Ghost of a Poet (John Davidson). When Jackdaw disembarks, he is in a secret, parallel London: a living, bustling socialist utopia. Alan Morrison was born in 1974. His poetry first appeared in Don’t Think of Tigers in 2001, and he has since published work in over thirty journals, including The London Magazine. He is the author of a play for voices, Picaresque, and of two critically praised collections, The Mansion Gardens (2006) and A Tapestry of Absent Sitters (2009). Morrison is currently Poet-in-Residence at Mill View Psychiatric Hospital, Hove, and is the founding editor of the radical literary webzine, The Recusant.

Smokestack Books | Paperback | £7.95 978-0-956034-16-8 | 197x127mm | 64pp | February

F EBRUARY | 1 2


poet r y

Pavilion Deborah Tyler-Bennett

Dreams that Spell the Light Shanta Acharya

Fantastical poetry inspired by Brighton and its Royal Pavilion.

“She cuts to the heart of things.” Peter Porter

The Brighton Pavilion is one of Britain’s best loved follies. Built for the Prince Regent (later George IV) to entertain his mistresses, it is a Grade 1 listed building, a monument to dandyism and a museum of royal kitsch. Between the Pavilion and the ruined West Pier lies the coast of Greeneland: peep-shows and arcades, cheap thrills and expensive mistakes. This new collection is a celebration of the world of the English dandy, its gorgeous peacock feathers and fading glamour. The poet’s cast of eccentric and complicated characters entertain their listeners at the bar, flashy and flamboyant as Brighton’s fantasy Pavilion, revealing the sad truths and disturbing secrets behind their cheap make-up. Welcome to the Pleasure Dome.

Shanta Acharya’s fifth full-length collection is gentle, poignant and unpretentious. An established name on the London poetry scene, she writes about real concerns with a directness and a linguistic tension which registers her Indian origins without being merely exotic.

Deborah Tyler-Bennett’s previous publications include Selected Poems: Clark Gable in Mansfield (2003). In 2001 she won the Hugh MacDiarmid Trophy at the Scottish International Open Poetry Competition. She is the coauthor of a Creative Writing web-package for the Victoria and Albert Museum, and co-founded the literary magazine The Coffee House. She lives in Loughborough.

Shanta Acharya was born and educated in Orissa, India and won a scholarship to Oxford where she completed her doctoral thesis on Ralph Waldo Emerson. She was a Visiting Scholar at Harvard, before embarking on a career in the asset management industry; she is also the author of several books on the subject. Since 1996, she has been the founder director of Poetry in the House at Lauderdale House, Highgate, London. Her previous collection was Shringara (2006).

Smokestack Books | Paperback | £7.95 978-0-956034-15-1 | 197x127mm | 64pp February

Arc Publications | Hardback and Paperback £10.99 (hb) | £7.99 (pb) | 978-1-906570-05-7 (hb) 978-1-904614-61-6 (pb) | 138x216mm | 72pp March

“Her acute eye and keen sense of form depict the outer world in vivid detail, invoking the inner world where human experience makes its reality. Here is a poet of much clarity of spirit and a wondrous gift for evoking place.” Penelope Shuttle

13 | M AR CH


P oet r y

Seeing Birds in Church is a Kind of Adieu Arlene Ang Fifth collection from poet of power and perception. Arlene Ang’s fifth collection is concerned with images and perception, with the intricacies and strangeness of human relationships. Her language is sometimes surreal but always sensual and inventive. This is poetry that surprises, poetry with a rapid heartbeat that demands a response from the reader. Throughout, Ang deploys sharp crafting and a unique voice. Arlene Ang is the author of four previous poetry collections, the most recent being a collaborative work with Valerie Fox, Bundles of Letters Including A, V and Epsilon (2008). Her awards include the 2008 Juked Poetry Prize and the 2006 Frogmore Poetry Prize, as well as a commendation in the Ware Poets Open Poetry Competition in 2007 and a runner-up place at the Biscuit International Poetry Prize in 2008. She lives in Spinea, Italy where she serves as staff editor for The Pedestal Magazine and Press 1.

Cinnamon Press | Paperback | £7.99 978-1-907090-06-6 | 216x140mm | 80pp March

MAR C H | 1 4

The Forest Under the Sea John Barnie “… unquestionably one of our most urgent contemporary voices.” Damian Walford Davies “Characterised by a probing seriousness, the volume is… energised by Barnie’s trademark ironies – a wryness he sees operating in the structures of the universe. His vision is best described as teasingly dark. Long-listed for the 2008 Wales Book of the Year award for his previous collection, Trouble in Heaven, John Barnie proves with The Forest Under the Sea that he is unquestionably one of our most urgent contemporary voices.” Damian Walford Davies John Barnie is a poet and essayist from Abergavenny, Gwent, who lived in Denmark from 1969 to 1982. He was editor of Planet and The Welsh Internationalist from 1990 to 2006 and has published several collections of poetry, works of fiction, and two collections of essays, one of which, The King of Ashes, won a Welsh Arts Council Prize for Literature in 1990. He is a Fellow of Academi and of the Society of Authors.

Cinnamon Press | Paperback | £7.99 978-1-907090-04-2 | 216x140mm | 80pp March


poet r y

Landing Places: Immigrant Poets in Ireland Eva Bourke and Borbála Faragó (editors) Significant anthology profiling 66 ‘Irish’ poets from across the globe. Editors Eva Bourke and Borbála Faragó present a timely and important anthology of poems by sixty-six poets, both recent arrivals to Irish shores and first generation immigrants from all over the world. Now they collectively contribute to, challenge and ultimately broaden the definition of what is thought of as ‘writing from Ireland’. Contributors include Chris Agee, Theodore Deppe, Enrique Juncosa, Nyaradzo Masunda, Jennifer Matthews, Clare McDonnell, Susan Millar DuMars, Daniel O’Donoghue, Mark Roper, Eckhardt Schmidt, Jo Slade, Richard Tillinghast, Grace Wells, Sally Wheeler, Sabine Wichert, and many more. Eva Bourke has published five collections of poetry, most recently The Latitude of Naples (Dedalus, 2005). Her New and Selected Poems is due in 2011. She has received numerous awards and bursaries from the Arts Council and is a member of Aosdána. Borbála Faragó was born in Budapest and moved to Ireland in 1997. She completed her PhD at University College, Dublin in 2006 and is currently preparing a monograph on the poetry of Medbh McGuckian. She lives in Dublin.

Dedalus Press | Hardback and Paperback | £22.50 (hb) £13.50 (pb) | 978-1-906614-22-5 (hb) 978-1-906614-21-8 (pb) | 140x216mm | 238pp March

This London Patrick Hicks A poetic exploration of one of the world’s great cities. Two thousand years ago a tiny village was founded on the marshy banks of the River Thames. Since then, this outpost of a crumbling Roman Empire has become an international city, a magnetic intersection between cultures and histories. London was once the capital for millions of colonised people around the globe, including—for nearly two hundred years—a land that would eventually become the United States. In this new collection, Patrick Hicks explores connections between history and place, colonialism and language, visiting and belonging, and points out the hidden streets and personalities of a city that changed the world. Patrick Hicks is a dual citizen of Ireland and the United States, as well as Writer-in-Residence at Augustana College in South Dakota. He is the author of several poetry collections, including Finding the Gossamer (Salmon, 2008). Aside from being a Visiting Fellow at Oxford, he has been nominated several times for the Pushcart Prize. After living in Europe for many years, he now enjoys thunderstorms rolling across Midwest America.

Salmon Poetry | Paperback | £10.00 978-1-907056-27-7 | 210x134mm | 88pp March

15 | M AR CH


P oet r y

Frightening New Furniture Kevin Higgins

Inroads Carolyn Jess-Cooke

Eagerly anticipated follow-up to The Boy with No Face and Time Gentlemen, Please.

“A sparkling variety-act, choreographed with a strong but daring sense of form.” Carol Rumens

In poems laced with the blackest humour Kevin Higgins spares no-one, least of all himself. In his third collection of poetry, he takes the reader through the hubris of boomtime Ireland and out the other side into a strange country where everything is suddenly broken again. Higgins goes all the way into the dark to investigate what’s left when youthful political idealism gives way under the sheer weight of what really goes on. As ever, the City of Galway is one of his pet subjects, and he takes time out to bring to hilarious life its bookshop romancers and women who decide to be fascinating. “... a social critique as lithe and imaginative as that of the con-merchants who run the show…” Justin Quinn

Carolyn Jess-Cooke’s debut collection showcases a startling new talent, a sophisticated poetic intelligence and a great sense of fun. The verbal fluency and dexterity on display produces poems that are multi-faceted, often paradoxical. Sweet realism constantly interlaces with strong metaphor, as in the strangely evocative ‘Dorothy’s Homecoming’, a brilliant take on the classic film The Wizard of Oz. Whatever the theme and whatever the approach, readers will enjoy discovering this striking and versatile new voice. “There are breathtaking poems here... Jess-Cooke has an unflinching honesty to match her powerful imagery.” Luke Kennard

Kevin Higgins is the co-organiser of Over the Edge literary events, and teaches Creative Writing. His first collection of poems, The Boy with No Face (Salmon, 2005) was shortlisted for the Strong Award. His poems have featured in The Forward Book of Poetry 2009, Best of Irish Poetry 2009, The Watchful Heart – A New Generation of Irish Poets (Salmon) and in Identity Parade – New British and Irish Poets (Bloodaxe).

Carolyn Jess-Cooke is a Northern Irish poet and novelist currently living in north-east England. Recipient of an Eric Gregory Award, the Tyrone Guthrie prize for poetry and a Northern Promise award, her work has appeared everywhere from promotional handbags for the Durham Book Festival to a 700m steel floorscape in a medical facility in Middlesbrough. Inroads is her first poetry collection; her first novel, The Guardian Angel’s Journal, is due to be published in 2011.

Salmon Poetry | Paperback | £10.00 978-1-907056-25-3 | 210x134mm | 96pp March

Seren | Paperback | £7.99 978-1-854115-11-9 | 138x216mm | 64pp March

MAR C H | 1 6


poet r y

Identity Parade: New British & Irish Poets Roddy Lumsden (editor) A new taste-making anthology from the publishers behind the Staying Alive phenomenon. Identity Parade presents new British and Irish poetry at a time of great vibrancy and variety. It offers the work of 85 highly individual and distinctive talents whose poems display the distinctive breadth of styles and approaches characteristic of our current poetry. These writers are prospering all over Britain and Ireland – from Shetland to Aberystwyth, from Gravesend to Galway – as well as further afield. Many new and under-sung poets appear alongside this generation’s most celebrated names, and probably for the first time in any major poetry anthology, more women writers than men are featured. Identity Parade is as accessible to the new reader as it is to the aficionado – the essential starting place for anyone interested in the poetry of here and now. Roddy Lumsden’s first book Yeah Yeah Yeah (1997) was shortlisted for both the Forward and Saltire prizes. His second collection The Book of Love (2000), a Poetry Book Society Choice, was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Mischief Night: New & Selected Poems (2004) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. His latest collection is Third Wish Wasted (2009). Born in St. Andrews, he lived in Edinburgh before moving to London, where he is a freelance writer.

Bloodaxe Books | Paperback | £12.00 978-1-852248-39-0 | 216x138mm | 400pp | March

Out of the Cold Blue Richard McKane “His poems are faultlessly alive, so fully worked out.” Peter Levi These selected poems of Richard McKane, written from the mid-1960s to the turn of the century, amplify and vastly expand on his first book, Amphora for Metaphors. Peter Levi’s words in his Introduction to that collection still hold true here: “Richard McKane’s arrival has been long delayed, but now he steps into the rather crowded ranks of the most brilliant poets of the last twenty years or more.” This collection is a companion volume to Poet for Poet, also published by Hearing Eye and chosen by Helen Bamber OBE on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs. Richard McKane was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1947. In 1978, he was the first non-US citizen to be awarded the Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University as a writer. As a translator from Russian and Turkish, he has published books with Bloodaxe, Anvil and Arc. The first collection of his own poetry, Amphora for Metaphors, was published in New York and London in 1993 and his Turkey Poems was published bilingually in Istanbul. Whilst continuing to translate, he also works as an interpreter at the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, in London.

Hearing Eye | Paperback | £10.00 978-1-905082-32-2 | 129x196mm | 112pp | March

17 | M AR CH


P oet r y

Dreams for Breakfast Susan Millar DuMars

Heart Turned Back Bertha Rogers

Second collection from prolific poet and short-story writer.

Eagerly awaited new collection from American poet and illustrator.

In her second poetry collection, Susan Millar DuMars patrols the dangerous border between daylight’s fragile peace and the dark reckonings of our dreams. The poems are sensual, surreal, dark and darkly funny. Sarah Palin loses her head; Albert Speer plants a garden; Plato’s ghost stares into an empty fridge while Stephen Fry bestows Champagne kisses. Women lose their faces but find their voices as ‘We dive into / the language sea’.

Rich in knowledge of forest and farmland, in dreamscapes both bucolic and nightmarish, in her latest collection Bertha Rogers summons up vivid worlds and recollections with clarity and haunting music. She has a painter’s eye for composition and colour, and a naturalist’s keen sense of observation. These poems come from a slow and painstaking education in the things of this world, from learning that we have only a limited time to comprehend, then translate and transform that comprehension into words.

“Millar DuMars walks the tightrope strung between the House of Mirth and the Temple of Poetry – and gets it right.” Grace Wells Susan Millar DuMars was born in Philadelphia in 1966. Her debut poetry collection, Big Pink Umbrella, was published by Salmon in 2008. Her work appears in The Best of Irish Poetry 2010 and Landing Places: Immigrant Poets in Ireland (Dedalus Press). She has also published a collection of short stories, American Girls (2007), and is at work on a further story collection. Susan lives in Galway, where she works as a Creative Writing teacher, and has run Galway’s Over the Edge readings series, with her husband Kevin Higgins, since its inception in 2003.

Salmon Poetry | Paperback | £10.00 978-1-907056-35-2 | 210x134mm | 62pp March

MAR C H | 1 8

Bertha Rogers’s poems appear in journals, anthologies and in the collections Even the Hemlock: Poems, Illuminations, and Reliquaries; The Fourth Beast; A House of Corners; and Sleeper, You Wake. Her translation of Beowulf was published in 2000; and her translation of the AngloSaxon riddle-poems from the Exeter Book, Uncommon Creatures, Singing Things, is forthcoming. In 2006, Rogers received an A.E. Ventures Foundation Grant for excellence in writing and visual arts and for contributions to the field. In 1992, she founded Bright Hill Press with her husband, Ernest M. Fishman.

Salmon Poetry | Paperback | £12.00 978-1-907056-26-0 | 210x134mm | 82pp March


poet r y

Fishing for Beginners James Bell

Apparently Matthew Caley

Debut collection from Exeter poet and performer.

Third collection from Forward Prizenominated poet.

The poems in Fishing for Beginners engage the reader on a quiet, thoughtful journey where water is never far from the poet’s thoughts and imaginings. Sometimes cautious, sometimes experimental, James Bell writes with authority and wit, yet always with a deft eye for the significant detail that marks him out as a poet of maturity and craft. This is a collection to savour.

Every poem in Matthew Caley’s Apparently begins – or occasionally ends – with the word ‘apparently’. In conversation this word usually precedes a scurrilous piece of gossip or hearsay, allowing the speaker to voice what cannot be substantiated; for in our increasingly mediated world, what is ‘apparent’ often has more authority than ‘what actually is’.

“Shifts of water glitter all through this collection. James Bell shares what he recalls, understands and loves, from the cruel cackle of a gull to the trim of silver on wet sand.” Harry Guest

“A book to delight and amaze long after you’ve fallen off the chaise longue.” John Hartley Williams

James Bell was born in Scotland and has lived in Devon for many years. His chapbook The Just Vanished Place was published by tall-lighthouse in 2008. Widely published in magazines such as Acumen and Poetry Scotland, and featuring at many readings and festivals, he is also the co-presenter of Uncut Poets, Exeter’s premier year-round poetry platform.

Matthew Caley’s Thirst (1999) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and described by Time Out as “a joy – comic, witty, even touchingly poignant.” Since then he has been Poet-in-Residence at the Poetry Society Café and commended in separate National Poetry Competitions. This is his third full-length collection, following The Scene of My Former Triumph (2005). In a previous life he designed record sleeves in Newcastle. He now lives, works and writes in London.

tall-lighthouse | Paperback | £8.00 978-1-904551-78-2 | 150x230mm | 72pp April

Bloodaxe Books | Paperback | £8.95 978-1-852248-63-5 | 232x154mm | 80pp April

19 | Ap ril


P oet r y

Inner Cities of Gulls J.P. Dancing Bear “J.P. Dancing Bear writes new myths for our times.” Pascale Petit “Throughout Inner Cities of Gulls, whether penetrating the natural world or the historical one, whether in love poems or in poems that explore other ‘inner weather’ of the human heart, J.P. Dancing Bear reveals a certain kind of earned wisdom. Sometimes summoning the voices of mythical persons, sometimes raising his own powerful voice, this poet lends insight to our sometimes faulty assumptions about the way life should be lived.” Andrea Hollander Budy “Inner Cities of Gulls contains powerfully moving poems that are restlessly inventive and always life affirming.” Pascale Petit J.P. Dancing Bear is the author of Conflicted Light (Salmon, 2008), Gacela of Narcissus City (2006), Billy Last Crow (2004) and What Language (2002), winner of the Slipstream Prize. His work has been nominated ten times for a Pushcart Prize and once for a Forward Prize. He is the editor of the American Poetry Journal and Dream Horse Press and the host of Out of Our Minds, a weekly poetry program on the US public radio station KKUP.

Salmon Poetry | Paperback | £10.00 978-1-907056-23-9 | 134x210mm | 82pp | April

Hare Hugh Dunkerley Several-times prize-winner in BBC Wildlife Poet of the Year awards. “This original and confident collection depicts an unsettling contemporary world, where the quotidian is found to be profoundly other than expected, and a sense of troubled realism prevails. Acuity of observation, emotional depth and intellectual rigour inform Hugh Dunkerley’s work.” Penelope Shuttle “What I admire about Hugh Dunkerley’s poetry is the spareness and clarity of his language: his ability to tackle the extremities of experience – death, sex, loss, the ruthlessness of nature – with a vision which is unsentimental and yet profoundly moving.” Vicki Feaver Hugh Dunkerley lectures in Creative Writing and Contemporary Poetry and the Environment in Chichester. He has a particular interest in environmentalism and ecocriticism. His poetry includes a chapbook, Walking to the Fire Tower (1997) and Fast, published in 2007. He has been the recipient of a prestigious Eric Gregory Award (1992), a Hawthornden Fellowship (1999) and a 2009 Arts Council Award. He also writes articles on contemporary poetry as well as reviewing for various magazines.

Cinnamon Press | Paperback | £7.99 978-1-907090-08-0 | 216x140mm | 64pp | April

A P RIL | 2 0


poet r y

Sunflowers in Your Eyes: Four Zimbabwean Poets Menna Elfyn (editor) Anthology of four vibrant women poets from Zimbabwe. “These voices are much needed, conveying a world made magnificent in its humanity. These voices sing of an unquenchable spirit against the backdrop of convention and expectation.” Menna Elfyn Ethel Irene Kabwato has won many prizes for her prose and poetry. She works in a project called Slum Cinema, a voluntary initiative which seeks to empower disadvantaged communities through multi-media work. Fungai Rufaro Machirori has won national short-story and script writing competitions, is a journalist, researcher and blogger, and works in international development with specific focus on gender issues. Joice Shereni is a single mother of two children. Her writing empowers her to shed light on her understanding of the world. Blessing Musariri is an award-winning children’s author. She has been featured in various international anthologies and was recently awarded a special prize in the Susie Smith Memorial Prize Competition, run by Oxfam. Menna Elfyn is an awardwinning poet and playwright. Director of the Masters Programme in Creative Writing at Trinity University, Carmarthen and Literary Fellow at Swansea University, in 2009 she was awarded the International Anima Istranza Foreign Prize for Poetry.

Cinnamon Press | Paperback | £7.99 978-1-907090-13-4 | 216x140mm | 64pp April

Zen Cymru Peter Finch “... a delight, continuously inventive, truthful, intelligent.” The Independent on Sunday Zen Cymru is the new collection of poems by that master of modern angst, Peter Finch. Not one for quiet meditations, this voice is loud, bewildered, satirical, furious, sad, fearful and funny. This is a Wales beset by rain, the ghosts of harddrinking poets, of holy wells guarded by heifers, of sports crowds, Ikea, sheep, ‘enormous storm clouds’, and the ‘Entry of Christ Into Cardiff, 2005’. Elvis is seen in Asda, Merthyr. We visit ‘The Miró Minibar’ in Barcelona, look for Bélla Bartók in Hungary, take a road trip to Ireland and find more rain. Finch is a well-known performance poet and his poems have the immediacy and the dramatic impact of pieces conceived for the stage. Zen Cymru will win yet more fans to the Finch cult. Peter Finch is a poet, author and critic who lives in Cardiff. He is the series editor of Seren’s hugely popular Real travelogues, which began with his own Real Cardiff in 2002. His numerous poetry titles include Useful, Poems for Ghosts and Food (all from Seren), plus Antibodies and Vizet, a selected poems in Hungarian from Kronkét Könyvek. A former publisher and bookseller, he is now Chief Executive of the Welsh Academy, the Welsh Literature Promotion Agency and Society of Writers.

Seren | Paperback | £7.99 978-1-854115-00-3 | 138x216mm | 64pp April

21 | Ap ril


P oet r y

Territory Andrew Forster

The Visitors Rowan Fortune-Wood (editor)

Second collection from Forward Prize-shortlisted poet.

Poetry and short stories, including winners of the Cinnamon Press Collection Award.

Andrew Forster’s second collection explores what it means to make a home in a particular place, and the relationship with the environment that this implies. Much of the collection is set in the remote former mining village of Leadhills in south-west Scotland, where these questions are encountered daily. The poems delve into the landscape, history and natural history of Leadhills, its surrounding area and beyond, looking at the uneasy balance of our relationship with nature.

The Visitors showcases an array of talented new and established voices in short fiction and poetry. Tricia Durdey’s haunting, evocative title story gets to the core of what it means to be at home; Muhamed Fajkovic’s ‘Vivisection’ dissects the layers we hide behind and how they peel away in crisis with a wry humour and flair for twists; Cassandra Passarelli’s ‘Cadejo’ blends Guatemalan folklore and magical realism with a coming of age story, while Fiona Thackeray’s ‘Northern Species’ explores issues of poverty and ecology in Brazil and Huw Lawrence puts a surreal and sensual twist on the breakdown of a relationship in ‘Someone Dancing’. The Visitors also features work from Anne Caldwell and Sally Douglas, joint winners of the 2009 Cinnamon Press Collection Award.

“His descriptions of country life through the seasons offer an evocative perspective on living amidst the forces of nature, which can both inspire and oppress in equal measure.” Poetry Book Society Andrew Forster was born in South Yorkshire but lived in Scotland for over twenty years before moving to Cumbria in 2008. He was Literature Development Officer for Dumfries and Galloway for five years before becoming Literature Officer for the Wordsworth Trust in 2008. Dress Rehearsals, a pamphlet, was published in 2000, while his first collection Fear of Thunder (also from Flambard) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2008.

Flambard Press | Paperback | £7.50 978-1-906601-15-7 | 216x138mm | 72pp April

A P RIL | 2 2

Rowan Fortune-Wood is assistant editor at Cinnamon Press. His writing engages with several forms including poetry, fiction, reviews and essays. He runs a YouTube channel with a large subscriber base that features his work in philosophy, aesthetics and literature, including a series of mixed media microfictions.

Cinnamon Press | Paperback | £8.99 978-1-907090-05-9 | 216x140mm | 144pp April


poet r y

You Are Her Linda France “Sensuous and pensive… gentle yet surprisingly hard-hitting.” Time Out Linda France found the title for her new collection, You are Her, on a fading information board at Hadrian’s Wall, not far from where she has lived for the past thirty years. Locating and disorientating at the same time, it set the co-ordinates for a body of work on boundaries and identity, damage and absence. A horse-riding accident in 1995 fractured Linda France’s spine and cracked her pelvis; the injury, although on the surface healed, re-emerged in the form of flashbacks and chronic pain ten years later when several of her friends died in close succession. Many of the poems in You are Her chart the passage of grief and resolution, a cycle of re-orientation. “… a restless and curious writer with a decided voice of her own.” Sean O’Brien Linda France was born in Newcastle upon Tyne, and now lives near Corbridge in Northumberland. She works as a poet, tutor, mentor and editor, often collaborating with visual artists. Her previous poetry collections include Book of Days (Smokestack, 2006), The Toast of the Kit Cat Club (Bloodaxe, 2005) and The Simultaneous Dress (Bloodaxe, 2002). Linda also edited the acclaimed Bloodaxe anthology Sixty Women Poets (1993). Arc Publications | Hardback and Paperback | £12.99 (hb) £9.99 (pb) 978-1-906570-56-9 (hb) | 978-1-906570-55-2 (pb) 216x138mm | 92pp | April

Carnival Edge: New and Selected Poems Katherine Gallagher Third Arc collection from popular Australian poet. Carnival Edge: New & Selected Poems is Katherine Gallagher’s third book from Arc, and draws together the best work from five of her previous collections, together with a substantial body of new work. Gallagher is a prolific and popular poet, and this comprehensive new collection will delight her many devotees, both in the UK and in her native Australia. “To be able to follow, within a single volume, the evolution and refinement of a poet of Gallagher’s subtlety and integrity is a fascination in itself… Reading Gallagher, one recognises there are ways of walking that are also dance.” Mario Petrucci Katherine Gallagher is a widely-acclaimed poet with six books published, as well as four chapbooks. Born in Australia, Gallagher has lived and worked in London since 1979. She has been an active force in the community, giving poetry readings, running workshops, judging poetry competitions, and participating in poetry festivals. She also translates from French and her own poetry has been translated into French, German, Italian, Romanian and Serbian. Her two previous Arc collections are Tigers on a Silk Road and Circus-Apprentice. Arc Publications | Hardback and Paperback | £14.99 (hb) £11.99 (pb) 978-1-906570-43-9 (hb) | 978-1-906570-42-2 (pb) 216x138mm | 200pp | April

23 | AP RIL


P oet r y

Free Sex Chocolate Julian Gough

Sad Giraffe Café Richard Gwyn

Debut crossover from immensely successful comic novelist.

Popular Welsh poet and author of The Colour of a Dog Running Away.

Free Sex Chocolate is a witty, irreverent, provocative and highly original collection of poems and songs written by Julian Gough. An acclaimed novelist, this is his first collection of poetry. Gough’s first novel, Juno & Juliet, was published in 2001; his second, Jude: Level 1, came six years later, and was described by The Sunday Tribune as “possibly the finest comic novel since Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman”. In the UK, it was shortlisted for the Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction. Will Self, controversially, won. Gough (understandably miffed) kidnapped Will Self ’s pig, and posted the ransom video on YouTube.

Sad Giraffe Café is a collection of prose poems which together form a shifting progressive narrative. There are three recurring themes: an imaginary and sinister kingdom, a young wanderer named Alice, and a shape-shifting, timetravelling, first-person narrator. The poems seem to be devoid of past or future, existing in an unstable and at times apocalyptic present. They are peopled by strangers and lodged in an ‘elsewhere’ which is also somehow familiar. They have the feel of dreams masquerading as real events, or else of real events masquerading as dreams.

Julian Gough was born in London, to parents so Irish they have to be buried on the Rock of Cashel. In 2007, his story ‘The Orphan and the Mob’ won the BBC National Short Story Award, then the world’s largest annual prize for a single short story. He also wrote the first short story ever printed in The Financial Times, ‘The Great Hargeisa Goat Bubble’, broadcast as an acclaimed radio play on BBC Radio 4 in 2009. In early 2010, The Sunday Tribune chose Jude: Level 1 as its Irish Novel of the Decade.

Salmon Poetry | Paperback | £10.00 978-1-907056-36-9 | 138x210mm | 150pp April

A P RIL | 2 4

“... wry and curiously wise short fictions...” Philip Gross Richard Gwyn grew up in Crickhowell, south Wales. He now directs the MA in Creative Writing at Cardiff University. He is the author of five collections of poetry and two novels, The Colour of a Dog Running Away (2006) and Deep Hanging Out (2007). He has also written many articles and essays, and reviews new fiction for The Independent. He has translated poetry from Spanish and Catalan, and his own poetry and fiction have appeared in several languages.

Arc Publications | Hardback and Paperback | £10.99 (hb) £7.99 (pb) | 978-1-906570-48-4 (hb) 978-1-906570-45-3 (pb) | 216x138mm | 78pp April


poet r y

Blue Abundance Noël Hanlon

Giraffe Under a Grey Sky Danielle Hope

“This is powerful love poetry... saucy, erotic, candid and funny…” Leila Doolan

“Danielle Hope shares with William Carlos Williams a gift for observation…” Poetry Express

“Noel Hanlon’s voice embodies luminous presence. Whether speaking so keenly and clearly of land she loves in Oregon and Ireland, conversations with neighbours and family, the raising of lambs, planting, nurturing and harvesting all the layers of a precious life and world – these are marvellous poems we could live in. They are that deep and that wide.” Naomi Shihab Nye “These poems are astonishing in their strength – the vigor of unjaded senses, the generosity of a mature heart… they offer that strength in the forms of an achieved, at times transcendent art.” Ursula K. Le Guin

Giraffe under a Grey Sky is Danielle Hope’s fourth collection of poetry and her first new volume for over five years. In it we encounter a new character – Mrs Uomo – who muddles through modern urban society, dealing with health care bureaucracy and the Hadron Collider, then finds herself corrupted by a game of Monopoly. These new poems delve into social, imaginative, natural and personal worlds, in turns comic and serious. These include the workings of the heart, a world ruled by buttercups, grief, and a sequence on the Potters Bar rail crash. “Danielle Hope shares with William Carlos Williams a gift for observation; with Dannie Abse a lyricism and satirical edge; and with Chehkov a compassion manifesting itself in elegies and political poems borne out of long acquaintance with suffering.” John O’Donoghue, Poetry Express

Noël Hanlon was born in Portland, Oregon in 1956. Her poems have been widely published in the US. She is on the board of Soapstone, an Oregon residency that provides women writers with a stretch of uninterrupted time for their creative work, and the opportunity to live in semi-solitude in the natural world. Noël herself lives this dream: her own poetry is born out of her relationships with the people, landscapes and animals, tame and wild, of her native Oregon.

Danielle Hope edited Zenos, a magazine of British and international poetry, was a trustee of Survivors’ Poetry and is currently advisory editor of Acumen. She was born in Lancashire and now lives in London where she also works as a doctor.

Salmon Poetry | Paperback | £10.00 978-1-907056-47-5 | 134x210mm | 64pp April

Rockingham Press | Paperback | £7.99 978-1-904851-34-9 | 210x140mm | 64pp April

25 | AP RIL


P oet r y

The Breakfast Machine Helen Ivory “An explosion in the sky of contemporary poetry.” Penelope Shuttle Inside The Breakfast Machine a chicken on squeaky tin legs is cooking you eggs and a squirrel plays tape-recorded birdsong high up in a tree. The Horsemen of the Apocalypse high-tail it into town as cowboys, and the fate of the world is decided by a game of cards. Driven by the transformations of fairytale, The Breakfast Machine explores the dark corners of childhood and finds them alive and well in offices, kitchens and hen-houses. “Ivory’s particular trick of capturing reality from a slightly surreal angle makes the heart race a little.” Ambit Helen Ivory was born in Luton in 1969, and lives in Norwich. She has published two other collections with Bloodaxe: The Double Life of Clocks (2002) and The Dog in the Sky (2006). She has taught Creative Writing for Continuing Education at the University of East Anglia for nine years and has been Academic Director there for five. She is an editor for the Poetry Archive, a tutor for the Arvon Foundation and is currently studying for a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing at UEA.

Bloodaxe Books | Paperback | £7.95 978-1-852248-73-4 | 208x134mm | 64pp | April

One Child Sold Larry Jaffe From the co-founder of the Poets for Human Rights movement. Larry Jaffe has been using his art to promote human rights throughout his entire professional career. Masterfully crafted, his poetry appears in numerous anthologies, magazines and on the internet, where he has pioneered poetry web sites. He is an official Ambassador for Youth for Human Rights as well as their Poet Laureate, and has read his poetry in such distinguished locations as the Japanese American Museum and the Hammer Museum in California, the Museum of Literature in Prague and the Dylan Thomas Centre in Wales. He was the recent recipient of the Saint Hill Art Festival’s Lifetime of Creativity Award, the first time this award was given to a poet. Larry Jaffe served as International Readings Coordinator for the UNESCO Dialogue among Civilisations through Poetry Project from 2001 to 2004, a project that incorporated hundreds of readings in hundreds of cities globally. He is also the co-founder of Poets for Human Rights, an international coalition of poets and human rights advocates.

Salmon Poetry | Paperback | £10.00 978-1-907056-45-1 | 134x210mm | 100pp | April

A P RIL | 2 6


poet r y

Joy Change Judy Kendall

In Other Words Mary Madec

“An acute observer of nuance and detail…” Philip Gross

Winner of 2009 Hennessy Award for Emerging Poetry.

Joy Change focuses on Judy Kendall’s years spent teaching in Japan. Sharply observed, beautifully honed and brimming with wit and humanity, this second collection establishes Judy Kendall as an accomplished and highly talented poet.

In this debut collection, Mary Madec tests the power and resilience of language to explore the intractable intimacies of our connection with the world, from first memories and love to brave and incisive portraits of real and imagined lives. Mary Madec finds an idiom for a complex inner world, resonating truths we all know. There is an underlying compassion and humour in this book which takes us to new places in ourselves, and an intelligence and clarity which helps us to see exactly where we really are in the world.

“Joy Change is a fascinating study in how to be outside – in this case, outside the dauntingly ‘complete’ society of Japanese manners and language… the result is vivid, intense work, tightly sounded, with a musical precision to its naming and a painterly grasp of concise description.” W.N. Herbert Judy Kendall spent many years living and working in southern Africa and Japan. Her previous collection with Cinnamon Press is The Drier The Brighter. Kendall was shortlisted for the 2008 Bridport Poetry Prize. Her research interests are in poetic composition, collaborative translation and the poetry of Edward Thomas; she edited Edward Thomas’s Poets and is working on a book on Edward Thomas’s letters to Walter de la Mare. She currently lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Salford.

Cinnamon Press | Paperback | £7.99 978-1-907090-07-3 | 216x140mm | 64pp April

Mary Madec was born and raised in the west of Ireland. She was educated at NUI, Galway and the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. She currently directs the Villanova University Centre at NUI, Galway. She has published poetry in various literary journals, and was a featured reader at Over the Edge in 2005 and at the Cúirt Over the Edge Showcase in 2008. In 2008 she started up a community-writing project, Away with Words, for people with intellectual disabilities. In April 2009 she won the prestigious Hennessy Award for Emerging Poetry.

Salmon Poetry | Paperback | £10.00 978-1-907056-34-5 | 134x210mm | 92pp April

27 | AP RIL


P oet r y

No Other World: Selected Poems Kunwar Narain (translated by Apurva Narain)

The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems Mark Eisner (editor)

Arguably the most highly-regarded poet writing in Hindi today.

Winner of 1971 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Kunwar Narain is one of the finest poets living today and a pre-eminent literary and intellectual figure in India. No Other World is his first full-length collection of poems to be published in English translation, and consists of poems selected from five volumes across five decades. Frequently inspired by characters, legends and actual events in India’s rich and varied history, Narain writes with wisdom and a humanity that is at once compassionate and unremittingly moral. Coursing through the past and the present, intimate recollections and meditative ruminations, his is poetry that in its intricate weave and egalitarianism leaves us both restless and reassured. Through his son’s beautifullymodulated translations, Narain’s poems communicate themselves to the English-language reader with freshness and energy. Kunwar Narain was born in 1927 and now lives in Delhi. His literary output has spread over more than half a century of Hindi literature, primarily concerned with postindependence India. Narain’s poetry, short stories, literary criticism, essays, translations and varied writings on the arts have been translated internationally and received many literary awards worldwide, as well as India’s Hindustani Academy Award and the Prem Chand Award.

Arc Publications | Hardback and Paperback | £13.99 (hb) £10.99 (pb) | 978-1-906570-20-0 (hb) 978-1-904614-81-4 (pb) | 138x216mm | 160pp April

A P RIL | 2 8

Pablo Neruda (1904-73) was to many the greatest Latin American poet of the 20th century. A prolific, inspirational poet, he wrote many different kinds of poems covering a wide range of themes, notably love, death, grief and despair. His poetry celebrates the dramatic Chilean landscape and rages against the exploitation of his people, for whom he became a national hero. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971 for “a poetry that with the action of an elemental force brings alive a continent’s destiny and dreams”. This book presents fifty of his most essential poems in dynamic new translations, the result of an unprecedented collaboration between a team of poets, translators and leading Neruda scholars. Also including some previously un-translated works, this bilingual edition sets the standard for a general, high-quality introduction to Neruda’s complete oeuvre. “The best introduction to Neruda available in English.” Dominic Luxford Mark Eisner is a writer and filmmaker, and Founder and President of Red Poppy, which is currently producing the first feature documentary on Neruda in English (with a Spanish version), Pablo Neruda: The Poet’s Calling.

Bloodaxe Books | Paperback | £9.95 978-1-852248-62-8 | 214x138mm | 224pp April


poet r y

First Sixty: The Acumen Anthology Patricia Oxley (editor)

Drifting Under the Moon Ger Reidy

Features 195 poets from the first sixty issues of Acumen.

Draws on the unique landscape of County Mayo and the west of Ireland.

If Patricia Oxley, editor of First Sixty, believed in biographical notes, the reader would realise they were reading poems by Poets Laureate, Forward and T.S. Eliot prize-winners, recipients of the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, poetry fellows and academics as well as equally good poems by writers whose work has come in by post. There is even a poem by the murdered Queen of Nepal. Acumen is a magazine open to all. First Sixty is an anthology of readable and meaningful poems which will make the reader laugh, cry, think, agree, disagree but, above all, enjoy. Organised chronologically, the anthology reads not only like a poetic social comment, but as a history of changing poetic forms and concerns. An anthology no serious poetry lover should be without.

Ger Reidy’s first collection of poems, Pictures from a Reservation, appeared in 1998, and received widespread praise for its compelling voice and authentic evocation of the west of Ireland. Just over a decade later, Drifting Under the Moon will considerably advance his reputation: the new poems revealing an increased awareness of craft, a broadening and deepening of his vision.

“A beacon of invention in the west, Acumen’s guiding light is valued throughout the wider world of letters.” Peter Porter

“... peppered with hard-hitting musings on the perennial problems that have bedevilled life on the fringe.” The Irish Times on Pictures from a Reservation “The images are fresh and the emotions uncompromisingly honest. Buy the book. It’s a wise move.” Dermot Healy

Patricia Oxley has been involved with the poetry magazine scene since 1972. Besides editing Acumen, she is the organiser of the Torbay Festival of Poetry and a committee member of the Torbay Arts Base.

Gerard Reidy was born near Westport in Co. Mayo in 1958, qualified as a civil engineer in 1979 and started writing poetry in 1980. He has been the recipient of a number of bursaries and residencies including Mayo County Council Heinrich Boll House, The Tyrone Guterie Centre at Annaghmakerrig, an Arts Council Bursary in 2002 and an international bursary at Can Serrat in Catalonia.

Acumen | Paperback | £9.99 978-1-873161-23-4 | 206x148mm | 332pp April

Dedalus Press | Paperback | £10.50 978-1-906614-25-6 | 140x216mm | 90pp April

29 | AP RIL


P oet r y

The Art of Gardening Mary Robinson

The San Simeon Zebras C.J. Sage

Debut collection from a promising and popular Cumbrian poet.

“C.J. Sage reinvents the nature poem for the 21st century.” Molly Peacock

In The Art of Gardening, Mary Robinson explores her personal memories, the lives of other writers and her experiences of particular places. She begins with a childhood museum visit and ends with a sequence of poems prompted by The Poetics of Space by the French philosopher, Gaston Bachelard. In the title poem, the Czech writer Karel C˘apek plants bulbs that will continue to flower in Prague long after his death. Alongside visits to the Scottish islands, Germany and Norway, there are poems in the voices of, among others, George Orwell on Jura, James Joyce’s publisher in Paris and a 15th century master printer in Venice.

“These poems read like a phantasmagoric zoo – a restless, and relentless, collection of beasts created by soundplay, hallucination, and pleasure. There is a feeling of idée fixe, of obsession, that drives this poet onward to build a linguistic Island of Dr. Moreau where dream and the subconscious are barely contained by the rational impulses of language – to fascinating effect.” Larissa Szporluk

“This is poetry that is detailed, delicate, apparently fragile but robust with treasured thoughts.” Steve Matthews Mary Robinson grew up in Warwickshire and now lives in the north of England, within sight of the Scottish hills. Her poetry has been published in magazines and anthologies and shortlisted for the Templar Poetry Prize and the Cinnamon Press First Collection Award. She works as a literature tutor in adult and continuing education in Cumbria. This is her first collection.

C.J. Sage’s poems appear in publications such as The Antioch Review, Ploughshares, Shenandoah and The Threepenny Review, among others. Her previous books are Let’s Not Sleep (poems), And We The Creatures (an anthology), Field Notes in Contemporary Literature (a textbook/anthology), and Odyssea (poems). After taking her MFA in Creative Writing/Poetry, she taught poetry, writing and literature for many years. She edits The National Poetry Review and Press and works as a realtor in Santa Cruz, California. She lives in Rio Del Mar, a coastal town on the Monterey Bay.

Flambard Press | Paperback | £7.50 978-1-906601-14-0 | 216x138mm | 80pp April

Salmon Poetry | Paperback | £10.00 978-1-907056-22-2 | 134x210mm | 72pp April

A P RIL | 3 0

“C.J. Sage distills the cadences of faith and flourish into a gorgeous bestiary.” Margot Schilpp


poet r y

The Fullness of Time: New and Selected Poems Gerard Smyth Collects together 40 years of Smyth’s poetry. “At the heart of Gerard Smyth’s entire oeuvre is an intriguing duality. He is an urban poet who emerged as an artist from the distinctive Dublin modernism of Michael Smith’s New Writers’ Press, yet his work over the years has accumulated all the characteristics of a compelling, Kavanaghlike, story-telling narrative method.” So begins Thomas McCarthy’s insightful Introduction to this generous selection of four decades of Gerard Smyth’s poetry, in which his intimacy with his native city is balanced by a fascination with the wider imaginative world of Art and of ‘many journeys’, both outward and interior. “He may do for Dublin in verse what Joyce did for it in prose.” Michael Hartnett Gerard Smyth was born in 1951 in Dublin, where he still lives. His poetry has been published widely in literary journals in Ireland, the UK and the United States, as well as in translation, since the late 1960s. He is the author of several poetry collections, including Daytime Sleeper (2002), A New Tenancy (2004) and The Mirror Tent (2007), all from Dedalus Press. He is a member of Aosdána.

Dedalus Press | Hardback and Paperback | £23.00 (hb) £13.99 (pb) 978-1-906614-26-3 (hb) | 978-1-906614-27-0 (pb) | 140x216mm 220pp | April

Time Between Tides: New and Selected Poems Seán Street “Seán Street is one of the best contemporary poets of the English landscape…” The Daily Telegraph Time Between Tides, Seán Street’s seventh poetry collection, brings together new poems, written since Radio and Other Poems (also from Rockingham) appeared in 1999, and his selection from six previous books. These new poems embrace travel, landscape, literary history and film, and include a sequence entitled ‘The Broadcast’, based on CBC’s The Fisheries Broadcast: possibly the longest-running program in North American radio history. “I found myself reading ‘The Broadcast’ as a realistic and moving metaphor for the role language plays in the world at large, and in particular for the role poetic language can play in survival...” Anne Cluysenaar “The quiet control remains, the perceptive sharpness finds new layers.” John Powell Ward Seán Street is a poet, broadcaster, writer and academic. He continues to make feature programmes for BBC Radio 3 and 4, has recently published two ground-breaking histories of radio in the UK and is Professor and Director of the Centre for Broadcasting History Research at Bournemouth University.

Rockingham Press | Paperback | £7.99 978-1-904851-33-2 | 210x140mm | 107pp | April

31 | AP RIL


P oet r y

Keinc Rhys Trimble

Dragon Talk Fleur Adcock

Debut collection from talented bilingual Welsh poet and performer.

Featured in The Guardian’s book highlights for 2010.

Keinc (in English, ‘branch’) is a debut collection that twists between mythology and relationships, between language and form. Influenced by medieval Welsh folktales, but also by Dostoevsky and Kerouac, Rhys Trimble’s poetic voice is visceral, lithe and distinctive. His is a work which pushes at the boundaries of poetic structure, challenging linguistic perceptions.

After a ten-year hiatus since her Poems 1960-2000, Fleur Adcock’s sardonic eye for the incongruities and absurdities of the world makes a welcome return. This new collection continues to reflect her preoccupations with family matters, and with her ambivalent feelings about her native New Zealand. The central sequence moves from her first coming to consciousness in New Zealand, through the war years in Britain, and on to sketches from her teens in puritanical post-war Wellington. Her initial inspiration was the letters her father wrote home from England to his parents during World War II, and the circle closes with affectionate poems for her grandchildren and her late mother.

“[Keinc is] a genuine exploration of what it means to write in a bilingual context… This is risk-taking work from a young and still-developing writer that suggests some exciting new directions for poetry in Wales while responding thoughtfully to the past.” Zoë Skoulding Rhys Trimble is a bilingual poet, performer, tutor and editor working in north Wales. He was born in 1977 in Livingstone, Zambia and brought up in Gwent and Pontneddfechan, south Wales. His work has been published in many journals including Poetry Wales, Tears in the Fence and Coffee House Poetry. He has recently collaborated with musician and record producer Alan Holmes on a track for the band Parking Non-Stop.

Cinnamon Press | Paperback | £7.99 978-1-907090-02-8 | 216x140mm | 64pp April

M ay | 3 2

Fleur Adcock returned to the UK in 1963 to live in London. She is the author of ten books of poetry and a collected edition of her work, Poems 1960-2000, was published by Bloodaxe in 2000. Recipient of a Cholmondeley Award in 1976 and a New Zealand National Book Award in 1984, she was awarded an OBE in 1996. She was awarded the Queen’s Medal for Poetry in 2006, and in 2008 was named Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to literature.

Bloodaxe Books | Paperback | £7.95 978-1-852248-78-9 | 216x138mm | 64pp May


poet r y

Transplants David and Helen Constantine (editors) Worldwide showcase of poetry, including translations from Marilyn Hacker and Ruth Fainlight. Translation can be thought of as the transplanting of a living thing out of its native time and place, into somewhere foreign. There it may thrive or die. How can the subjects and forms of poetry be transplanted across time and space? Must they be modified? Or can the host culture accept them as they are? This issue of Modern Poetry in Translation shows many of the ways and means by which a literary transplant’s chances of survival may be increased. Transplants brings together poets in translation from China, Alaska, Albania, Vietnam, Brazil, India, Ancient Greece and Rome, Israel and Estonia. The forms on show are no less varied: epic poetry, tanka, elegy, ballad, sonnet and ghazal, rhyming and un-rhyming poems and prose poems all appear. Amongst many notable poets and translators featured are: Marilyn Hacker translating Tahar Bekri (Tunisian), Stephen Capus translating Miklos Radnoti (Hungarian), Ruth Fainlight translating Blanca Varela (Peruvian); and the enchanting Estonian poet Kristiina Ehin, whose Selected Poems in English translation (by Ilmar Lehtpere) was awarded the Poetry Society’s Corneliu M. Popescu Prize for European Poetry in Translation.

Modern Poetry in Translation | Paperback | £9.99 978-0-955906-44-2 | 201x140mm | 200pp May

Afterlife Pádraig J. Daly Mystical poems from one of Ireland’s bestknown ‘religious’ poets. According to Thomas McCarthy, Pádraig J. Daly “comments on life as if he was a mystic who had just come through the gates of the City”. In these at times visionary works, Daly is never far from the subject of faith, both in his own life and in the daily lives of those close to him. In this new collection he writes of the afterlife of the title, of visions and versions of both heaven and hell, but also of the various afterlives we pass through here on earth. He writes with particular tenderness about the younger members of his own wider circle, finding hope in their boundless imaginations, blessing and example in their love. Pádraig J. Daly was born in Dungarvan, Co. Waterford in 1943 and is an Augustinian priest in Dublin. His most recent poetry collection is Clinging to the Myth (Dedalus, 2007). The Last Dreamers: New and Selected Poems was published by Dedalus in 1999. He is also an accomplished translator of classical works in Irish and Italian.

Dedalus Press | Paperback | £10.50 978-1-906614-20-1 | 216x140mm | 100pp May

33 | M AY


P oet r y

Rootling: New and Selected Poems Katie Donovan “A beautifully evocative and thought-provoking collection of poems.” Sarah Hackett Katie Donovan writes about the hungers which haunt our flesh and our fantasies, the conjunction of myth and the physical world of body and earth. This book draws on three previous collections, Watermelon Man (1993), Entering the Mare (1997) and Day of the Dead (2002), together with a whole collection of new poems. Here her lively sensibility explores motherhood: she charts the shock of birth and the delights of watching her two babies develop. The death of her father prompts her to shuttle back to scenes of her own rural childhood, and to mourn the passing of a remarkable man. The end of the collection dwells on her partner’s courageous struggle with cancer. Katie Donovan was born in 1962 and grew up in Co. Wexford. She worked as a journalist with The Irish Times for thirteen years, and now teaches Creative Writing at the Institute of Art, Design and Technology in Dun Laoghaire. She is the author of Irish Women Writers: Marginalised by Whom? (1988), and has co-edited two anthologies, Dubliners (with Brendan Kennelly), published by Bloodaxe in 1996, and Ireland’s Women: Writings Past and Present (with A. Norman Jeffares and Brendan Kennelly) in 1994.

Bloodaxe Books | Paperback | £10.95 978-1-852248-81-9 | 234x156mm | 192pp | May

By Way of Dust and Rain Mark Fitzgerald Debut UK collection from acclaimed American poet. This second collection from widely acclaimed US poet Mark Fitzgerald marks an eagerly awaited UK debut. Subtle, lyrical and accomplished – Fitzgerald’s poetry moves easily between image and insight, the formal and the concrete, always with a keen ability to render the vicissitudes and mysteries of life. These poems paint bold horizons of meaning and contemplate humanity’s relationship to the natural world and the indomitable strides of time. Neither obscure nor colloquial, the poet has woven a tapestry of remarkable intimacy and wonder, celebrating the sublime halflight that waltzes between ecstasy and elegy, between dust and the rain that washes it away. Mark Fitzgerald is the author of Distracting the Rain, a collection of poems. His work has appeared in Crab Creek Review, Squaw Review, Poetry Midwest and Parting Gifts. He earned his MFA from George Mason University and has studied in Strasbourg and Oxford. He lives in Falls Church, Virginia and teaches Writing at the University of Maryland.

Cinnamon Press | Paperback | £7.99 978-1-907090-10-3 | 216x140mm | 80pp | May

MAY | 3 4


poet r y

Seeking Refuge Jan Fortune-Wood (editor)

Anniversary Richard Halperin

Poetry in aid of London Cold Weather Shelter for the homeless.

“A passionate exploration of what makes life beautiful and devastating.” Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin

This is real poetry with a real purpose – accessible, entertaining, varied and able to make a difference. Seeking Refuge is both a great way to get into poetry and a fantastic way to support an essential charity housing London’s homeless. Each year Ruth O’Callaghan, poet, mentor and poetry organiser, hosts a series of readings in venues in central London and Camden showcasing the best in contemporary poetry, together with open mic slots for a large range of new and established poets. The best of these poems are selected for an annual anthology, which also features contributions from nationally acclaimed poets. This year’s anthology includes work by Fiona Sampson, Andrew Motion and Penelope Shuttle. Jan Fortune-Wood is commissioning editor for Cinnamon Press. She has written three novels, one for teenagers, and two collections of poetry, including a novelised sequence of prose poetry, Stale Bread and Miracles (also from Cinnamon), about being ordained priest at the first ordination of women in the Church of England.

Cinnamon Press | Paperback | £7.99 978-1-907090-15-8 | 216x140mm | 96pp May

Anniversary is a sequence of love poems presented through a fracture of space and time: a husband still here and writing, a wife no longer here but present. Other poems punctuate this: parents, myths, the very young, the very old, various dead, various missing, are lit up in a few lines, then disappear. Places also loom up unexpectedly: a hotel room in Dublin, a lake in the North Woods of Wisconsin, a hospice in Ekaterinaberg, a Paris street. Whether a dream or not, they carry over and are described with precision. Richard Halperin was born in 1943 and lives in Paris. His last office job was Chief of Teacher Education for the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization. For UNESCO, he edited the booklet Reading and Writing Poetry: The Recommendations of Noted Poets from Many Lands on the Teaching of Poetry in Secondary Schools. Since 2005, more than eighty of his poems have been published; in 2009, he was featured poet in The Stinging Fly’s Summer issue. He has given readings at the West Cork Literary Festival, the Dublin Writers Centre and the Live Poets Society in Paris.

Salmon Poetry | Paperback | £10.00 978-1-907056-33-8 | 134x210mm | 108pp May

35 | M AY


P oet r y

Beneath a Portrait of a Horse Cynthia Hardy

A Cure for Woodness Michael Haslam

Poems of expectation, love and loss from Alaskan author.

After a five-year wait, the final volume in Haslam’s trilogy, Music.

The poems in this book are not all about horses. They are poems of longing, disappointment and discovery, of the natural world bumping up against the man-made world, of the small places where we can find respite: the crack in a sidewalk, a conversation on a ferry, the taste of ginger or coffee. Written over a span of years and in various locations, they reflect the poet’s impulse to find beauty in the mundane, and in the remote. The exotic location of many of the poems, Alaska, is made ordinary, comfortable, yet vital in these poems about living in a place and focusing on its small details.

A Cure for Woodness is the third part of Michael Haslam’s trilogy Music, the first two parts of which, The Music Laid her Songs in Language (2001) and A Sinner Saved by Grace (2005) were widely praised and received excellent reviews. Like the first two parts of the trilogy, A Cure for Woodness is a reaffirmation of the nature, language and music with which the poet finds himself surrounded in his hilltop home in the Pennines.

Cynthia Hardy was born in Salisbury, Maryland and grew up in horse and farm country in Pennsylvania. She has published poems and stories in Permafrost, The Northern Review, and Ice-Floe: An International Journal of the Far North. Her chapbook, We Tempt Our Luck, was a finalist in the 2008 Astounding Beauty Ruffian Press Poetry Chapbook competition. She lives in Fairbanks, Alaska, where she teaches at the University, dances, gardens and tends the horses that appear in these poems.

Salmon Poetry | Paperback | £10.00 978-1-907056-40-6 | 134x210mm | 78pp May

MAY | 3 6

“I haven’t read anything that sounds as beautiful as this for years.” Robert Potts, The Guardian Michael Haslam was born in Bolton in 1947, and has lived in the Calder Valley since 1970. Widely published in the network associated with ‘The Cambridge School of Poetry’ in the 1960s, he became known through the publication, to great acclaim, of his collected poems, A Whole Bauble, by Carcanet. He has worked as a labourer most of his life, but now, thanks to a legacy, he is able to devote his time to writing.

Arc Publications | Hardback and Paperback | £12.99 (hb) £9.99 (pb) | 978-1-906570-36-1 (hb) 978-1-904614-84-5 (pb) | 138x216mm | 96pp May


poet r y

Hands Moving at the Speed of Falling Snow Aideen Henry Poetry of distinct emotional range and unspeakable feeling from rising talent. Hands Moving at the Speed of Falling Snow explores a spectrum of conflicting emotions that hold us in their power, including love, loss, joy and grief. Some poems meticulously describe people and their particular ways, the point of view of the child interwoven with that of the adult. Others show a view of damage from inside a wound; they try to name the unnameable, speak the unspeakable, to make sense of acute life experience. Throughout the collection there is a feeling of pause, of an imagination straining to leave the quiet bay for the pitch and roll of the open sea.

Writing the Picture David Hurn and John Fuller Striking mixture of poetry and photography. Writing the Picture is a rare collaboration between a leading photographer and an eminent poet. Even rarer, it is a collaboration in which the poet responds to images, rather than a photographer or artist ‘illustrating’ a poem. From warm portraits of rural Wales to a drug addict shooting up in London, from a raucous hen night to a moving sequence following the aftermath of the Aberfan disaster, photographer and poet respond to all aspects of life. The result is such a marvellous and magical meeting of artforms that it’s surprising it doesn’t happen more often.

Aideen Henry lives in Galway and works as a writer, university lecturer and doctor. Her poems have been published previously in several literary journals and magazines including Crannóg, The Shop, The Cúirt Annual and Southword, and she has given many poetry readings around the country. She received a 1st Class Honours MA in Writing from NUI, Galway in 2008. This is her first collection of poetry. She also writes plays and short stories.

John Fuller is a prizewinning poet and novelist. He is the author of seven collections of poems, most recently Pebble and I (2010). An Emeritus professor at Magdalen College, Oxford, his novel Flying to Nowhere was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1983. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. David Hurn is a documentary photographer. Prominent in fashionable Sixties London, Hurn’s air pistol was used as a prop during a shoot to promote the James Bond film From Russia with Love, inadvertently becoming a Bond symbol. He is the author of several books including the influential guide On Becoming a Photographer.

Salmon Poetry | Paperback | £10.00 978-1-907056-31-4 | 134x210mm | 106pp May

Seren | Hardback | £20.00 978-1-854115-31-7 | 240x220mm | 120pp May

37 | M AY


P oet r y

The Shape of Time Doris Kareva (translated by Tina Aleson) Iconic figure in contemporary Estonian poetry. The Shape of Time is Doris Kareva’s eleventh collection and, as with all her books, its publication was hailed as a major literary event in Estonia. It is also the first full-length publication of her work in the UK. In style, it is more restrained than her earlier collections, but its themes are the same – love and its great enemies, death and time – and the poems still retain the romantic bravado and recklessness that make her work so compelling. “Doris Kareva observes the anguish of existence and experience in a style that is pared-back, bone-clean, needle-sharp… the music of inwardness, of its despairs and its mediating flashes of illumination.” Penelope Shuttle Doris Kareva is arguably Estonia’s leading female poet. Born in Tallinn in 1958, she studied English Language and Literature at Tartu University and worked in the cultural weekly Sirp from 1978 to 1993 and from 1997 to 2002. From 1992 onwards, she has been the Secretary General of the Estonian National Commission for UNESCO. She has published one book of essays and fourteen collections of poetry, which have been translated into over twenty languages.

Arc Publications | Hardback and Paperback | £13.99 (hb) £10.99 (pb) | 978-1-906570-37-8 (hb) 978-1-904614-89-0 (pb) | 138x216mm | 120pp May

MAY | 3 8

Prophesying the Past Noel King Debut collection from worldwide-published poet. The poems in Prophesying the Past speak through a distinctly urban voice: rooted in history, both social and political. As the title suggests, this collection plays with our sense of space and time moving back and forth across dates, locations, time zones, generations and even across the boundary between life and death. The personas in this work also give voice to the social and economic dilemmas of a people, from wartime Ireland through to the post-Celtic tiger era. This debut collection from Noel King gathers fifty-three poems: poems to be savoured by the generation who were there and explored by the young to find the foundations upon which they stand today. Noel King is a writer, actor and musician, native of Tralee, Co. Kerry. His poetry, haiku, short stories, articles and reviews have appeared in publications in over thirty countries, the poetry in journals as diverse as Poetry Ireland Review, The Sunday Tribune, Bongos of the World (Japan), The Dalhousie University Review (Canada), Kotaz (South Africa), Poetry Salzburg Review (Austria) and Quadrant (Australia). Along the way he has been a singer with the Bunratty Castle Entertainers and has worked as an arts administrator and poetry editor.

Salmon Poetry | Paperback | £10.00 978-1-907056-46-8 | 134x210mm | 96pp May


poet r y

The Absolute Bonus of Rain S.J. Litherland Sixth collection from highly acclaimed Durham poet. S.J. Litherland’s sixth poetry collection never lets us forget Feste’s remark that “the rain it raineth every day”. Litherland is concerned with rain as the native weather of England, and also with our national sport, cricket. Rain and cricket may not usually go together, but in The Absolute Bonus of Rain they combine to form a backdrop of encouragement for life to go on, in spite of life’s lost ideals and the spectre of bereavement. S.J. Litherland’s recent collections include The Homage (Iron Press), which was nominated for Cricket Book of the Year in 2007, and her highly praised The Work of the Wind (also from Flambard), about her years with fellow poet Barry MacSweeney. She was born in Warwickshire but has lived in Durham since 1965, and was a founding member of the Vane Women collective. A recipient of two Northern Writers’ Awards, her poetry has been included in various anthologies, notably New Women Poets (Bloodaxe) and The Forward Book of Poetry.

Flambard Press | Paperback | £8.50 978-1-906601-16-4 | 216x170mm | 88pp | May

The Song the Oriole Sang Philip McDonagh Second collection from prominent Irish diplomat. Philosophically and geographically wide-ranging, as one might expect of a diplomat poet, this second collection features poems inspired by Philip McDonagh’s experiences in places as far afield as India and Finland. At the same time it sees him find an earth and anchor for those experiences in the realm of family, about which he writes with great tenderness. An insightful guide through the political complexities of the world, McDonagh is also very much the lyric poet, remaining open to the unexpected moment of wonder. Philip McDonagh was born in Dublin in 1952. As a diplomat he has had postings throughout Europe and between 1994 and 1999 worked at the Irish Embassy in London, where he helped to develop the Peace Process. More recently he has been Irish Ambassador to India. In 2003 he published his first full-length collection with Dedalus, Carraroe in Saxony. Since then an expanded work, including this earlier book, has been published in India as Memoirs of an Ionian Diplomat. Philip McDonagh is currently the Irish Ambassador to Russia.

Dedalus Press | Hardback and Paperback | £22.50 (hb) £11.00 (pb) 978-1-906614-31-7 (hb) | 978-1-906614-30-0 (pb) 140x216mm | 110pp | May

39 | M AY


P oet r y

Miming Happiness Allison McVety

Curve of the Moon Noel Monahan

“… a poet at the height of her powers.” Poetry Book Society

Fifth collection from multi-award winning Irish poet.

“Let Allison McVety be your guide through the industrial landscape of the last century: for hers is a voice that is deft, measured and unfaltering in the face of ‘liquid history’, yet always with an eye for the human: the train drivers, button keepers and those on the night shift. Here is a poet who excels at making long-gone everyday objects like ration books at once endearing and remarkable.” Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch

Curve of the Moon is a haunting exploration of individual and collective voices. Divided into four sections, this new collection deals with life as lived at the edges, where myth and reality overlap in an untamed landscape, where earth-mother sonnets curve around a moonland of dreams. Monahan’s belief that we are essentially alone prevails throughout the collection and the truths of yesterday are questioned alongside the false gods of modern times. Ultimately, Monahan enters a psychic wasteland, creates bridges that give access to a youthful reimagining of the past and raises the voices of a forgotten community to full poetic chorus.

“Allison McVety seizes the reader’s attention. Partly it’s a narrative talent, but her particular skill is in converting the feel of the day-to-day – whether ordinary, intriguing or alarming – into genuine poetry.” Alan Brownjohn

“Monahan’s voice is shimmering with light...” Poetry Ireland Review

Allison McVety’s collection, The Night Trotsky Came to Stay (Smith/Doorstop, 2007), was shortlisted for the Forward Best First Collection Prize 2008, and won enthusiastic reviews. Her poems have appeared in The Times and PN Review and have been broadcast on Radio 3. Allison has an MA in Poetry and was shortlisted for the inaugural Manchester Metropolitan University Poetry Prize in 2008.

Noel Monahan has won numerous awards for his poetry and writing, including the SeaCat National Poetry Award, the RTE P.J. O’Connor Award, the ASTI Achievements Award, the Hiberno-English Poetry Award and the Irish Writers’ Union Poetry Award. His poetry is prescribed text for Leaving Certificate English, due for examination in 2011 and 2012. His previous collections are: Opposite Walls (1991), Snowfire (1995), Curse of The Birds (2000) and The Funeral Game (2004), all published by Salmon.

Smith/Doorstop | Paperback | £8.95 978-1-906613-14-3 | 215x140mm | 57pp May

Salmon Poetry | Paperback | £10.00 978-1-907056-38-3 | 134x210mm | 120pp May

MAY | 4 0


poet r y

Zephyr Mary Mullen “If we can claim her, Ireland has found another magical woman poet.” Nuala Ní Chonchúir The poems in Zephyr are crafted by a poet with a fresh voice who invites us into three unique places: Alaska, the west of Ireland, and the world of a girl with Down’s syndrome. This first collection of poems by Mary Mullen is cinematically beautiful, and brightly honest in exploring the emotional landscape of single motherhood, the search for inclusion and belonging, the art of dancing with a foot on two continents, and the longing for a world set right. Mary Mullen was born in 1952 in Soldotna, Alaska. She moved to Ballinderreen, Co. Galway in 1996, where she still lives with her daughter, Lily, a sparkly girl who was born with Down’s syndrome. Mary’s poems have been published in The Stinging Fly, Crannóg, The Cuírt Annual, and Landing Places: Immigrant Poets in Ireland, published by Dedalus Press. Her non-fiction pieces have been featured in the Cork Literary Review, We Alaskans, The Irish Times and on RTE Radio 1. She teaches Creative Writing and memoir classes. She was awarded an MA in Writing from the National University of Ireland, Galway, in 2006.

Salmon Poetry | Paperback | £10.00 978-1-907056-41-3 | 134x210mm | 64pp May

I Have Crossed an Ocean: Selected Poems Grace Nichols Winner of the 1983 Commonwealth Poetry Prize. Born and educated in Guyana, Grace Nichols moved to Britain in 1977. Her poetry has a gritty lyricism that addresses the transatlantic connections central to the Caribbean-British experience. Her work brings a mythic awareness and a sensuous musicality that is at the same time disquieting. I Have Crossed an Ocean is a comprehensive selection spanning some twenty-five years of her writing, published on the occasion of her 60th birthday. “Grace Nichols has wit, acidity, tenderness, any number of gifts at her disposal.” Jeanette Winterson “Not only rich music, an easy lyricism, but also grit, and earthy honesty, a willingness to be vulnerable and clean.” Gwendolyn Brooks Grace Nichols’ first collection, I is a Long Memoried Woman (1983) won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. Her later poetry collections include The Fat Black Woman’s Poems (1984), Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Woman (1989), Sunrise (1996), winner of the Guyana Prize, and Startling the Flying Fish (2006). I Have Crossed an Ocean is her second collection with Bloodaxe, following Picasso, I Want My Face Back (2009). She lives in Sussex with the poet John Agard and their family.

Bloodaxe Books | Paperback | £9.95 978-1-852248-58-1 | 216x138mm | 192pp May

41 | M AY


P oet r y

To the Winds Our Sails: Irish Writers Translate Galician Poets Mary O’Donnell and Manuela Palacios (editors) Unique anthology of Galician poetry in translation. The best writing from Galicia’s outstanding contemporary women poets awaits the reader of To the Winds Our Sails. Co-edited by Irish poet Mary O’Donnell and Galician scholar Manuela Palacios, this anthology offers a unique insight into the imaginative, social, ecological and personal preoccupations with which Galician poets have engaged in recent decades. Ten poets ranging in age, experience and style are represented with five translations each. An interesting feature of this anthology is that each Galician poet has selected one poem in five to be rendered purely in the Irish language. This multilingual approach is an attempt to represent the cultural and linguistic concerns which both Ireland and Galicia have shared historically. Irish poets featured include Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Maurice Harmon and Catherine Phil MacCarthy, alongside Galician writers Chus Pato, Marilar Aleixandre and Xohanna Torres. For several of these well-known Galician poets, this is their first appearance in English. “... bears eloquent witness to translation as the supreme art of discovery.” Michael Cronin

Salmon Poetry | Paperback | £12.00 978-1-907056-37-6 | 140x216mm | 130pp | May

Learning Gravity Helen Oswald Debut collection from highly commended Brighton poet. “Helen Oswald’s poems are edgy but delicate. Her overdue collection displays wit and warmth, yet she enters difficult areas where her empathy and understatement are displayed to powerful use.” Roddy Lumsden “People are at the heart of Helen Oswald’s wise, humane poems. She explores the complex web of relationships which define our place in the world. Her poetry is shot through with images of connection and separation as people move towards and away from each other. In all her work there is an unsentimental yet tender fascination with our ‘secondhand planet’ and how we make our lives on it.” Esther Morgan Helen Oswald has received commendations in the Bridport Prize (2009) and the Arvon International (2004) and National Poetry Competitions (2000, 2008). She also won the Blue Nose Poets-of-the-Year Competition in 2000. Her poems have appeared in a number of anthologies and poetry magazines, including Magma, Poetry Review, The Rialto, Stand and Poetry London. She lives in Brighton.

tall-lighthouse | Paperback | £8.00 978-1-904551-77-5 | 150x230mm | 62pp | May

MAY | 4 2


poet r y

The Last Falcon and Small Ordinance Paul Perry

What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo Pascale Petit

Third collection from author of The Drowning of the Saints and The Orchid Keeper.

New collection from poet twice shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.

The publication of Paul Perry’s first collection of poems, The Drowning of the Saints, in 2003 saw him heralded as “a prodigiously gifted poet” by Fred D’Aguiar. The Orchid Keeper (2006) saw that promise confirmed in a book of almost ceaseless motion, energised by the rhythms of thought, navigating between the confessional and the visionary. Taking its title from the doomed late 16th century settlement at Roanoke, Perry’s new collection explores memory and trace – from meditations inspired by historical events to poems brought out by a brother’s illness – in a work that is as lively on the page as it is likely to remain in the reader’s memory. Paul Perry was born in Dublin in 1972. He has won the Hennessy New Irish Writer of the Year Award, and the Listowel Prize for Poetry for his first collection, The Drowning of the Saints (Salmon, 2003). He has been a James Michener Fellow of Creative Writing at the University of Miami, and a Cambor Fellow of Poetry at the University of Houston. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including Poetry Ireland Review, the TLS, Granta, The Best Irish Poetry 2007 and The Best American Poetry 2000.

Dedalus Press | Paperback | £10.50 978-1-906614-28-7 | 140x216mm | 92pp May

The poems in this collection are spoken in the voice of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo and bear the titles of her paintings. Pascale Petit focuses on the main events of Kahlo’s life: her polio as a child, the near-fatal bus accident she suffered as a teenager, her marriage to Diego Rivera, his infidelities, her miscarriages, the many surgical procedures she underwent, her vivacity and love of nature and, most of all, how she turned to painting as recompense for her suffering. Together the poems read not so much as a comprehensive verse-biography, but as an exploration of the ways art can be used to withstand and transform pain. Pascale Petit was born in Paris, grew up in Wales and lives in London. In 2004 the Poetry Book Society and Arts Council named her as one of the Next Generation Poets. This collection follows The Treekeeper’s Tale (2009); The Zoo Father (2001) and The Huntress (2005) were both shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and were Books of the Year in the TLS. Petit trained as a sculptor at the Royal College of Art, tutors for Tate Modern, The Poetry School and Oxford University and is currently the Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Middlesex University.

Seren | Paperback | £8.99 978-1-854115-15-7 | 138x216mm | 72pp May

43 | M AY


P oet r y

Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been: New and Selected Poems Chase Twichell Multi-award winning American poet. Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been shows the evolution of a distinctive voice in American poetry over the last thirty-five years. Chase Twichell’s central concerns are the heartbreak of love, the ecological decimation of our planet, and the nature of the human mind, in particular her study of Zen Buddhism. Later poems reflect on years of sexual abuse, and a lifelong battle with depression. But at the heart of the book is a focus on Twichell’s continuing, deepening enquiry into the nature of the self through the eyes of Zen, becoming sparer and sparer as they approach saying what cannot be said. “... unsentimental poems with a sinewy intellectual toughness... they open out into a stark, sometimes bewildered clarity.” Washington Post Chase Twichell was born in 1950 in New Haven, Connecticut. She has won awards from the Artists Foundation in Boston and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She has taught at colleges and universities across the US, and co-edited The Practice of Poetry: Writing Exercises from Poets Who Teach (1992). She lives in Keene, New York with her husband, the novelist Russell Banks. Bloodaxe Books | Paperback | £9.95 978-1-852248-67-3 | 229x154mm | 192pp May

MAY | 4 4

Chopping Wood with T.S. Eliot John Walsh “John Walsh’s work is brave, vibrant and immensely accessible.” Michael Gorman “John Walsh’s quizzical observer, in ‘pre-Troubles’ Derry, backpacking in Bavaria, or coming ‘home’ to post-Wall Berlin – whether musing on a lake-locked mansion, fulminating at the news’ excesses or recalling vanished boyhood heroes – finds much virtue in small things, value in the overlooked, validation in nature’s persistence. Engaged, like the Eliot of his title, in salvaging the poetic and the good from society’s wastelands, his wry gaze and gentle tone conjure an art, and a world, that are ethically rooted, authentic, and ultimately heartening.” Anne-Marie Fyfe John Walsh was born in Derry in 1950. After sixteen years teaching English in Germany, in 1989 he returned to live in Connemara. His first collection Johnny Tell Them was published in 2006, followed by Love’s Enterprise Zone in 2007. His poems have been published in Ireland, the UK and Austria and he has read and performed his poems at events across Europe. He is organiser and MC of the successful performance poetry event North Beach Poetry Nights in Galway, and is the director of Doire Press.

Salmon Poetry | Paperback | £10.00 978-1-907056-42-0 | 134x210mm | 88pp May


poet r y

When God Has Been Called Away To Greater Things Grace Wells Debut poetry collection from prize-winning children’s author. In poems of lyrical beauty and imaginative reach, Grace Wells explores the complex world of familial relationships: from childhood exploits in the company of an older sister, through the difficulties and self-doubt of failed relationships, to the refuge of supportive love. Strength in times of hardship is found in the example of other women, in the community of artists and writers. And, despite the loneliness with which the title poem begins, with abandonment comes nonetheless the consolation of ‘an imprint, which lingers’, a suggestion of the power of faith and determination, no doubt, but also of the power of poetry to reveal the world. Grace Wells was born in London in 1968. Formerly an independent television producer, she moved to Ireland in 1991. Her first book, Gyrfalcon (2002), a novel for children, won the Eilís Dillon Best Newcomer Bisto Award, and was an International White Ravens’ Choice. Her other publications for children include Ice-Dreams (2008) and One World, Our World (2009). Her short stories and poetry have been widely published and broadcast. She reviews Irish poetry for Contrary, the University of Chicago’s online literary journal, is a freelance arts administrator, and teaches Creative Writing.

Dedalus Press | Paperback | £10.50 978-1-906614-32-4 | 140x216mm | 92pp May

Bonjour Tetris Simon Barraclough Limited-edition second collection from Forward Prize-nominated poet. From retro computer games and Hollywood blockbusters to the West Indian cricketer Brian Lara – no field of contemporary culture is safe from Simon Barraclough’s sophisticated and inclusive vision. Bonjour Tetris presents seventeen new poems originally commissioned for radio programmes, anthologies and the opening of a concert hall. Both serious and playful, quirky and formal, these poems prove there’s nothing ordinary about writing to order. The first Penned in the Margins mini-book, Bonjour Tetris is published in a boxed, limited edition with an exclusive poem-postcard inside. Each copy is signed and numbered by the author. “Aside from the fact that this may be the best ever name for a published volume of poetry, the physical object is itself a thing of marvellous beauty.” Crystal Bennes Simon Barraclough is originally from Yorkshire but has lived in London since 1997. He won the poetry section of the London Writers’ Prize in 2000 and his 2008 debut Los Alamos Mon Amour was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. His work has been published in the likes of Poetry Review, The Guardian, The FT and Magma and he is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 3 and 4.

Penned in the Margins | Paperback (boxed) | £7.50 978-0-956546-70-8 | 198x129mm | 48pp June

45 | JUNE


P oet r y

Where’s the Moon, There’s the Moon Dan Chiasson

Common Cause Francis Combes (translated by Alan Dent)

Winner of the 2004 Pushcart Prize.

Translation of influential French Communist poet.

Dan Chiasson has been hailed by fellow American Frank Bidart as “one of the most gifted young poets of his generation.” His latest collection, Where’s the Moon, There’s the Moon, takes its title from an improvised children’s game, the starting point of a book about staged loss and recovery, and how, in our games as in our poems, made-up losses depict real ones. At the book’s centre is the title-poem, a long exploration of being a father in light of having lost one. “... free-swinging, gorgeous in movement, bold in imagination, athletic in movement…” Robert Pinsky Dan Chiasson was born in Burlington, Vermont. A widely published literary critic, Chiasson is a regular reviewer for The New Yorker and The New York Times Book Review and poetry editor of The Paris Review. His Bloodaxe selection Natural History and other poems (2006), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, drew on two collections published in the US, The Afterlife of Objects (2002) and Natural History (2005). He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship for poetry, a Pushcart Prize and a Whiting Writers’ Award, and teaches at Wellesley College. He lives in Sudbury, Massachusetts.

Bloodaxe Books | Paperback | £8.95 978-1-852248-71-0 | 216x138mm | 80pp June

J UNE | 4 6

“Communism,” wrote Brecht, “is the simple idea so hard to achieve.” Common Cause tells the hard story of this simple idea, from the Garden of Eden to the French Revolution and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Common Cause is a ‘history of the defeated’, a book about enthusiasm and illusion, heroes and martyrs, saints and sinners. It is an epic, a tragedy and a manifesto for the utopian imagination. Introduced by Booker Prize-winning author John Berger. The French poet Francis Combes has published fifteen books of poetry, including La Fabrique du Bonheur, Cause Commune, Le Carnet Bleu de Chine and La Clef du Monde est dans l’Entrée à Gauche. He has translated several poets into French, including Heine, Brecht, Mayakovsky and Attila Joszef. He has also published two novels. He is a founder of the radical publishing cooperative, Le Temps des Cerises, and was for many years responsible for putting poems on the Paris Métro. Alan Dent is a poet, translator and critic. He edits the radical cultural journal Penniless Press. His anthology of contemporary French countercultural poetry, When the Metro is Free, is also published by Smokestack.

Smokestack Books | Paperback | £9.95 978-0-956034-18-2 | 197x127mm | 360pp June


poet r y

My Life in Squares Kristin Dimitrova First collection in English from awardwinning Bulgarian poet. My Life in Squares is an introduction to the work of a major European poet and one of the most original writers to emerge from the ‘new Europe’. Kristin Dimitrova’s work has been published in twenty-two countries, translated into nineteen languages and has won many international prizes. She is a Balkan minimalist, a feminist-fabulist whose work combines the fantastic and the prosaic. She writes with a deceptively simple, playful touch, teasing the reader with faux folk-wisdom and unexpected endings. Oblique, subtle and witty, her poems creep up on her subjects from behind, demonstrating that looking at something sideways is not the same as avoiding the issue. Kristin Dimitrova was born in Sofia in 1963. Her latest poetry collection published in Bulgaria is The Cardplayer’s Morning (2008). She has also published a book of short-stories, Love and Death under the Crooked Pear Tree (2004) and a novel, Sabazuis (2007). A five-times winner of national poetry awards in Bulgaria, Dimitrova has also translated John Donne’s poetry into Bulgarian. She teaches in the Department of Foreign Languages at the University of Sofia.

Smokestack Books | Paperback | £7.95 978-0-956034-17-5 | 197x127mm | 84pp | June

The Scent of Your Shadow Kristiina Ehin (translated by Ilmar Lehtpere) Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation Summer 2010. Rooted in an ancient folk song tradition, Kristiina Ehin’s poetry is both universal and deeply personal; her language is direct and simple, yet she expresses herself so vividly that her joys and sorrows become the reader’s own. These poems, beautifully translated by Ilmar Lehtpere and selected from her most recent collection, were written over two years, beginning shortly before the birth of her son. “Here is a generous, honest imagination: visceral, shamanistic and wise. Kristiina Ehin is a visionary poet with a discerning and distinctive voice, a voice resonant with genuine passion, close to the primordial world of spirits and myths, but also rooted in history and in contemporary life.” Sujata Bhatt Kristiina Ehin was born in Rapla, Estonia in 1977. The Drums of Silence (2007), a volume of her selected poems in English translation, also translated by Ilmar Lehtpere, was awarded the Poetry Society Corneliu M. Popescu Prize for European Poetry in Translation. Kristiina is often invited to take part in international arts and literary festivals – she read at the Ledbury Poetry Festival in July 2010 – and her work, poetry and prose, appears regularly in English translation in leading British and Irish literary journals. Arc Publications | Hardback and Paperback | £12.99 (hb) £9.99 (pb) 978-1-906570-54-5 (hb); 978-1-906570-53-8 (pb) 138x216mm | 110pp | June

47 | JUNE


P oet r y

Standard Midland Roy Fisher

The Squirrels are Dead Miriam Gamble

Third Bloodaxe collection, coincides with author’s 80th birthday.

Winner of 2007 Eric Gregory Award.

Roy Fisher is known internationally for his witty, anarchic poetry, but he is at heart an English Midlander. In Standard Midland, he confronts and worries at nuances of perception and the politics of understanding. Many of the poems are concerned with landscapes, experienced, imagined or painted, particularly the scarred and beautiful north Midlands landscape in which he has lived for nearly thirty years. “Fisher’s poetry... is altogether English: ironic, humorous, self-deprecating and unpretentiously local.” Elaine Feinstein “Fisher at his most approachable… an excellent introduction to this important poet’s work.” The Guardian Roy Fisher was born in Birmingham in 1930. He has published over thirty poetry books, and has been the subject of numerous critical studies. This is his third collection with Bloodaxe: The Dow Low Drop (1996) was superseded by The Long and the Short of It: Poems 19552005 (2005). In 2003 he was named as the Honorary Poet of the City of Birmingham, and in 2005 as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. His first US selected poems, edited by August Kleinzahler, is due in 2011. He is now a freelance writer and jazz musician, and lives in Derbyshire.

Bloodaxe Books | Paperback | £7.95 978-1-852248-70-3 | 216x138mm | 64pp June

J UNE | 4 8

Miriam Gamble’s poetry understands the doubleness of language: as a resistant, resisting medium, and as the lightly worn currency of the everyday. Her first full-length collection, The Squirrels are Dead, is remarkable for its imaginings of both the animal world and the human, socially engaged but with a profound sense of mystery throughout. Gamble is a mistress-manipulator of tradition – with sonnet, villanelle and sestina just some of the forms on display – who forces new rhythms into tried and tested forms. The Squirrels Are Dead is a striking and assured debut from a distinctive new talent in Irish poetry. Miriam Gamble was born in Brussels in 1980 and grew up in Belfast. She won an Eric Gregory Award in 2007, and her pamphlet, This Man’s Town, was published by tall-lighthouse in 2007. She has published poems in The Rialto and Fortnight, and has written reviews and features for The New Statesman. A selection of her poems appears in the 2009 Bloodaxe anthology Voice Recognition: 21 poets for the 21st century. Miriam lives in Belfast, where she writes poems, reviews and critical essays, and is a part-time tutor in Creative Writing at Queen’s University.

Bloodaxe Books | Paperback | £7.95 978-1-852248-68-0 | 216x138mm | 64pp June


poet r y

The Anatomy of Structures Rebecca Goss

The Assay Yvonne Green

“An incredibly tight collection that coheres in a way so many collections don’t.” Anne-Marie Fyfe

Winner of the 2008-09 Poetry Business Competition.

The poems in this collection explore lives behind closed doors. In opening them, Rebecca Goss is not afraid to unsettle her reader, revealing danger and desire in a variety of voices. These compact narratives portray a heady mix of sex, fear, longing and revenge – her poems trembling with tenderness and sorrow while depicting people at their most vulnerable and exposed. Her style is succinct, with each poem pared to the bone. The people you meet inside this book may be alarming, their lives may veer and freewheel, but Goss’s pen is unnervingly calm and indisputably in control. “... fearless, fresh and utterly engaging… gets to the heart of the matter in a very few lines.” Tribune Rebecca Goss was born in 1974, grew up in Suffolk and now lives in Liverpool with her family. She began writing poetry as a teenager and was a Special Award winner in the 1991 WH Smith Young Writers Competition, judged by Ted Hughes. Her poems have appeared in many literary magazines and anthologies, while a pamphlet, Keeping Houston Time, appeared in 1997. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Cardiff University and for several years taught at Liverpool John Moores University.

Flambard Press | Paperback | £7.50 978-1-906601-17-1 | 216x138mm | 64pp June

“Yvonne Green’s poems are strange, evoking unfamiliar worlds and seeing them with their own kind of language... There is so much world, so many stories, included here. It is wonderful to encounter this vivid annex to experience and understanding.” Michael Schmidt “Geographically [these poems] excel, and in so many other directions too. The poems are different to what one normally gets in English, the issues far bigger…” Alan Sillitoe Yvonne Green was born in London in 1957 into a merchant family of Central Asian descent. Her mother was born in Egypt and her father in France. Yvonne read law at LSE and practised as a barrister in the Inner Temple. Her poems have been published in many magazines and journals and on BBC Radio 4’s The Food Programme, and she has been poet-in-residence to JWA Women’s Refuge, to Norwood Ravenswood and at Spiro’s Ark. Her pamphlet collection, Boukhara (Smith/Doorstop, 2008), was a winner in the Poetry Business Competition 2008-09, judged by Alison Brackenbury.

Smith/Doorstop | Paperback | £8.95 978-1-906613-17-4 | 215x140mm | 75pp June

49 | JUNE


P oet r y

When Love is Not Enough: New and Selected Poems Maurice Harmon Celebrates 80 years of poetry from distinguished Irish writer and critic. To mark his 80th birthday, Maurice Harmon has brought together poems written in the last two years together with selections from his three collections published by Salmon: The Last Regatta, The Doll with Two Backs and The Mischievous Boy. His distinctive voice, both serious and playful, combines love poems with political satire, elegies with family portraits; he also writes poems of surprising eroticism, centred around his questioning of clerical oppression. This wide-ranging selection includes translation from Acallam na Senórach, the medieval anthology of Irish stories and poems, featuring the haunting ‘Créde’s Lament’, and from work by the contemporary Galician poet, Ana Romani. “... displays an ability to combine tenderness and pathos with a fiercely unsentimental honesty.” The Irish Times Maurice Harmon, Emeritus Professor of Anglo-Irish Literature at University College Dublin, is a distinguished critic, biographer, editor, literary historian and poet. He has written studies of several Irish writers, including Seán O’Faoláin, Austin Clarke and Thomas Kinsella, and edited the ground-breaking anthology Irish Poetry After Yeats (1988).

Salmon Poetry | Paperback | £10.00 978-1-907056-39-0 | 134x210mm | 120pp | June

You John Haynes Follow-up to Letter to Patience, winner of 2006 Costa Prize. You is the new book-length long poem by Costa Prize-winning poet John Haynes. The ‘You’ of the title is the narrator’s wife of many years and partner in a cross-cultural union: he is a white British man; she was born and raised in Nigeria. Exploring a partnership based on culturally different – and sometimes painfully incompatible – conceptions of ‘love’, the poem is knit together by the philosophical theme of ‘I’ and ‘you’ seen from many perspectives. The poetry moves from the Nigeria where the couple first met, re-created with great joy and sensitivity, through their ‘new’ life in Britain and all the contrasts and problems it provokes: exposure to racism, unfamiliar customs, homesickness, cold weather, raising children in a strange land. “... ambitious and brilliant... Haynes is the equal of Muldoon, Heaney or Hill...” The Guardian John Haynes won the 2006 Costa Prize for Poetry with his previous book, Letter to Patience (also from Seren), another long poem set in part in Nigeria during troubled times. A lecturer with a background in linguistics, Haynes is a superb reader of his work.

Seren | Paperback | £8.99 978-1-854115-17-1 | 138x216mm | 72pp | June

J UNE | 5 0


poet r y

A Quechua Confession Manual Sheila Hillier Awarded the Hamish Canham Prize by the Poetry Society in 2009. Sheila Hillier brings a lifetime of research skills and concern for the human condition to bear in her finely observed, subtle, rhythmic and highly original poetry. Coming to poetry later in life, Hillier applies the pursuit of excellence to her considerable life experience and wide-ranging knowledge of disparate cultures to produce one of the finest debut collections. Sheila Hillier trained at the London School of Economics and The London Hospital Medical College. She was appointed Professor of Medical Sociology in 1992, the first sociologist to be appointed to a Chair in a UK Medical School. She has undertaken research in the UK, Trinidad and the People’s Republic of China, where she has been involved for over thirty years. Widely published in poetry magazines, she was commended in the 2006 National Poetry Competition, and received the prestigious Hamish Canham Prize from the Poetry Society in 2009. She is currently Visiting Professor at the Chinese University, Hong Kong and Professor Emeritus at Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry.

Cinnamon Press | Paperback | £7.99 978-1-907090-12-7 140x216mm | 64pp June

Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty Tony Hoagland “Hilarious, searing poems that break your heart so fast you hardly notice.” Marie Howe Tony Hoagland’s zany poems poke and provoke at the same time as they entertain and delight. He is American poetry’s hilarious “high priest of irony” (LA Times), a wise-cracker, a risk-taker whose disarming humour, selfscathing and tenderness are all fuelled by an aggressive moral intelligence. These poems try to make sense of the situation of the individual in our time, and in America in particular. They worry over how to preserve a sense of self and values in an era driven by the markets, by dazzling but toxic entertainment, and by the degraded idiocies of mass culture. And as always, they push the poetic form to its limits. “... he’s so entertaining and... so spot on in his insights.” New York Times Tony Hoagland was born in 1953 in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. His first UK book of poems was the 2005 Selected What Narcissism Means to Me (Bloodaxe Books, 2005). The recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, in 2008 he won the Jackson Poetry Prize. In 2005 he received the O.B. Hardison Jr. Prize, awarded by the Folger Shakespeare Library, as well as the Poetry Foundation’s Mark Twain Award. He currently teaches at the University of Houston.

Bloodaxe Books | Paperback | £8.95 978-1-852248-72-7 | 234x156mm | 96pp June

51 | JUNE


P oet r y

Christmas in Auschwitz András Mezei (translated by Thomas Ország-Land) Prominent Hungarian poet and Holocaust survivor. The Jewish-Hungarian poet András Mezei (1930-2008) survived the Holocaust as well as the three-month siege of Budapest in 1944-45. Throughout his long writing career, he returned repeatedly to the terrible experiences of his childhood, assembling a poetic collage of eye-witness accounts of racist mass murder. Christmas in Auschwitz brings together, for the first time in English, all of Mezei’s most important poems about the Hungarian Holocaust. “A many-sided and accomplished Hungarian writer and poet.” The Independent A locksmith by trade, András Mezei was one of the most prominent writers in Communist Hungary. A poet, novelist and essayist, he wrote the script of Lucky Daniel, one of the first Hungarian films to critically examine the events of 1956. In the 1990s he launched the Belvárosi Könyvkiadó publishing house and the cultural journal Central European Times. A recipient of the Hungarian János Arany Prize and the Israeli Kotzetnik Prize, he died in his native Budapest in 2008. Thomas Ország-Land is a poet and awardwinning foreign correspondent based in Eastern Europe. He is also a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust and the siege of Budapest.

Smokestack Books | Paperback | £7.95 978-0-956034-19-9 | 197x127mm | 64pp June

J Un e | 5 2

De Chirico’s Threads Carol Rumens Ambitious collection from eminent poet and Guardian contributor. De Chirico’s Threads features an unusual centre-piece: a verse-play, fizzing with ideas and surrealist imagery, based on the life and work of Italian painter Georgio De Chirico, as well as forty pages of distinctive and beautifully crafted individual poems by one of the UK’s best poets. An acute socio-political awareness, sometimes satirical, sometimes tender, inspires a number of pieces, such as the dystopian vision of ‘2084’, while ‘The Tadpole goddess’ is a clever alternative nature poem. Also here are poems about various places in London, such as the Crystal Palace rail station and ‘East Ending’, a celebration of an old music hall. Sophisticated, playful, relevant and humane, a new collection by Carol Rumens is not to be missed. Carol Rumens is the author of fourteen collections of poetry, most recently Blind Spots (Seren, 2008), as well as fiction, translations from Russian, criticism and drama; she has had three plays produced. She has been shortlisted twice for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem, in 1998 and 2002. She has also edited several anthologies, and is Professor in Creative Writing and Literature at Bangor and Hull universities. She also has a weekly poetry blog on the Guardian Online website.

Seren | Paperback | £8.99 978-1-854115-34-8 | 138x216mm | 72pp June


poet r y

Goin’ Down Slow: Selected Poems 1985-2010 Brendan Cleary Retrospective covering 25 years of work by important Northern Irish poet. Brendan Cleary’s poems have never been for the squeamish or the faint-hearted. His work is urban, gritty and often manic. His poems are awash with the demons of modern life. Tragic and sad, but often also darkly comic, they speak for the dispossessed, the bedsit dwellers, the losers in love. Goin’ Down Slow brings together work from Brendan Cleary’s numerous full collections and pamphlets of the last twenty-five years. “Just read them for yourself and listen.” Martin Mooney

Where’s Katie? Elaine Feeney Debut full collection from prolific festival performer and poetry slam winner. Elaine Feeney’s poems are reports from the front line of her own experiences, whether they be poems about a messy divorce, the thankless frustrations of special needs teaching, or her heroic and Amazonian one-woman assault on a Galway lap-dancing club. The emotions which surge toward us are not merely ‘recollected in tranquility’ or composed at a safe and uncontaminated distance. Trauma and rupture have not been tamed, sublimated or bound over. We are tranquilised by Elaine’s speedy poetry: the hurt continues to hurt; the anger does not lie down; the wounds are open. “... a poet of rare energy and talent.” Kevin Higgins

Brendan Cleary was born in Carrickfergus, Northern Ireland and moved to the north east of England in 1977. He settled in Newcastle where he founded Echo Room Press and edited Stand magazine. He worked as a parttime lecturer, performance poet and stand-up comic, and appeared as poet-in-residence on The Mark Radcliffe Show on Radio 1. He has had two full collections published by Bloodaxe: The Irish Card and Sacrilege. His most recent work has been published by tall-lighthouse: Weightless and Some Turbulent Weather. Brendan now lives in Brighton where he continues to work as a poetry tutor.

Elaine Feeney was born in Galway in 1979. Her poetry has been widely published, and she has performed her work at the Cuírt International Literature Festival, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and Over the Edge Galway, among many others. In 2006 she won the annual North Beach Nights Slam in Galway and was the 2008 Cuírt International Literature Festival Grand Slam Champion. As a teacher Elaine has worked tirelessly at promoting literature and poetry among teenagers.

tall-lighthouse | Paperback | £10.00 978-1-904551-79-9 | 150x230mm | 130pp July

Salmon Poetry | Paperback | £10.00 978-1-907056-43-7 | 210x134mm | 88pp July

53 | JULY


P oet r y

Invitation to a Sacrifice Dave Lordan

The Plucking Shed Gill McEvoy

Winner of the 2005 Patrick Kavanagh Award for Poetry.

“These poems are like jewels. Incalculable pressures underpin their creation.” Helena Nelson

Invitation to a Sacrifice is the second collection from a prize-winning author who has made an already considerable impact on the poetry scene, through both his print publications and his always lively readings. His debut collection, The Boy in the Ring (Salmon, 2007) was shortlisted for the prestigious Irish Times Poetry Now Award in 2008 and was winner of the Strong Award for Best First Collection. “Heart-stopping lines.” Mary O’Malley

The Plucking Shed is an accomplished collection from a poet alive to the requirements of the spoken word as well as the word on the page. Her first full collection after the successful pamphlets A Sampler and Uncertain Days, these pieces are remarkably honed, turning the raw material of life, loss and nature into gems. “Gill McEvoy’s poetry has an eerie focus on natural phenomena.” W.N. Herbert

Dave Lordan was born in Derby in 1975. He grew up in Clonakilty in West Cork. He took an MA in English Literature at University College Cork in 1998 and an MPhil in Creative Writing at Trinity College, Dublin in 2001. He was awarded an Arts Council bursary in 2004. In 2005 he won the Patrick Kavanagh Award for poetry. His work has been published widely and he is a regular and popular performer of his own work. He is also an experienced Creative Writing teacher, workshop leader, and playwright: his most recent play, Jo Bangles, completed a sell-out run in Dublin in February 2010.

Gill McEvoy is a poet, performer and poetry events organiser living in Chester. As a young mother she faced the illness and early death of her husband. In 1999 she overcame ovarian cancer, the disease that killed her mother. She is currently Artistic Director for Chester Oyez! – the performance section of the Chester Literature Festival – and runs three regular poetry events in the city.

Salmon Poetry | Paperback | £10.00 978-1-907056-44-4 | 210x134mm | 112pp July

Cinnamon Press | Paperback | £7.99 978-1-907090-14-1 | 216x140mm | 80pp July

JULY | 5 4


poet r y

How to Euthanise a Cactus Stephen Derwent Partington Second collection from critically acclaimed Kenyan poet. How to Euthanise a Cactus is an important second collection from one of East Africa’s most talented poets and performers. Stephen Derwent Partington combines political engagement with highly crafted writing, inviting readers to glimpse the heady mixture of beauty and violence, humanity and danger that characterises a nation and a region on the brink of both catastrophe and hope. Stephen Derwent Partington is a teacher in Kenya, and a poet. He lives and works just outside Machakos and is a member of Concerned Kenyan Writers. A collection of poems, SMS & Face to Face, was published to critical acclaim in East Africa in 2003. His poetry has been widely published in literary journals in the UK, including Thumbscrew, Frogmore Papers and Poetry Wales, and in Africa, including Wajibu, Kwani?, The Standard Newspaper and Afrika News. He also writes academic articles on regional literature for leading post-colonial journals and East African regional media, and was named as one of Kenya’s creative talents at Generation Kenya 2008/09.

Cinnamon Press | Paperback | £7.99 978-1-907090-16-5 | 216x140mm | 80pp | July

Cattle Console Him Chris Preddle First full-length collection from awardwinning Yorkshire poet. The consoling cattle in Chris Preddle’s second collection can be seen from his kitchen window in Holme, West Yorkshire. These poems are often grounded among local friends and the local moors, but expand into a far larger cultural space that takes in Gilgamesh, the Greeks, medieval monks, courtly love, music, modernism, the golden ratio, compost bins, James Bond and Caterpillar tractors. Their serious concern is a search for values; they consider love, friendship, art, politics and the present, in the face of uncertainty, unstable selfhood and mortality. Above all, these poems are witty, erudite, sardonic, grave, civilised and humane. Chris Preddle is a retired librarian and lives in West Yorkshire, on a windy shoulder of the Pennines. His work has appeared in PN Review, Poetry Review, The Rialto, The Shop, Smiths Knoll, Envoi, Orbis and other magazines. He won the first prize for short poems in the Poetry on the Lake Competition 2008 and in the Scintilla Competition 2007. He was a finalist for the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize in 2007, 2006 and 2005. He won the Biscuit Poetry Prize in 2001, resulting in the 2002 short collection Bonobos.

Waywiser Press | Paperback | £8.99 978-1-904130-41-3 | 129x197mm | 80pp | July

55 | JULY


P oet r y

Joining Music with Reason Christopher Ricks (editor)

Glimmer Rowan Fortune-Wood (editor)

New anthology edited by Oxford’s Professor of Poetry 2004-2009.

Genre-spanning mix of new and established names on world literary scene.

During his tenure as Oxford Professor of Poetry, Christopher Ricks arranged for thirty poets, half of them British, half American, to read from their work. This anthology features work by all of those poets, a mixture of the established and the new. The poets include Kate Clanchy, Jane Draycott, John Fuller, Patrick McGuinness, Bernard O’Donoghue, Vidyan Ravinthiran, Saskia Hamilton, George Kalogeris and Rachel Wetzsteon. There is also a coda to the anthology containing poems by older poets associated with Oxford University: Geoffrey Hill, Anthony Thwaite, Elizabeth Jennings, Jonathan Price and Adrian Mitchell.

Glimmer introduces readers to a wonderful selection of emerging and more established voices in prose and poetry. Tonya Mitchell’s award-winning title piece is a compelling story of guilt, beautifully evoked and standing alongside fantastic fiction from Guatemalan writer Cassandra Passarelli and poetry from superb new voices, including Lyn White, Sharon Black, David Underdown, Frances Anne King, Bill Trüb and Padraig O’Moran.

Christopher Ricks was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford in 2004, and is known for both his criticism and his editorial work. The latter includes The Poems of Tennyson (1989), The New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse (1987), Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909-1917 by T.S. Eliot (1996), The Oxford Book of English Verse (1999) and Samuel Menashe: New and Selected Poems (Bloodaxe, 2009). He is the General Editor of Poetry for Penguin Classics. He is currently undertaking a full critical edition of T.S. Eliot’s complete poems, to be published by Faber. He was knighted in 2009 for his services to scholarship.

Waywiser Press | Paperback | £12.99 978-1-904130-40-6 | 129x197mm | 440pp July

AU GUST | 5 6

Rowan Fortune-Wood is assistant editor at Cinnamon Press. His writing engages with several forms including poetry, fiction, reviews and essays. He runs a YouTube channel that features his work in philosophy, aesthetics and literature, including a series of mixed media microfictions. He is currently completing an MA in novel writing, alongside working on a first novel and a collection of short stories and microfiction.

Cinnamon Press | Paperback | £7.99 978-1-907090-17-2 | 216x140mm | 144pp August


poet r y

Before the Invention of Paradise Ludwig Steinherr (translated by Richard Dove) First full-length UK collection from prominent German poet. Before the Invention of Paradise is a selection from Ludwig Steinherr’s nine collections published since his debut collection in 1985. Dealing with the things that concern many modern German poets – silence, memory, knowing and the impossibility of knowing, the everyday and what is beyond – Steinherr’s is profound yet accessible poetry. This bilingual edition is the first full-length collection of his work to be published in the UK. Ludwig Steinherr was born in Munich in 1962, where he still lives, studied philosophy at the University of Munich and is now a freelance writer and lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Eichstätt. His poems have been published widely in magazines and anthologies in Germany and abroad and have been translated into various languages, including French and Czech. Steinherr was elected a fellow of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts in 2003.

Ten: New Poets from Spread the Word Bernardine Evaristo and Daljit Nagra (editors) Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. “This thrilling, moving, challenging and inspiring new anthology introduces 10 sparkling new talents who demonstrate the richness, energy and confidence of the poetic voice in our multicultural country. It is a joyful and important moment in publishing.” Carol Ann Duffy These poets’ histories are to be found in Trinidad and Tobago, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, Ghana, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Uganda, Ethiopia, Ireland and England. Together their poems will take you on a journey into war and exile, myth and magic, homeland and memory, fantasy, family and love. Ten’s new poets are: Mir Mahfuz Ali, Rowyda Amin, Malika Booker, Roger Robinson, Karen McCarthy, Nick Makoha, Denise Saul, Seni Seniviratne, Shazea Quraishi and Janet Kofi Tsekpo. Bernardine Evaristo was born in London, where she still lives. She has published five cross-genre novels, most recently Hello Mum (2010) and Lara (Bloodaxe, 2009). She was awarded an MBE for services to literature in 2009. Daljit Nagra was born in London. In 2004 he won the Forward Prize for Best Poem with ‘Look We Have Coming to Dover!’, also the title of his first collection (2007), which won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and The South Bank Show Decibel Award.

Arc Publications | Hardback and Paperback | £13.99 (hb) £10.99 (pb) | 978-1-904614-94-4 (hb) 978-1-904614-45-6 (pb) | 138x216mm | 160pp August

Bloodaxe Books | Paperback | £8.95 978-1-852248-79-6 | 198x129mm | 128pp August

57 | SEP TE MB ER


P oet r y

Understudies: New and Selected Poems Anne-Marie Fyfe New and selected works from one of Ireland’s favourite poets. Since first appearing in Late Crossing (2004), Anne-Marie Fyfe’s life studies have focused increasingly on the disconcerting underside of small-town and suburban banality: on the underlit corners of apartments, waiting rooms, underpasses; on doppelgangers and stand-ins; on clandestine operations and undercover escapades. Understudies brings together new poems of optimism and isolation, of assumed and confused identities, with some of the earlier poems that first brought readers into this world of lives that lie below placid surfaces, at once chaotic yet oddly consolatory. “Anne-Marie Fyfe reminds us of the skins we inhabit and shed… This is fine poetry.” TLS Anne-Marie Fyfe was born in Cushendall, Co. Antrim. She organises the fortnightly Coffee House Poetry series of readings and classes at London’s Troubadour, as well as the annual John Hewitt Spring Festival in the Antrim Glens. Her poems have been widely published in anthologies and magazines, and awarded prizes in major poetry competitions including Arvon, Bridport and the National Poetry Competition. In 2002 she received an Authors’ Foundation Award, and in 2003 she was writer-inresidence at the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival.

Seren | Paperback | £9.99 978-1-854115-20-1 | 216x138mm | 128pp | September

Facsimiles Daniel Healy Follows critically acclaimed first collection Winter Lines. Facsimiles is a superb second collection from a talented young poet. Developing his unique voice, first showcased in Winter Lines (2008), Daniel Healy dazzles with powerful writing pared down to the essentials. Poems that at first appear to be fragments resonate long after the page is turned; cool, sharp language that stirs the depths. “When the need arises to excise the troubles of a day just gone, this is a book to be reached for and, as with lowering one’s face to a bowl of chilled water, dipped into. Dan Healy’s poems are quiet moments… they ask us to share in his sense of wonder at a moment’s this-ness…” Sam Smith Daniel Healy is a young Welsh poet who works as a bookseller in Cambridge. His first collection, Winter Lines, was published by Cinnamon Press in 2008. He has had over 230 poems published in various literary journals – including The Rialto, Borderlines, Dream Catcher, The Coffee House, Envoi, The Journal, Parameter, Orbis, Poetry Monthly and Other Poetry – as well as in the Cinnamon anthology Only Connect (2007).

Cinnamon Press | Paperback | £7.99 978-1-907090-18-9 | 140x216mm | 80pp | September

SE PTE M BER | 5 8


poet r y

Shad Thames, Broken Wharf Chris McCabe

Tongues Micheal O’Siadhail

A London Word Festival Commission looking at the changing face of the Docklands.

Established Irish poet writes on the theme of language.

Shad Thames, Broken Wharf is a play of voices that spans centuries of changes across the Docklands, allowing past ghosts to be heard above the white noise of the polemical present. Set in a pub that has stood on the site since the 16th century, we eavesdrop on a conversation between three characters: Echo, a middle-aged woman who has lived her life in the area; Blaise, a northerner who finds resonances with the more familiar docks at Liverpool; and the gregarious landlord, a Londoner with ‘the knowledge’. Breaking into the dialogue, The Restructure is a sinister, all-knowing Public Service Announcement with ‘advice’ to share with anyone who’ll listen… “... an elegy, an urban bucolic around the river and its Eastern banks.” Giulia Merlo

Language pervades our world, the media, our relationships, minds and hearts. It unites the personal and the social, allows for continuity and novelty and can arouse the strongest passions. We learn it and we pass it on. In Tongues, Micheal O’Siadhail delights in language and shares its wonder and fascination. O’Siadhail explores individual words, plays with grammar, and meditates on pictograms and the distilled meaning of proverbs across various cultures. The variety of forms, from sonnets to complex rhyming and syllabic patterns, matches the thematic richness. “One of our foremost poets… his work is that rare combination of the intellectual and the emotional.” Eugene O’Brien

Chris McCabe was born in Liverpool in 1977. He has published two collections of poetry, The Hutton Inquiry (2005) and Zeppelins (2008), and a pamphlet, The Borrowed Notebook (2009). He currently works as Joint Librarian of The Poetry Library and lives in London and Liverpool with his wife and son.

Micheal O’Siadhail won the Irish American Cultural Institute Prize in 1982, and the Marten Toonder Prize for Literature in 1998. He is a freelance writer, and was formerly a lecturer at Trinity College, Dublin and a professor at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. His previous Bloodaxe books include Poems 1975-1995 (1999), Our Double Time (1998), The Gossamer Wall: Poems in Witness to the Holocaust (2002) and Globe (2007). He lives in Booterstown, Co. Dublin.

Penned in the Margins | Paperback | £9.50 978-0-956546-72-2 | 198x129mm | 48pp September

Bloodaxe Books | Paperback | £9.95 978-1-852248-74-1 | 138x216mm | 208pp September

59 | SEP TE MB ER


P oet r y

My Only Ever Oedipal Complaint Omar Sabbagh

Twelve Nudes Ross Sutherland

Emerging Lebanese/British poet, already widely published.

Limited-edition second collection from one of The Times’ Top Ten Literary Stars, 2008.

Drawing together disparate worlds – the Lebanese and the Western, the academic, brimming with literary allusion, and the soul, raw with suffering – Omar Sabbagh weaves lyrical, intelligent pieces that range across family relationships, love, passion and war, always with something new to say and a distinctive way of saying it. Powerful, heartfelt, but beautifully controlled and crafted, Sabbagh is a new voice who will make an extraordinary mark on the poetry world.

“Ross Sutherland’s poetry approaches the epic; a kind of epic on a human scale. If he were a piece of furniture, he would be an elegant high stool that felt uncomfortable and stylish at the same time.” Ian McMillan

“Sabbagh writes brilliantly about alienation from country and family; even his love poems are often troubled and this makes for a distinctively modern sensibility.” Martyn Crucefix “Omar Sabbagh is a distinct presence and a powerful voice: a young poet worthy of attention.” Philip Davis Omar Sabbagh is a Lebanese/British poet, who completed his MA in Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths in 2007, and is currently completing a PhD in English Literature at King’s College London. His poems have already featured in many literary journals, including Agenda, Envoi, The London Magazine, The New Writer, PN Review, Poetry Review, Poetry Wales, The Reader, Stand, The Warwick Review and The Goldfish Anthology. Cinnamon Press | Paperback | £7.99 978-1-907090-19-6 | 140x216mm | 80pp September

SE PTE M BER | 6 0

In this limited-edition, boxed and signed mini-book, Ross Sutherland presents the poem as honed, stripped and exposed. With trademark wit, Twelve Nudes interrogates the failures of love, exploding the dynamics of text, voice and body. In this elegant but uneasy satire, ‘to be naked is to speak without footnotes’. Ross Sutherland was born in Edinburgh in 1979. A former lecturer in electronic literature at Liverpool John Moores University, Ross works as a freelance journalist and tutor in Creative Writing. He was one of The Times’ Top Ten Literary Stars of 2008. A founding member of Aisle16, Ross has co-written eight live literature productions, including the critically acclaimed Poetry Boyband and Found in Translation. Ross makes regular appearances at Manchester Literature Festival, Aldeburgh Poetry Festival, Glastonbury, Latitude Festival and venues around the UK. His first collection, Things To Do Before You Leave Town, was published by Penned in the Margins in 2009.

Penned in the Margins | Paperback (boxed) | £9.50 978-0-956546-73-9 | 198x129mm | 48pp September


poet r y

I Won’t Let You Go: Selected Poems Rabindranath Tagore (translated by Ketaki Kushari Dyson) Winner of Nobel Prize in Literature; Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation. Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) is arguably India’s greatest modern poet and the most brilliant creative genius produced by the Indian Renaissance. He was both a restless innovator and a superb craftsman, and the Bengali language attained great beauty and power in his hands. Tagore’s poetry has an impressive wholeness: a magnificent loving warmth, a delicate sensuousness, an intense sense of kinship with nature and a burning awareness of man’s place in the universe. He is religious in the deepest sense, wavering between a faith that sustains the spirit in times of crisis and a profound questioning that can find no enduring answers. Rabindranath Tagore reshaped Bengali literature and music in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As author of Gitanjali, he became Asia’s first Nobel laureate, winning the 1913 Nobel Prize in Literature. His support for the Indian Independence Movement endures in his vast canon, in the institution he founded, Visva-Bharati University, and in the Bangladeshi and Indian national anthems. Ketaki Kushari Dyson is an author, translator and critic. She is one of the outstanding Bengali writers of her generation, and has published more than thirty titles in her two languages. She lives in Oxford.

Bloodaxe Books | Paperback | £12.00 978-1-852248-98-7 | 138x216mm | 320pp September

Wait C.K. Williams New collection from Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet. C.K. Williams is perhaps the most challenging American poet of his generation, a poet of intense and searching originality who makes lyric sense out of the often brutal realities of everyday life. Wait finds Williams by turns ruminative, stalked by ‘the conscience-beast, who harries me’, and ‘riven by idiot vigor, voracious’. Poems about rural life are set against poems about shrapnel in Iraq and sudden desire on the Paris Métro; grateful invocations of Herbert and Hopkins give way to fierce negotiations with Coleridge, Dostoevsky and Celan. What the poems share is their setting in the cool, spacious, spotlit, book-lined place that is Williams’s consciousness, a place whose workings he has rendered for fifty years with inimitable candour and style. “One of the most distinguished poets of his generation.” Paul Muldoon C.K. Williams was born in New Jersey in 1936. He lives in Normandy and teaches at Princeton University. He has published ten books with Bloodaxe, including New & Selected Poems (1995), The Vigil (1997), Repair (1999) and The Singing (2003) – all four were Poetry Book Society Recommendations – followed by his Collected Poems in 2006. Repair was awarded the 2000 Pulitzer Prize, and The Singing won the National Book Award for 2003.

Bloodaxe Books | Paperback | £9.95 978-1-852248-75-8 | 152x229mm | 144pp September

61 | SEP TE MB ER


P oet r y

One of Our Skylarks Alison Bielski

Kalagora Siddhartha Bose

Award-winning, internationally recognised Welsh poet.

One of The Times’ “ten rising stars of British poetry”.

One of Our Skylarks is an exceptional collection from a poet at the height of her powers. Now in her mid-eighties, Alison Bielski continues to produce finely tuned work that is layered with myth and rooted in a deep sense of place. The collection takes the reader on a journey from south Wales to the borders and then northwards, but this is much more than landscape poetry; rather it is the lyricism that inhabits the land and the history that it breathes. Beautifully crafted, visually rich poetry.

‘Kalagora’ is a Hindi neologism meaning ‘black man / white man’. This book tells his story: from a wild Millennium eve party in Manhattan to homecoming amid the grime and glory of London’s East End. In this dazzling debut collection by Siddhartha Bose, the global wanderer pays witness to traffic accidents and street surrealism in Mumbai – the irresistible ‘city of motion’ – observing the uncanny and the unexpected at the start of the 21st century. Across continents and time-zones, a story emerges of love, chaos and addiction, a tale that evokes the colour and raw energy of these hybrid, multi-cultural cities.

Alison Bielski has published numerous collections and regularly contributes to magazines. Often drawing on Welsh folklore and mythology, some of her experimental visual poetry has been exhibited in Wales and abroad. She has won numerous poetry prizes and has been published in many European countries and in India as well as the UK and the US. Her previous collections include Twentieth Century Flood (1964), Across the Burning Sand (1970), Monogrampoems (1971), Eve (1973), Mermaid Poems (1974), The Lovetree (1974), Seth (1980), Night Sequence (1981), Eagles (1983) and Sacramental Sonnets (2003). She has also published several booklets on local history, and is a member of Academi.

Cinnamon Press | Paperback | £7.99 978-1-907090-21-9 | 140x216mm | 64pp October

OC TOB ER | 6 2

“Bose’s métier is a kind of breathless urban Romanticism… daring the reader to keep up.” Simon Turner Siddhartha Bose is a poet and performer based in London. He grew up in Mumbai and Calcutta, followed by a seven year itch in the USA. Selections of his work have appeared in the anthologies City State: New London Poetry (Penned in the Margins, 2009) and Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century (Bloodaxe, 2009). Bose has recently completed a PhD at Queen Mary, University of London, where he also teaches poetry and Shakespeare. He is playwright-in-residence with WhynotTheatre, Toronto.

Penned in the Margins | Paperback | £8.99 978-0-956546-74-6 | 216x138mm | 96pp October


poet r y

Polyphony David and Helen Constantine (editors) Includes new translations of Pushkin, Larbaud, Dubnov and many more. Polyphony deals with the different voices of poetic translation: the local, the foreign, the native, the acquired – and the strange hybrids that come into being when the language of home is crossed with that of abroad. This issue of Modern Poetry in Translation, edited as ever by David and Helen Constantine, is an anthology in celebration of variety, without ever suppressing tones, dialects and utterances it might disturb us to hear. Polyphony includes a new translation of Pushkin’s Yevgeni Onegin by D.M. Thomas, along with translations of Valéry Larbaud, Eugene Dubnov and Dorothea Grünzweig. There are also translations out of English: William Blake into Russian, Gerard Manley Hopkins into German, plus a feature on Daniel Huw’s Memories of Ted Hughes 1952-1963 (2010), and an essay that delves into the ‘Voices of Poetry’, those very voices that make poetry such a vital, vibrant and unique experience for all concerned.

Modern Poetry in Translation | Paperback | £9.95 978-0-955906-45-9 | 201x140mm | 200pp | October

The Brittle Sea: New and Selected Poems Paul Henry Includes poems commissioned by BBC2 for the 2008 Rugby World Cup. For two decades Paul Henry has been quietly building an oeuvre of beautifully crafted poems. Born into a family of musicians, music pervades his poems on childhood, as do a large cast of neighbours, friends and relations, many of whom appear in Dylan Thomaslike character sketches. Some of his earliest portrait-poems are set against the Breconshire villages, before a move south to Newport inspires poems about the undulating river Usk and the postindustrial cityscape. And, by popular request, rugby fans will find the poems written specially for BBC2. “Paul Henry is the poet I wish I could be.” Sheenagh Pugh Paul Henry was born in Aberystwyth. Described by the late U.A. Fanthorpe as “a poet’s poet”, his work has been widely anthologised and regularly appears in journals such as Poetry Wales and the TLS. His other collections, all published by Seren, are Ingrid’s Husband (2007), The Breath of Sleeping Boys and other poems, The Slipped Leash, The Milk Thief, Captive Audience and Time Pieces. A regular tutor at Ty Newydd, Wales’s national writers’ centre, he also works as an associate lecturer at the University of Glamorgan and as a radio presenter for BBC Wales. He lives in Crickhowell, Powys. Seren | Paperback | £9.99 978-1-854115-24-9 | 216x138mm | 180pp | October

63 | O C TO B ER


P oet r y

Moor Music Mike Jenkins Wales Book of the Year winner for Wanting to Belong. In this innovative new collection, Mike Jenkins continues his life-long fascination with the history and fate of Wales, with the glories of its valleys and with the decline of its inner cities. His career in teaching left him with a sense of optimism about young people, about the prospect of change and with an eagerness to embrace changing times. His sensitive awareness of the natural world, or what is available of the natural world in an urban context, is a frequently poignant feature of his work. Above all, though, these poems, like his prize-winning short stories, are full of colourful characters, dialogue, and incident. Mike Jenkins is now a full-time writer and teacher of Creative Writing. This is his eighth poetry collection for Seren. He is the former editor of Poetry Wales and is coeditor and founder of Red Poets magazine. He has won an Eric Gregory Award, a Welsh Arts Council Young Writers’ Prize, a John Tripp Award for Spoken Poetry and, in 1998, the Wales Book of the Year for Wanting to Belong (also from Seren). Jenkins has appeared at the Hay and Aldeburgh festivals and has read many of his poems on TV and radio.

Seren | Paperback | £8.99 978-1-854115-35-5 | 216x138mm | 72pp October

OC TOB ER | 6 4

The Iron Book of New Humorous Verse Eileen Jones (editor) Features Ian McMillan, Wendy Cope and John Hegley. This is the first anthology exclusively dedicated to recently written humorous verse, taking into account new fashions in performance poetry. More than 100 poems are included and among the contributors are Ian McMillan, Kate Fox, Jacob Polley, Linda France, Andy Croft, David Bateman, John Whitworth, and Paul Groves. All the selections, picked from more than 1,500 poems from throughout the world, were originally published post-1990. Subjects include a paeon to a wonderbra, a knitted orgasm, stuffing your husband and the annual shindig for Greenland’s literary elite. Eileen Jones lives in Tynedale. After a career as a social worker in Newcastle, and as an NHS commissioning manager in Northumberland, she now writes poetry and plays. Her poetry has been published in The Guardian, in magazines such as The North and Other Poetry and in anthologies. She is well-known for her readings on NE1 community radio and at performance poetry venues like Northern Lines, Ten by Ten and Free as a Bard. She also helped to establish Carte Blanche, the Newcastle-based group for women writers.

Iron Press | Paperback | £8.00 978-0-955245-09-1 | 216x138mm | 130pp October


poet r y

The Book of Emblems Matthew Ladd

Raiment Marilyn Longstaff

Winner of the 2009 Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize.

New collection from widely published North East poet.

The Book of Emblems takes its title from the devotional genre, popular throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, whose allegorical illustrations were meant to focus the mind on the divine. Using a variety of narrative voices, a taut lyricism, and an array of images culled from the author’s travels in the United States and abroad, this volume celebrates the mind’s aspiration to a deeper understanding of its own mysteries: the literary and visual arts, sexuality, familial love, and the dark, connective wonder of death.

Raiment is a book about the ways in which we clothe our bodies, and our spirits. It is a study in faith and disappointment, bras, knickers and the whole armour of God. According to the Easter hymn, ‘Angels in bright raiment rolled the stone away, / Kept the folded grave clothes where thy body lay.’ For Marilyn Longstaff, the cerements in the vacant tomb are a symbol of spiritual mystery and an image of religious emptiness. She is a pilgrim, a stranger in a strange land, tempted by guilty pleasures and beset by a Puritan’s consciousness of sin and injustice. These poems cheerfully balance desire and loss, hope and failure and finding satisfaction in small pleasures, in a world that contains no angels in bright raiment.

Matthew Ladd was born in Los Angeles and raised in Texas. Having received an MPhil in Divinity from Cambridge, in 2006 he received an MFA in Poetry from the University of Florida. His poems have appeared in such journals as The Paris Review, The Yale Review, The Virginia Quarterly and The Antioch Review. He has also written criticism for The American Scholar, The Humanist and the The Threepenny Review, among other publications; and he writes an annual poetry review for West Branch, the literary journal of Bucknell University. He currently lives in New York.

Waywiser Press | Paperback | £8.99 978-1-904130-43-7 | 216x138mm | 64pp October

Marilyn Longstaff’s previous books are Puritan Games (2001) and Sitting Among the Hoppers (2004). In 2003 she received a New Writing North Promise Award, and in 2005 completed her MA in Creative Writing at Newcastle University. She is a member of the Vane Women collective, and has recently been part of the group Stemistry, working with the poet Lisa Matthews to write in response to stem cell research. She lives in Darlington.

Smokestack Books | Paperback | £7.95 978-0-956417-54-1 | 197x127mm | 64pp October

65 | O C TO B ER


P oet r y

Chickweed Wintergreen: Selected Poems Harry Martinson (translated by Robin Fulton) Winner of the 1974 Nobel Prize for Literature. In his native Sweden, Harry Martinson is one of the best known authors of his time. His books reflect his troubled upbringing, his travels and his interest in science and social questions: his poems often combine close scrutiny of the natural world with an intense awareness of the enormity of the cosmos. While his prose books have reached a wide readership in several languages, his poems have appeared only sporadically in English. Robin Fulton’s translations provide the first substantial selection of Martinson’s poetry to be made available to English-language readers. Harry Martinson (1904-78) sailed the oceans from 1920 to 1927 as an escape from an unhappy childhood in rural southwest Sweden. When lung problems forced him ashore, he spent several years travelling around Sweden without steady employment, at times living as a vagrant. After publishing his first book of poems in 1929, he achieved popular success as a poet and novelist, and was elected to the Swedish Academy in 1949, an astonishing achievement for a self-educated writer. He was joint winner of the 1974 Nobel Prize in Literature, but adverse criticism of the award contributed to the worsening of his depression. He committed suicide in 1978.

Bloodaxe Books | Paperback | £10.95 978-1-852248-87-1 | 216x138mm | 192pp | October

Safe House Iggy McGovern Winner of Hennessy Literary Award for Poetry and McCrae Literary Award. The follow-up to his hugely popular 2005 debut, The King of Suburbia, Iggy McGovern’s second collection of poems sees him walk the metrical line between a childhood in the religiously divided town of Coleraine and his present home in Dublin. En route he takes in the wonders and absurdities of contemporary life in his ‘one island, two countries’. Here are poems in which the Troubles begin to raise their head, in which the orb of the Child of Prague might be mistaken for a hand-grenade. Here too are poems from the other end of that conflict, from an Ireland struggling to come to terms with the near collapse of its economy. Iggy McGovern is now Associate Professor of Physics at Trinity College, Dublin. His poetry has been widely published in anthologies and journals in Ireland and abroad, as well as in the popular ‘Poetry in Motion’ series on trains in the Dublin suburban rail system (DART). In 1993 he won the McCrae Literary Award, followed by the Hennessy Literary Award for Poetry in 1996. The King of Suburbia won the inaugural Glen Dimplex New Writer Award for Poetry in 2006, and his poem ‘The Irish Poem Is’ was shortlisted for the 2008 Strokestown Poetry Prize.

Dedalus Press | Paperback | £10.00 978-1-906614-34-8 | 216x140mm | 88pp | October

OC TOB ER | 6 6


poet r y

Speaking Without Tongues Jane Monson Multi-layered, intelligent prose poetry. Speaking Without Tongues is a collection of prose poems that mark Jane Monson out as one of the most talented young writers the UK has to offer. These poems are highly crafted, exquisitely precise pieces with wit and intelligence, multi-layered with aspects of philosophy, theology, folk-lore and mythology. Combined with the poet’s linguistic clarity and her story-teller’s eye for detail, what appears above the surface becomes by turns engaging or enigmatic, humane or disquieting, but always compelling and accessible. Jane Monson has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia, and a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing from Cardiff University. Based in Cambridge, she works as a freelance writer and teacher and runs independent Creative Writing courses abroad, and in Cambridge, Harlow and London. Jane has been shortlisted for an Eric Gregory Award and commended by both Poetry London and the New Writing Partnership. Her poetry is widely anthologised and published in magazines such as Ore and Cadenza.

Cinnamon Press | Paperback | £7.99 978-1-907090-22-6 | 140x216mm | 80pp October

My Flirtation with International Socialism Gerry Murphy Follows critical success of End of Part One: New and Selected Poems. In My Flirtation with International Socialism, Gerry Murphy proves himself to be one of the most inquisitive and unconventional of contemporary Irish poets. These poems move seamlessly from blink-and-you’ve-missed-it one-line observation to the more considered and affecting works of love and loss that are among his great strengths. Throughout there is anarchic humour, robust engagement with historical and literary figures, and a deep-seated pride in the poet’s native land, to which his work so often serves as homage. “Murphy’s voice is salacious, funny, pithy, angry-making, often verging on the side-of-the-mouth and, dare one add, tender...” Poetry Ireland Review Gerry Murphy was born in Cork in 1952. His collections of poetry include four previous volumes from Dedalus, along with End of Part One: New and Selected Poems, which appeared in 2006 to critical and popular acclaim. In 2008 his work was adapted for actors and musicians by Crazy Dog Audio Theatre and was produced, as The People’s Republic of Gerry Murphy, at the Everyman Palace in Cork.

Dedalus Press | Paperback | £10.50 978-1-906614-29-4 | 140x216mm | 86pp October

67 | O C TO B ER


P oet r y

The Arrival of the Orchestra Gustavo Pereira (translated by John Green, Michal Boñcza and Eduardo Embry) Leading poet of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution. “There are only a handful of poets on this planet who can write political, intelligent, uncompromising poetry that is still relevant and accessible. Gustavo Pereira is one such poet.” Benjamin Zephaniah “In this remarkable book, Gustavo Pereira reflects with insight and eloquence the reawakening in Venezuela that offers us all the threat of a good example.” John Pilger This edition features the poems of Gustavo Pereira in English for the very first time, presented alongside their original Spanish versions. Gustavo Pereira is one of Latin America’s most prolific poets, the best-known Venezuelan poet of his generation, a leading spirit in his country’s Bolivarian revolution and a prominent supporter of President Hugo Chávez (who once invited him to serve as Minister of Culture). Pereira has written over thirty books exploring Venezuela’s Spanish, Indian and revolutionary traditions. In 2008 the Caracas World Poetry Festival was dedicated to him. A member of the Venezuelan National Constituent Assembly, he is the author of the preamble to the Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, which defines culture as a legal right.

Smokestack Books | Paperback | £7.95 978-0-956417-53-4 | 197x127mm | 360pp October

OC TOB ER | 6 8

Waking Dreams: New and Selected Poems Lawrence Sail Important retrospective of one of the UK’s most distinguished poets. Lawrence Sail’s poems balance dream and history, delight and unease: they weigh the art of the possible against the encroachment of time. This substantial retrospective covers work written over four decades, alongside new poems that continue to explore Sail’s characteristic themes – the border country between belief and doubt; the interplay of memory and imagination; the possibilities of art; the context of silence – and they do so with a fresh inwardness. “Witty, memorable and rich in feeling.” Helen Dunmore Lawrence Sail was born in London in 1942. His ten poetry collections include four previous Bloodaxe titles: Out of Land (1992), Building into Air (1995), The World Returning (2002) and Eye-Baby (2006). He was chairman of the Arvon Foundation from 1990 to 1994. In 1991 he was programme director of the Cheltenham Festival of Literature, and a judge for the Whitbread Book of the Year awards. In 1999 he was a co-director of the 50th Anniversary Cheltenham Festival of Literature. He is a freelance writer and lives in Exeter.

Bloodaxe Books | Paperback | £9.95 978-1-852248-83-3 | 216x138mm | 224pp October


poet r y

Sandgrain and Hourglass Penelope Shuttle

Letter to Auden N.S. Thompson

Follow-up to Redgrove’s Wife, shortlisted for 2006 Forward and T.S. Eliot Prizes.

Book-length poem inspired by W.H. Auden.

Some aspects of human experience can be too painful or difficult to bear, except through poetry. As Ted Hughes said, “poetry is a way of speaking to people we’ve lost when it is too late.” Penelope Shuttle’s major preoccupation in Sandgrain and Hourglass is her continuing experience of loss, particularly the way time modulates and redefines grief. In these poems – as in her previous book Redgrove’s Wife – Shuttle continues such conversations with her husband Peter Redgrove, her father Jack Shuttle, and her close friend L.H.S., among others. Penelope Shuttle has published seven collections of poems since 1980, three of which have been Poetry Book Society Recommendations (including a Selected Poems in 1998). Redgrove’s Wife (Bloodaxe, 2006) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize and T.S. Eliot Prize, and in 2007 she received a Cholmondeley Award. Her poetry has been recorded for The Harvard Poetry Room and broadcast on BBC Radio. She has also published five novels and is coauthor of The Wise Wound (2005) and Alchemy for Women (1995). She has lived in Falmouth since 1970, and was married to the poet Peter Redgrove, who died in 2003.

Bloodaxe Books | Paperback | £8.95 978-1-852248-82-6 | 216x138mm | 96pp October

“I want a form that’s large enough to swim in,” wrote W.H. Auden in his ‘Letter to Lord Byron’ – “And talk on any subject that I choose, / From natural scenery to men and women, / Myself, the arts, the European news.” Auden was writing in 1936 to the ghost of the long-dead Byron, to tell him about recent developments in poetry and politics. Seventy years later, N.S. Thompson decided it was time somebody wrote to Auden to bring him up to speed with events since his death in 1973. Letter to Auden is an antiheroic verse-epistle, combining Byron’s savage wit and Auden’s breezy conversational manner. It’s an irreverent and original venture into the world of the Audenesque, and a homage to one of the 20th century’s greatest poets. N.S. Thompson was born in Manchester in 1950. He worked in Italy for several years as the curator of Casa Guidi, the Florence home of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. His publications include Chaucer, Boccaccio and the Debate of Love (1999), several chapbooks of poetry and a full-length collection, The Home Front (1997).

Smokestack Books | Paperback | £7.95 978-0-956417-51-0 | 197x127mm | 64pp October

69 | O C TO B ER


P oet r y

Phantom Noise Brian Turner Second collection from Iraq war soldierpoet; follows 2007’s Here, Bullet. Brian Turner’s first book of poems, Here, Bullet, was a harrowing, first-hand account of the Iraq war by a soldierpoet. In Phantom Noise he faces and tries to deal with the traumatic aftermath of war. Flashbacks explode the daily hell of Baghdad into the streets and malls of peaceful California. Turner writes a powerful poetry of witness, exceptional for its beauty, honesty and skill. In Phantom Noise, as in Here, Bullet, we see and feel the devastatingly surreal reality of everyday life and death for soldiers and civilians through the eyes of an eloquent writer who served in the US Army for seven years. “... a chiseling of agony onto paper and a poignant cri de coeur to the republic of conscience.” Carolyn Forché Brian Turner was an infantry team leader for a year in Iraq from November 2003 with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division. Born in 1967, he received an MFA from the University of Oregon and lived abroad in South Korea for a year before joining the army. Here, Bullet (Bloodaxe, 2007) was first published in the US in 2005, where it earned Turner nine major literary awards.

Bloodaxe Books | Paperback | £8.95 978-1-852248-76-5 | 216x138mm | 80pp October

OC TOB ER | 7 0

Voices at the World’s Edge: Irish Poets on Skellig Michael Paddy Bushe (editor) Anthology of some of Ireland’s best-known poets. Skellig Michael, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, lies some twelve kilometres off the coast of south-west Kerry. Despite its proximity to the mainland, however, it remains virtually unknown, yet its stark beauty holds a fascination for many. For Voices at the World’s Edge, Paddy Bushe invited some of Ireland’s best-known poets to travel with him to Skellig Michael, to spend the night among bee-hive huts, puffins and gannets, and to write of their experiences at what was once the edge of the world. Contributors include Theo Dorgan, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Bernard O’Donoghue and Macdara Woods, while Marie Heaney provides an introduction to this extraordinary anthology that is part travel writing, part meditative day-book, part natural history, part response to the history of faith on this seaencircled rock. World-famous photographer John Minihan, so often to be found among writers, records both his own and his companions’ journeys. Paddy Bushe was born in Dublin in 1948. In 2008 Dedalus published the Selected To Ring in Silence. Described in The Irish Times as “a significant and necessary voice in Irish poetry”, he is the recipient of the Oireachtas prize for poetry and the Michael Hartnett Poetry Award. He lives in Co. Kerry.

Dedalus Press | Hardback and Paperback | £20.99 (hb) £12.50 (pb) | 978-1-906614-36-2 (hb) 978-1-906614-35-5 (pb) | 216x140mm | 170pp October


poet r y

New and Collected Poems Ruth Fainlight Draws on work produced over the last 50 years, alongside new poems. According to A.S. Byatt, Ruth Fainlight’s poems “give us truly new visions of usual and mysterious events.” Each is a balancing act between thought and feeling, revealing otherness within the everyday, often measuring subtle shifts in relationships between women and men. Images of the moon, however interpreted – whether as stern and stony presence or protective maternal symbol – recur throughout her work; Peter Porter described one of her collections as having “the steadiness and clarity of the moon itself.” This substantial New and Collected Poems covers work written over 50 years, drawing on over a dozen books as well as a whole new collection. It also includes Fainlight’s translations, and two of her opera libretti, The Dancer Hotoke and The Bride in Her Grave. Ruth Fainlight was born in New York City in 1931. She was educated in the US and England, and has lived in England since the age of fifteen. She lives in London, and was married to the late Alan Sillitoe. Four of her original collections were originally published by Bloodaxe, including Sugar-Paper Blue (1997), which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Award.

Bloodaxe Books | Paperback | £15.00 978-1-852248-85-7 | 234x156mm | 384pp | November

Exposure Holly Howitt and Jan Fortune-Wood (editors) Innovative anthology of prose poetry and microfiction. Exposure is an exciting anthology of prose poetry and microfiction selected by Holly Howitt and Jan Fortune-Wood from over 1,000 writers in Wales, the UK and across the globe. Ranging across love, loss, hate, journeys and other oddities, these finely written pieces constantly surprise, delight and challenge. With a powerful title piece from Bill Trüb, this is an innovative anthology full of difference. Holly Howitt was born and grew up in Wales. She writes fiction in various forms, and is particularly interested in truncated and overlooked genres, such as microfiction and the novella. She has a PhD in Creative Writing from Cardiff University and lectures at Portsmouth University. Her highly acclaimed microfiction collection, Dinner Time (also from Cinnamon), was launched at the Guardian Hay Festival in 2008. Jan Fortune-Wood is the founding editor of Cinnamon Press and also teaches Creative Writing. Her books include the novels Dear Ceridwen (2007) and The Standing Ground (2007) and the prose poetry collection Stale Bread and Miracles (2008), which she recently performed at a reading with Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy.

Cinnamon Press | Paperback | £7.99 978-1-907090-23-3 | 216x140mm | 80pp | November

71 | N ove mb er


P oet r y

Arun Kolatkar: Collected Poems in English Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (editor) Winner of 1974 Commonwealth Poetry Prize. Arun Kolatkar was one of India’s greatest modern poets. This collection brings together work from the three volumes published in his lifetime, the Commonwealth Prize-winning Jejuri, Kala Ghoda Poems and Sarpa Satra, and one posthumous selection, The Boatride and Other Poems, published in 2008. Jejuri, for example, offers a rich description of India while at the same time performing a complex act of devotion, discovering the divine trace in a degenerate world. Salman Rushdie called it “sprightly, clearsighted, deeply felt… a modern classic.” For Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, it was “among the finest single poems written in India in the last forty years… it surprises by revealing the familiar, the hidden that is always before us.” Arun Kolatkar (1931-2004) was born in Kolhapur, India. He worked for much of his life as an art director and graphic designer in Bombay, achieving great success. He wrote prolifically, in both Marathi and English. His first book of poems, Jejuri, won him the Commonwealth Poetry Prize and was later published in the US in the NYRB Classics series (in 2006) with an introduction by Amit Chaudhuri, one of many writers who have championed Kolatkar’s work.

Bloodaxe Books | Paperback | £12.00 978-1-852248-53-6 | 216x138mm | 400pp November

Nove mbe r | 7 2

Vendange Tardive Peter Reading The only British poet to have won America’s Lannan Literary Award for Poetry twice. After mapping Britain’s national decline over thirty years through twenty-five books of poetry, Peter Reading has reinvented himself as a writer in his 21st century work. The vitriolic social critic has become poetry’s Millennial prophet of doom, directing his venom and sorrow at the destruction of the world’s wildlife and environment. Vendange Tardive is a late harvest of vintage Reading in disaster mode. Here is a rueful crop of valedictory poems in which man reaps what he sows: shipwreck, ruin, death, war, ignomony and extinction. But somehow, amid all that, there is still the fruit of the vine and the bittersweet spirit of life. Vendange Tardive cements Peter Reading’s position as probably the most skilful and technically inventive poet writing today. Peter Reading is the only British poet to have won America’s prestigious Lannan Literary Award for Poetry twice, in 1990 and 2004. He is also the only poet to read his entire life’s work for the Lannan Foundation’s DVD archive. All his poetry is published by Bloodaxe: his Collected Poems is published in three volumes: 1: Poems 1970-1984 (1995), 2: Poems 1985-1996 (1996) and 3: Poems 1997-2003 (2003). He lives in Ludlow, Shropshire.

Bloodaxe Books | Paperback | £7.95 978-1-852248-84-0 | 138x216mm | 56pp November


poet r y Jacket in production

ASJ Tessimond: Collected Poems Hubert Nicholson (editor)

Steak & Stations Michael Egan

Featured on Radio 4’s Lost Poets, April 2010.

A peep-hole into the mysteries of modern society.

ASJ Tessimond was one of the most individual, versatile and approachable voices in 20th century poetry. His poems are remarkable for their lucidity and formal exactness and for their witty, humane depiction of life in the modern city. Tessimond remains, however, too little published and too much neglected, perhaps due to the fact that he was a poet plagued by self-doubt and depression, fiercely critical of his own work to the point of self-censorship. Since his death, his champions have been extraordinarily varied: from Michael Roberts, John Lehmann and Ceri Richards to Bernard Levin, Maggie Smith, Bill Deedes and Trevor McDonald.

Steak & Stations reports from a landscape of contrasts and contradictions: of speed and consumption, haute cuisine and isolated railway platforms; from nocturnal inner-city encounters to rural wildernesses where schoolgirls ‘climb into the wind’. In this exhilarating debut collection, Michael Egan has developed a style of his own, a conversational staccato that compels you to reconstruct his dark, fragmented micro-narratives piece by piece. Shot through with surreal humour, experimentation and a keen political sensibility, these poems offer a peep-hole into the mysteries of domesticity, relationships and modern society.

ASJ Tessimond (1902-62) was born in Birkenhead. Having run away from school at sixteen, and after taking a degree at Liverpool University, at the beginning of the Second World War he went on the run to avoid conscription. When he finally submitted himself to an army medical, he was declared unfit for service. Tessimond has been described as an eccentric, a night-lifer, loner and flâneur. He loved women, was always falling in love, but never married, spending half of a sizeable inheritance on his nightclub hostesses, striptease girls and models, and the rest on “four or five successive psychoanalysts”.

Bloodaxe Books | Paperback | £10.95 978-1-852248-57-4 | 138x216mm | 256pp November

“This is the work of an exciting, younger poetic voice taking on the challenge of how to write about change as it happens, about the past slipping away from us and the future still invisible to our senses. Read it and imagine.” Eleanor Rees Michael Egan lives in Liverpool and is a member of Edge Hill University’s Poetry and Poetics Research Group. He is also the editor of The Binturong Review. Michael’s poems have appeared in Erbacce, Great Works, Zafusy and Poetry Salzburg. A pamphlet, The River Swam, was published in 2005 and a second, Folklores, in 2010. Steak & Stations is his first full collection.

Penned in the Margins | Paperback | £8.99 978-0-956546-75-3 | 216x138mm | 80pp December

73 | D EC EMB ER


P oet r y

Beans in Snow by Jennifer Copley Smokestack | Paperback 64pp | £7.95 978-0-956034-12-0

Being Alive by Neil Astley (ed) Bloodaxe | Paperback 514pp | £10.95 978-1-852246-75-4

Blind Spots by Carol Rumens Seren | Paperback 96pp | £8.99 978-1-854114-65-5

Book of Days by Linda France Smokestack | Paperback 64pp | £7.95 978-0-956034-13-7

Cold Spring in Winter by Valérie Rouzeau Arc | Paperback/Hardback 158pp | £9.99/£12.99 978-1-904614-30-2 (pb) 978-1-904614-59-3 (hb)

Fear of Thunder by Andrew Forster Flambard | Paperback 80pp | £7.00 978-1-873226-94-0

Flowing, Still: Irish Poets on Irish Poetry by Pat Boran (ed) Dedalus | Paperback/Hardback 196pp | £13.99/£21.99 978-1-904556-04-1 (pb) 978-1-906614-05-8 (hb)

Here, Bullet by Brian Turner Bloodaxe | Paperback 80pp | £8.95 978-1-852247-99-7

How to Pour Madness into a Teacup by Abegail Morley Cinnamon | Paperback 64pp | £7.99 978-1-907090-00-4

I Spy Pinhole Eye by Philip Gross, Simon Denison Cinnamon | Paperback 80pp | £11.99 978-1-905614-99-8

In by Andrew Waterhouse The Rialto | Paperback 68pp | £7.95 978-0-952744-41-2

In Person by Neil Astley, Pamela Robertson-Pearce (eds) Bloodaxe | Paperback + DVD 272pp | £12.00 978-1-852248-00-0

SELECTED BACKLIST | 7 4


poet r y Later Selected Poems by Sheenagh Pugh Seren | Paperback 120pp | £9.99 978-1-854114-97-6

Letter to Patience by John Haynes Seren | Paperback 96pp | £7.99 978-1-854114-12-9

Long Division by Andrea Cohen Salmon Poetry | Paperback 120pp | £10.00 978-0-956128-71-3

Long-distance Swimmer by Dorothy Molloy Salmon Poetry | Paperback 60pp | £10.00 978-1-907056-21-5

Mainstream Love Hotel by Todd Swift tall-lighthouse | Paperback 64pp | £8.00 978-1-904551-54-6

The Night Trotsky Came to Stay by Allison McVety Smith/Doorstop | Paperback 64pp | £7.95 978-1-902382-90-6

Not for Specialists by W.D. Snodgrass Waywiser | Paperback 128pp | £10.99 978-1-904130-35-2

Our Sweet Little Time by Hamish Ironside Iron Press | Paperback 144pp | £6.00 978-0-955245-07-7

Penultimata by Robert Conquest Waywiser | Paperback 192pp | £8.99 978-1-904130-36-9

Pray for Us Sinners by Joolz Denby Comma Poetry | Paperback 80pp | £6.99 978-0-954828-06-6

Pro Eto – That’s What by Vladamir Mayakovsky Arc | Paperback/Hardback 160pp | £12.99/£15.99 978-1-904614-31-9 (pb) 978-1-904614-71-5 (hb)

Shepherd of Solitude by Amjad Nasser Banipal | Paperback 186pp | £7.95 978-0-954966-68-3

75 | SELECTED BACKLIST


P oet r y

Skirrid Hill by Owen Sheers Seren | Paperback 72pp | £7.99 978-1-854114-03-7

Staying Alive by Neil Astley (ed) Bloodaxe | Paperback 496pp | £10.95 978-1-852245-88-7

Sticky by Andy Croft Flambard | Paperback 112pp | £8.00 978-1-906601-05-8

Sunday at the Skin Launderette by Kathryn Simmonds Seren | Paperback 64pp | £7.99 978-1-854114-61-7

Sunlight in a Champagne Glass by William Oxley Rockingham Press | Paperback 112pp | £7.99 978-1-904851-29-5

Too Black, Too Strong by Benjamin Zephaniah Bloodaxe | Paperback 88pp | £7.95 978-1-852245-54-2

Turning the Key by Lotte Kramer Rockingham Press | Paperback 64pp | £7.99 978-1-904851-30-1

Undraining Sea by Vahni Capildeo Egg Box | Hardback 112pp | £12.99 978-0-955939-90-7

The Wall-Menders by Kate Noakes Two Rivers Press | Paperback 60pp | £8.00 978-1-901677-64-5

The Water Table by Philip Gross Bloodaxe | Paperback 64pp | £7.95 978-1-852248-52-9

The Wisteria’s Children by Sarah Lawson Hearing Eye | Paperback 54pp | £5.00 978-1-905082-53-7

The Zoo Father by Pascale Petit Seren | Paperback 72pp | £6.95 978-1-854113-05-4

SELECTED BACKLIST | 7 6


FIC TION


FI CTION

Niketche – A Story of Polygamy Paulina Chiziane (translated by Richard Bartlett) First novel in English from ground-breaking Mozambican author. After twenty years of marriage, Rami discovers that her husband is a collector… of wives. She is horrified to discover that Tony, a senior police officer, has four other households, children and families. With humour and compassion, she crafts a cautionary tale about assumed male superiority that brings together stories from the country’s myriad traditions and regions. “... not only has she now made her mark in Mozambican literature, she is also becoming one of the most interesting African women writers to follow.” The Independent on Sunday

Livingstone’s Funeral Landeg White Epic post-colonial novel by celebrated Welsh writer. Landeg White brings a lifetime of scholarship and lyricism to bear on this epic novel, but the intensely personal story of a young woman’s search for identity is not always as it seems. Maria, a student in Brighton, begins to piece together her family history during a dull Christmas visit to her grandmother, after buying an African carving that she can’t resist. Discovering that Caroline, the long-suffering colonial wife, was not her great-grandmother at all, Maria begins a journey of discovery as she looks to find order and resolution in these disparate narratives of origin. “Original, subtle, inventive... Livingstone’s Funeral has huge potential to become the best seller in its genre.” Jack Mapanje

Paulina Chiziane married early but separated in her mid-twenties to study and devote herself to work as an author. She has since become regarded as one of her country’s most important authors, with four novels to her name. Although described as a feminist writer, she prefers to consider herself as a storyteller, who bases her work on the rich heritage of the oral tradition in her country. Richard Bartlett has translated authors including Pepetela and Ondjaki. He studied in South Africa and now works as a journalist for The Financial Times.

Landeg White was born in south Wales. He taught at the University of the West Indies, Trinidad; the University of Malawi, from where he was deported in 1972; the University of Sierra Leone; and the University of Zambia. Since 1994, he has lived in Portugal where he teaches at the Universidade Aberta (Open University). He has published a prize-winning translation of Camões’ The Lusiads (2008) and four further collections of poetry.

Aflame Books | Paperback 978-1-906300-05-0 | 216x140mm | 204pp February

Cinnamon Press | Paperback | £8.99 978-1-905614-86-8 | 198x129mm | 208pp February

F EBRUARY | 7 8


FI CTION

It’s Just the Beating of My Heart Richard Aronowitz Eagerly awaited second novel from the author of Five Amber Beads. Waking each morning alone, John Stack finds solace in long, alcohol-fuelled walks through the unchanging landscape of a Gloucestershire valley. His wife has left him and his reputation as a man with the golden touch in the art world is rapidly diminishing. The only glimmer of hope for John comes through the weekend visits of his twelve-year-old daughter, Bryony. A chance encounter with the beautiful widow from the mysterious neighbouring stone house may offer the chance of a new beginning for John, if only he can quieten his suspicions about the death of her husband. Told in sparkling poetic language, It’s Just the Beating of My Heart is a story of loss and heartbreak in a world peopled by ghosts. “... a beautifully assured piece of work…” The Independent on Sunday Richard Aronowitz was born in 1970 and grew up in rural Gloucestershire. He studied at the universities of Durham, Heidelberg and London and now works at Sotheby’s. His debut novel, Five Amber Beads, was published by Flambard in 2006 and his poems have appeared in The Guardian and The Independent, and are anthologised in Anvil New Poets 3. He is married and lives in Cambridgeshire.

Flambard Press | Paperback | £8.99 978-1-906601-13-3 | 216x138mm | 254pp | March

Uncle Freddie and the Prince of Wales Alex Ferguson “In all his work there is a sense of joyous dreaming from which one awakes completely satisfied.” The Guardian A new collection of short stories from the acclaimed South Shields writer Alex Ferguson, again focusing on the author’s part-real part-mythical Uncle Freddie, and again located in the Jarrow of the 1940s where the author grew up. Ferguson’s writing is a unique amalgam of the starkly real – the terrible poverty of wartime Tyneside – and the surreally imaginative, meeting such famous characters as the Prince of Wales or Joe Stalin upstairs on a no. 38 bus. Iron Press published Ferguson’s story collection The Pineapple King of Jarrow in 2004, which rapidly sold out. That work was dramatised by the award-winning BBC Radio 4 producer Melanie Harris, who is again planning to dramatise the new collection, this time for the stage. Alex Ferguson was born in Jarrow and lives in South Shields, Tyneside. He has won a Guinness National Theatre Award, a Writers’ Guild Award for comedy, a Sony Nomination for Creative Radio Writing and a Royal Television Society nomination for his film Lads!

Iron Press | Paperback | £10.00 978-0-955245-08-4 | 148x210mm | 240pp | March

79 | M AR CH


FI CTION

Thinner than a Hair Adnan Mahmutovi´c

Touch Graham Mort

Winner of the Cinnamon Press Novella Award 2008.

Includes Bridport Prize-winning story ‘The Prince’.

Adnan Mahmutovi´c’s writing is lucid and beautiful. Told in the first person, Thinner than a Hair is about a young woman coming of age as her country falls into war and hatred. The deceptively simple narrative takes the reader on a journey across landscape, political boundaries, assumptions and emotions. The impact is powerful and evocative, the voices authentic, speaking for themselves and free of heavy-handed authorial intrusion. Full of poignancy and truth, this novella will establish Mahmutovi´c as one of the leading writers of his generation.

From the balmy heat of Africa to the snowbound dales of northern England, this is an assured and absorbing collection. Including the Bridport prize-winning story ‘The Prince’, Touch spans twenty years of short-story writing from author and poet Graham Mort. Be it a young child adrift on an ice-filled lake, or an ageing farmer facing life alone, these twenty-one stories display a deep sensitivity to both the natural world and human relationships. In skilfully crafted prose, vivid with detail, Mort examines the strength and fragility of life and the ties that hold us within it.

Adnan Mahmutovi´c was born in 1974 in Banja Luka, northern Bosnia and moved to Sweden as a refugee in 1993. He lives in Stockholm, where he is finishing a PhD in English Literature; he has also worked in special-needs care for over ten years. He describes himself as “a Bosnian exile in beautiful and calm Sweden, the land whose naked north glistens with green Northern Lights.”

Cinnamon Press | Paperback | £8.99 978-1-907090-03-5 | 198x129mm | 208pp March

MAR C H | 8 0

“... the writing is word-perfect... I was enchanted.” Tracy Chevalier Graham Mort has had a lengthy career as a freelance writer and artist in education, specialising in innovative combined arts projects. He currently lectures in Creative Writing at Lancaster University, where he directs the Centre for Transcultural Writing and Research and develops writing projects in Africa for the British Council. Among his many awards are the Cheltenham Poetry Competition first prize (twice), a major Eric Gregory Award and a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

Seren | Paperback | £7.99 978-1-854115-12-6 | 135x208mm | 220pp March


FI CTION

The Route Book at Bedtime Ian Daley (editor)

La Rochelle Michael Nath

Short-story anthology of bedtime reading for adults.

“Nath has a confidence and attitude that rocks you on every page.” Daisy Goodwin

Presenting twelve bedtime stories for adults, stories that capture those moments of deep emotional significance which return to us again and again to be picked over in our dreams. This magical collection reveals intimate insights into individual fantasy, the pursuit of our deepest desires, the urge to escape, the joy of love, the pain of loss, the debris of days. These stories represent the very best in new writing. The Route Book at Bedtime is title 22 in the Route series of contemporary stories – “Exhilaratingly conceived books” (Metro).

A doctor’s life is stirred up by the disappearance of his friend’s girlfiend, placing him in a position of power which threatens to ruin his professional integrity. Will it make or break him? Set in London during the hostage crisis of 2004, this is a study in modern heroism, set against a background of superheated thinking and sexual oblivion.

“A twilight dreamscape of hopes, fears, love and loss… We’re taken on a journey through teenage crushes, love gone bad, love growing old, trying to rebuild, trying to escape, dying. It’s a collection containing stories which are at once stunningly original and familiar. Just don’t plan on getting any sleep once you open the cover...” The Short Review Features stories from twelve authors: M Y Alam, Sarah Butler, Jo Cannon, Sam Duda, Pippa Griffin, Chris Hill, Louis Malloy, Michael Nath, Dave Pescod, Wayne Price, Katherine Reed and Cally Taylor.

Route | Paperback | £8.99 978-1-901927-42-9 | 198x129mm | 192pp April

“Stylish, very funny, discreetly surprising, this remarkable novel reads at times like a fable of England under New Labour, where nothing is quite what it seems and not much is worth what it costs.” London Review of Books “Original, funny and absolutely spot-on.” The Independent Michael Nath was brought up in south Wales and Lincolnshire. He is a lecturer in English at the University of Westminster, and has published short stories in Critical Quarterly, Stand, Main Street Journal and Billy Liar. His stories also feature in the Route anthologies Wonderwall, Ideas Above Our Station and Bonne Route. La Rochelle is his first novel.

Route | Paperback | £8.99 978-1-901927-43-6 | 198x129mm | 288pp April

81 | Ap ril


FI CTION

Bumping Tony Bianchi Author twice nominated for Wales Book of the Year. Bumping, set on contemporary Tyneside, interweaves three stories. Each presents a character whose obsessions and attachments become magnified through chance encounters, leading to unforeseen and ultimately catastrophic results. The ‘bumping’ of the title conveys something of these random processes, as well as one character’s passion for recreational lockpicking. The stories are told in a number of voices: middle-aged wayleave officer Frank; teenagers Nicky and Barry; and the heartbreakingly confused and ever-optimistic elderly Tom. Bumping is about obsession and longing; it is also a novel about youth and old age, delusion, lock-picking and Californian ladybirds. “A wise and tender portrait of ordinary lives slipping slowly out of kilter with the brave new world around them.” John Williams Tony Bianchi was born and grew up in North Shields, on Tyneside. Formerly Literature Director at the Arts Council of Wales, he is now a freelance writer, translator and arts consultant and lives in Cardiff. He has won prizes for his Welsh-language poetry and fiction, including the Daniel Owen Memorial Prize and nominations for the Welsh Book of the Year.

Alcemi | Paperback | £9.99 978-0-955527-28-9 | 140x215mm | 200pp | May

Always the Love of Someone Huw Lawrence Fifteen stories on relationships by acclaimed short fiction writer. Sinister impulses lurk behind Greg’s acclaimed portraits of his wife. Mair, an unemployed actress, loves her unemployed husband but sleeps with a television producer. A divorced couple find themselves staring at reunion. A talented tramp in a dirty pyjama jacket shares lentil soup with an architect in full view of the neighbourhood. Noi is an escapee Thai bride who learns just how different Britain really is. Fifteen stories on relationships: the nuances of class, exile, sexual exploitation, the civilising/interfering influence of women, and the accommodations made necessary by old age. Voices range across gender, age and ethnicity. The tone of Always the Love of Someone is upbeat: as optimistic in spirit as Mike Leigh’s Happy Go Lucky. “Crisp, clear and illuminating.” Emyr Humphreys Huw Lawrence’s short fiction has won nominations for the Tom Gallon Prize, the Bridport Competition, the Rhys Davies Short Story Competition and the Cinnamon Award. He was born in Llanelli and trained as a teacher in Swansea, later continuing his education at Manchester and Cornell. He spent some years doing a variety of labouring jobs in the Ffestiniog area, north Wales, and now lives in Aberystwyth.

Alcemi | Paperback | £9.99 978-0-955527-29-6 | 140x215mm | 200pp | May

MAY | 8 2


FI CTION

Faith, Hope and Love Llwyd Owen English-language version of the Wales Book of the Year 2007. Alun Brady is a bit of a mummy’s boy, stuck at home in the suburbs at thirty. When grandfather Paddy makes his deathbed in their spare room, he brings fresh air into Alun’s cushy little number and makes him face the hardest decision of his life. Later, just out of prison, Al is haunted by his brother’s perfect new family and seeks in dangerous new friends what he needs from his lost kin. Drawn into Cardiff ’s underbelly, events take a turn towards the tragic as he discovers he cannot break free of his own blood ties. A modern fable with a strong colloquial voice, Faith, Hope and Love steps between social classes to say important things about memory and identity. “Enjoyable and pacey... a thoughtful take on what it means to be alive.” Time Out Llwyd Owen is the author of four Welsh-language novels, among them the Book of the Year-winning Ffydd Gobaith Cariad (also from Alcemi). Born in Cardiff, he studied at Glantaf and Bangor University, before working briefly in Cardiff ’s TV industry. Escaping to Asia, Egypt and Australasia, he has now settled down again in the Welsh capital to write fiction and work part-time as a translator.

Alcemi | Paperback | £9.99 978-0-955527-27-2 | 140x215mm | 200pp May

Squaring the Circle Olga Slavnikova and Natasha Perova (editors) Celebrates 10th year of Russia’s Debut Prize for young writers. In the early 1990s the Booker Prize, brought to Russia from Britain, gave new impetus to the Russian novel. A decade later came the Debut Prize for young authors. Today an unusually gifted generation is entering Russian literature. The authors in this prose anthology come from various parts of Russia – none of them ever lived in the Soviet Union. Why the title Squaring the Circle? The authors live in a system of multiple uncertainties. To solve what is insoluble, to do what is undoable: that is the demand made of a young person today by unpredictable Russian reality. Theirs is a fundamentally new way of thinking, a new way of seeing the world. This new generation writing in Russian — both the individual writers and the phenomenon as a whole — deserves great attention. “A genuine socio-cultural happening.” Moscow News Olga Slavnikova is the director of the Debut Prize, and an internationally-renowned novelist and Russian Booker Prize winner. Natasha Perova is the editor-in-chief of Glas New Russian Writing.

Glas | Paperback | £8.99 978-5-717200-86-8 | 125x200mm | 300pp May

83 | M AY


FI CTION

The Horses Elaine Walker

A Place of Meadows and Tall Trees Clare Dudman

Debut novel from accomplished non-fiction author.

Fictional account of Welsh settlement in southern Argentina.

The Horses is set on a remote Scottish island after a strange ecological disaster which has left the world largely devoid of human life. This is the story of Jo and his family, who are marooned on the island during a family holiday: facing personal as well as global tragedy, they discover a connection to the mysterious horses whose arrival heralds a new way of life. This powerful first-person narrative uses magical realism to stunning effect to tell a highly compelling story.

Impoverished and oppressed in their own country, they’d been promised paradise on earth: a land flowing with milk and honey. But after a devastating sea journey all the settlers found was a cold South American desert where it seemed nothing could survive. A Place of Meadows and Tall Trees is a lyrical evocation of the trials of these colonists as they battle to survive hunger, loss and internal rivalries. Based on a true story, the settlers are Welsh, their New World is Patagonia, at the southernmost extremity of Argentina.

Elaine Walker has lived in north Wales all her life and has been a freelance writer since 1997. Her work includes fiction, poetry and non-fiction. Much of her non-fiction is concerned with equestrian history and culture, in particular her 2008 book Horse. As a fiction writer, she is particularly interested in magical realism and storytelling which is not bounded by reality. Elaine lectures for the Open University, the University of Wales and the Open College of the Arts. She runs online writing courses and is an Academi Mentor.

Clare Dudman was born in north Wales. In 1995 her children’s novel Edge of Danger won the Kathleen Fidler award, and in 2001 an excerpt from Wegener’s Jigsaw won an Arts Council of England Writers award. To research A Place of Meadows and Tall Trees Dudman travelled across the Patagonian desert in a bus, and then took ‘The Old Patagonian Express’ in the Andes. Along the way she interviewed the descendants of Welsh settlers who came there in 1865.

Cinnamon Press | Paperback | £9.99 978-1-907090-09-7 | 198x129mm | 256pp May

Seren | Paperback | £7.99 978-1-854115-18-8 | 135x208mm | 300pp June

J UNE | 8 4


FI CTION

Felicity and Barbara Pym Harrison Solow

Le Temps des Cerises Zillah Bethell

Stunning fiction from highly acclaimed writer and winner of a Pushcart Award.

Historical novel set in late 19th-century Paris and the Franco-Prussian War.

What is Felicity and Barbara Pym about? It’s about literature. It’s about reading. It’s about writing, about becoming educated – and it’s about knowing that sometimes, to get a true education, you have to turn to your butcher. A beautifully observed blend between fiction and non-fiction, Harrison Solow’s book is written as a series of letters from teacher Mallory Cooper to her student Felicity, as she discovers Pym’s work. In their letters to each other, narrator and student discuss, debate and discover British literary fiction together, and through Felicity’s eyes we are treated to a fresh view of our favourite novelists: George Eliot, Jane Austen, D.H. Lawrence and, of course, Barbara Pym.

Le Temps des Cerises is a vivid, flamboyant historical novel careering through life in the Franco-Prussian war, in particular the siege of Paris in 1870, when the inhabitants all but starved in a frozen winter. Zillah Bethell brings events to life in her own rollercoaster style, one which challenges realistic reconstructions of history and hardship. The story is centred around Eveline Renan, a beautiful seventeen-year-old desperate to escape her life of drudgery and eager to explode conventional gender and sexual roles. The age of revolution finds reflection in the hearts of individual characters, as they begin to question their own principles, expectations and modes of existence. Ultimately, however, the legitimate government returns to reclaim the city from the Commune, resulting in the terrible events of la semaine sanglante – the bloody week. Faced with these horrors, the characters are forced to either return to their old ways, or stand firm in their newfound identities.

Harrison Solow is a distinguished writer, university lecturer and creative consultant to a wide variety of institutions worldwide. Her works of poetry, fiction and non-fiction have been widely published in the UK and North America, receiving awards such as the 2008 Pushcart Prize (for the forthcoming Bendithion), the 2007 Leaf Books Award for Poetry, and the 2008 Cinnamon Press Award and 2006 Abroad International Award for Short Fiction.

Cinnamon Press | Paperback | £8.99 978-1-907090-11-0 | 198x129mm | 208pp June

Zillah Bethell is a graduate of Wadham College, Oxford and now lives in Tondu with her husband and two children. She is the author of Seahorses are Real (Seren, 2009), a haunting tale of love and tragedy that highlights the rare subject of domestic violence against men.

Seren | Paperback | £8.99 978-1-854115-22-5 | 208x135mm | 304pp September

85 | SEP TE MB ER


FI CTION

The Deer Wedding Penny Simpson

Clay Gladys Mary Coles

Follow-up to 2009 People’s Book Prize selection The Banquet of Esther Rosenbaum.

Debut novel, set in World War I, by wellknown poet and biographer.

The Deer Wedding is a novel set in Croatia, spanning two generations, two brutal wars and the controversial histories of two very special works of art. In 1941, artist Antun Fiskovi´c experiences a sea-change in his fortunes after discovering the identity of his real parents, just as occupying forces take over his country’s government. Fifty years later, a young woman called Dagmar Petri´c tries to solve the mystery surrounding her journalist father’s premature death. Antun and Dagmar’s stories come together in 1998, three years after civil war has torn apart the former Yugoslavia. Set in Zagreb and late Nineties Hvar, a former tourist paradise now home to wartime refugees, the novel interweaves public and private history to explore violence, family secrets and both personal and national reconciliation. “Compelling, humane... a novel of remarkable delicacy and power...” Michael Symmons Roberts Penny Simpson is the 2007 winner of the Rhys Davies Short Story Competition. Her short fiction features in the widely-acclaimed anthology Best European Fiction 2010, prefaced by Zadie Smith. DOGDays, her debut collection, was published in 2003. She is a Fellow of the Hawthenden International Writers Centre. This is her second novel, following The Banquet of Esther Rosenbaum (Alcemi, 2008).

Alcemi | Paperback | £9.99 978-0-956012-50-0 | 140x215mm | 200pp September

OC TOB ER | 8 6

In 1916 William Manderson, a young infantryman and poet, departs for the Western Front where his older brother Jack is already serving. Caught up in the preparations for the great offensive on the Somme, William writes intimate letters to Jack’s wife Elizabeth and longs for news of his friend, the composer and pianist Matthew Riley. Following a gas attack that leaves him struggling to write, William emerges a wounded man and a war poet. Using poetry, letters and journal entries, Gladys Mary Coles draws together a variety of narrative strands to tell a compelling story of the impact of war on the lives of four young people. Moving between Liverpool, the Wirral, France and, finally, north Wales, Clay asserts the need for endurance, creativity and love during a period of unprecedented tragedy and social change. A prolific poet, Gladys Mary Coles is also an historian, literary biographer and editor. As a poet, she has received many prizes and awards, and was selected to represent Britain in the Euro-Literature Project. Her collections include The Song of the Butcher Bird (2006) and The Echoing Green (2002), both published by Flambard.

Flambard Press | Paperback | £8.99 978-1-906601-19-5 | 198x129mm | 272pp October


FI CTION

Sing Sorrow Sorrow Gwen Davies (editor) Spine-chilling short stories for Halloween. Launching on Halloween, Sing Sorrow Sorrow is a chilling collection of supernatural myths and otherworldly horror stories, by some of Wales’ most exciting new and established authors. From the waters of the Styx to the circling birds of the Mabinogion, these contemporary stories grow out of European and Russian folk, fable and fairy tales, and legend and myth. Most have a black and sometimes violent twist – perfect for reading at Halloween, or the eve of its pagan Celtic predecessor, Samhain. These stories are chilling reading in their own right, but also fascinate in the over-shading they make with the genres of horror, the ghost story and crime thriller. The contributors featured in Sing Sorrow Sorrow are Niall Griffiths, Lloyd Jones, Maria Donovan, Deborah Kay Davies, Gee Williams, Richard Gwyn, Tristan Hughes, Cynan Jones, Matthew Francis, Zillah Bethell, Dai Vaughan, Glenda Beagan, Charlotte Greig, Jon Gower, Anne Lauppe-Dunbar, Mary-Ann Constantine, Imogen Herrad, Euron Griffith, Jo Mazelis, Alan Bilton, Roshi Fernando and Christine Harrison.

Seren | Paperback | £8.99 978-1-854115-30-0 | 216x138mm | 280pp | October

The Icarus Diaries Kate Hoyland Powerful debut novel from the BBC’s Asia correspondent. Three strangers travel to Asia to escape their past. For a while their destination seems tranquil, but soon they find themselves in a country experiencing violent political turmoil. Leaving the city with Van, a political dissident, they embark on a hazardous journey up river. As the dangers increase, bonds of friendship, trust and love develop and each reveals a story, but as they each confront what it is they had hoped to escape, political events come to a head. In 2007 over 400,000 people in Britain emigrated. Thousands more left a job, a bad relationship, an unsatisfying life, in order to travel. In The Icarus Diaries Kate Hoyland looks at how escapist dreams can turn sour. Kate Hoyland is a journalist and counsellor, who has spent a lot of life dreaming of or escaping to Asia. She is passionate about the continent, and the human stories behind big news events, from coups in the Philippines to bombings in Bali. In addition to writing reports, news stories and web pieces for the BBC, Kate teaches writing for broadcast. She lives in London.

Cinnamon Press | Paperback | £8.99 978-1-907090-20-2 | 140x216mm | 240pp | October

87 | O C TO B ER


FI CTION

The Dreams of Max and Ronnie Niall Griffiths

The Meat Tree Gwyneth Lewis

Latest in the series that includes Owen Sheers’ White Ravens.

Wales’ first National Poet joins acclaimed series of medieval reworkings.

New Stories from the Mabinogion is an exciting series of contemporary novels by leading authors, reworking ancient Celtic myth cycles. The first two stories by Owen Sheers and Russell Celyn Jones were published in 2009 to great acclaim, with reviews in The Telegraph, The Times, The Financial Times, The Independent on Sunday and The Guardian.

‘Blodeuwedd’, the fourth branch of the Mabinogion, is one of the most famous of the medieval Welsh tales. It has kings who can’t walk on the ground, rapists who are condemned to change into beasts of the forest and a wizard who conjures a wife made of flowers for his nephew. Gwyneth Lewis’ retelling is set in the future: the tale told by the Inspector of Wrecks, tasked to examine a deserted ship discovered in space. On the verge of retirement he brings all his experience to his last investigation of the physical and virtual reality fields of the ship, as well as the three bodies found floating in the hull. What he discovers shakes him to the core and forces him to question his beliefs about the human imagination, and about the disasters that kill us.

‘Rhonabwy’s Dream’ tells the story of a man who falls asleep in a filthy hovel and dreams of Arthurian splendour, knights and games of chess. In Niall Griffiths’ hands this tale of duty and power becomes the story of a squaddie bound for the Iraq war, and a biting commentary on the tribes of modern Britain. Griffiths also reworks the ‘Dream of Macsen Wledig’, a classic myth of an Emperor and a beautiful princess, as the dream of a seedy nightclub owner, Max, intent on revenge on a rival gang. Niall Griffiths lives near Aberystwyth, and has published six novels to date. His 2004 novel, Stump, won the Welsh Book of the Year Award, following the critical acclaim for his 2002 novel Sheepshagger. Niall is also the author of the offbeat, psycho-geographic guides Real Aberystwyth (2008) and Real Liverpool (2009), both published by Seren.

Seren | Paperback | £7.99 978-1-854115-02-7 | 216x138mm | 76pp October

OC TOB ER | 8 8

Gwyneth Lewis was appointed Wales’ first National Poet in 2005, and composed the six-foot-high words on the front of the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff. She has published six books of poetry: her first collection in English, Parables & Faxes (Bloodaxe, 1997), won the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival Prize and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize, as was her second, Chaotic Angels (Bloodaxe, 2005).

Seren | Paperback | £7.99 978-1-854115-23-2 | 216x138mm | 76pp October


FI CTION

Bamboo Grove Romy Wood

Rooms of the Mind Catherine Chanter

A black comedy about sex and financial boom-and-bust.

Much acclaimed and anthologised shortstory writer.

In a heady neo-Orient, a galaxy of unlikely and unusual characters find themselves bound together in the unique, rather dubious corporation known as Eastern Vision. They include a pseudo-Buddhist monk, an illegal immigrant, a teenager with precarious mental health and a quixotic pair of young and hungry businessmen. Trading in everything from faux-Eastern art to real estate, from sperm donation to gypsy magic, Eastern Vision has reached the top of the money mountain, and fallen over the other side. As the bust takes its toll, the team and others battle for control: of the company, of each other and of themselves, as they hurtle towards an end none of them could have predicted.

Rooms of the Mind is an extraordinary collection of short stories that crackle with wit and strangeness. The disquieting novella-length title piece is told by the owner of a house for sale: “Today is my 31st birthday but I have struggled to find a mirror in a room which is open to me. In the end I looked in the toaster unable to tell whether the stains and blemishes were on the stainless steel of the appliance or the stainless steel of my face. My hair is still its natural colour. Natural. That is not a world many people would use about me.” As prospective buyers are shown around, each room gives away a piece of this strange, disturbing and compelling narrative.

“Buzzes with insight and imagination... big themes of environmental responsibility and escape, mental illness and the policing of joy. A very fine debut.” Richard Gwyn

Catherine Chanter grew up in the West Country and studied English at Oxford. After several years as a lobbyist in the UK and abroad, she re-trained as a teacher, specialising in supporting children with behavioural difficulties. Her short story ‘A Summer of Findings’ was shortlisted for the 2009 Asham Award, and appeared in the Bloomsbury anthology Waving at the Gardener alongside stories from Margaret Atwood, Esther Freud, Alison MacLeod and Yiyun Li.

Romy Wood taught Drama in comprehensive schools for ten years. She works as an associate lecturer for the Open University. This novel is informed by her experiences of Romania and Thailand, where she has friends and family, as it is by Romy’s life as a woman with bipolar disorder. She lives with her husband and three children in Cardiff.

Alcemi | Paperback | £9.99 978-0-956012-51-7 | 140x215mm | 260pp October

Cinnamon Press | Paperback | £8.99 978-1-907090-24-0 | 198x129mm | 208pp December

89 | D EC EMB ER


FI CTION

The Banquet of Esther Rosenbaum by Penny Simpson Alcemi | Paperback 256pp | £9.99 978-0-955527-23-4

Blue Bay Palace by Natacha Appanah Aflame | Paperback 164pp | £7.99 978-1-906300-07-4

Bonne Route by Ian Daley (ed) Route | Paperback 192pp | £8.99 978-1-901927-34-4

Born in the 1980s by Catherine Browne (ed) Route | Paperback 176pp | £8.99 978-1-901927-40-5

Dancing for the Hangman by Martin Edwards Flambard | Paperback 256pp | £8.99 978-1-906601-00-3

The Day of the Sardine by Sid Chaplin Flambard | Paperback 292pp | £8.99 978-1-873226-72-8

Eleven by David Llewellyn Seren | Paperback 130pp | £6.99 978-1-854114-15-0

Everything is Sinister by David Llewellyn Seren | Paperback 186pp | £7.99 978-1-854114-69-3

Five Amber Beads by Richard Aronowitz Flambard | Paperback 192pp | £6.99 978-1-873226-83-4

A Gentleman’s Relish by John Murray Flambard | Paperback 256pp | £8.99 978-1-873226-81-0

Ideas Above Our Station by Ian Daley (ed) Route | Paperback 212pp | £8.99 978-1-901927-28-3

Kilo by MY Alam Route | Paperback 320pp | £6.95 978-1-901927-09-2

SELECTED BACKLIST | 9 0


FI CTION Knives by Wendy Robertson Iron Press | Paperback 128pp | £8.00 978-0-955245-06-0

The Land as Viewed from the Sea by Richard Collins Seren | Paperback 200pp | £6.99 978-1-854113-67-2

The Legend of Liz and Joe by John Murray Flambard | Paperback 224pp | £8.99 978-1-906601-07-2

Mr Cassini by Lloyd Jones Seren | Paperback 280pp | £7.99 978-1-854114-25-9

Mr Vogel by Lloyd Jones Seren | Paperback 320pp | £7.99 978-1-854113-80-1

The Ninth Wave by Russell Celyn Jones Seren | Paperback 176pp | £7.99 978-1-854115-14-0

The Portable Platonov by Andrei Platonov Glas | Paperback 256pp | £8.99 978-5-717200-46-2

Sardines and Oranges by Margaret Obank (ed) Banipal Books | Paperback 222pp | £8.99 978-0-954966-61-4

Scars Beneath the Skin by A.J. Duggan Flambard | Paperback 256pp | £8.99 978-1-906601-06-5

The Schoolboy by Holly Howitt Cinnamon | Paperback 160pp. £8.99 978-1-905614-88-2

The Sheep Who Changed the World by Neil Astley Flambard | Paperback 254pp | £8.99 978-1-873226-75-9

Shifts by Christopher Meredith Seren | Paperback 232pp | £6.95 978-1-854111-99-9

91 | SELECTED BACKLIST


FI CTION

The Sleepwalkers’ Ball by Alan Bilton Alcemi | Paperback 256pp | £9.99 978-0-955527-26-5

Soothing Music for Stray Cats by Jayne Joso Alcemi | Paperback 256pp | £9.99 978-0-955527-25-8

Stealth by Sonallah Ibrahim Aflame | Paperback 184pp | £7.99 978-1-906300-09-8

Stranded by Val McDermid Flambard Paperback/Hardback | 216pp £7.99/£14.99 978-1-873226-74-2 (pb) 978-1-873226-76-6 (hb)

TAG by Stephen May Cinnamon | Paperback 336pp | £8.99 978-1-905614-37-0

Taxi by Khaled Al Khamissi Aflame | Paperback 220pp | £7.99 978-1-906300-02-9

Thirsty River by Rodaan Al Galidi Aflame | Paperback 324pp | £8.99 978-1-906300-10-4

Truth Games by Bobbie Darbyshire Cinnamon | Paperback 288pp | £8.99 978-1-905614-72-1

The Turing Test by Chris Beckett Elastic | Paperback 230pp | £5.99 978-0-955318-18-4

Twenty Thousand Saints by Fflur Dafydd Alcemi | Paperback 200pp | £9.99 978-0-955527-22-7

War and Peace by Natasha Perova (ed) Glas | Paperback 400pp | £12.99 978-5-717200-74-5

White Ravens by Owen Sheers Seren | Paperback 192pp | £7.99 978-1-854115-03-4

SELECTED BACKLIST | 9 2


FI CTION NON -FIC TION

93 | SEP TE MB ER


NON -F IC TION

Dannie Abse: A Sourcebook Cary Archard (editor)

Help Me to a Getaway Knute Skinner

Comprehensive guide to literature and life of one of Wales’ greatest living authors.

New autobiography of poet’s European travels.

Dannie Abse, whose career as a poet spans sixty years, has made a huge contribution to the literature and literary life of Wales and to poetry and prose in the English language. This sourcebook is an essential companion to his poetry, prose, drama and critical writings. Cary Archard has edited and written about Abse’s work for over twenty years and collects here a marvellous representative selection of Abse’s own writings, together with criticism of his work, which illuminates Abse’s achievements for both students and general readers alike.

In 1958, Knute Skinner, a PhD candidate at Iowa University, made an impulsive decision to leave for the Canary Islands and spend the rest of his life there writing poetry. His subsequent travels took him to Ireland, Denmark, England, Spain, Italy and France. Along the way, his adventures involved diverting men and romantic women, and all the time he was experimenting with his art. Help Me to a Getaway, a memoir of his two-year sojourn, describes a Europe that no longer exists and tells a story which was not at all what the author expected.

Dannie Abse practised for many years as a doctor in London. Among his many publications are a dozen books of poetry and five novels, the last of which, The Strange Case of Dr Simmonds and Dr Glas, was longlisted for the 2002 Booker Prize. His most recent book of poems, Running Late (2006), won the Roland Mathias Prize and his prose memoir, The Presence, was Wales Book of the Year 2008. Cary Archard was born in south Wales. The editor of Poetry Wales from 1980 to 1986, and founder of Poetry Wales Press, he is also the general editor of the uniform edition of the works of Alun Lewis.

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Knute Skinner has had a home in Ireland since 1964. He has taught at the University of Iowa and at Western Washington University, where he was a Professor of English. Retired from teaching, he lives in Killaspuglonane, Co. Clare. His most recent book of poetry, Fifty Years: Poems 1957-2007 (Salmon, 2007) was published to great critical acclaim: “It’s worth whatever stretches might be required to put it into your personal library” (Joseph Green).

Seren | Paperback | £14.99 978-1-854115-07-2 | 138x216mm | 304pp March

Salmon Poetry | Paperback | £12.00 978-1-907056-29-1 | 140x216mm | 248pp March

MAR C H | 9 4


NON -F IC TION

Canterbury Tales: Chaucer Made Modern Phil Woods and Michael Bogdanov New format of best-selling drama text. In dramatising the Canterbury Tales, Phil Woods takes a deliberately un-academic approach to Chaucer’s classic work, while at the same time retaining the original’s sense of fun, chivalry and satire. Since Michael Bogdanov’s exciting 1974 production, this version has been acclaimed by audiences and critics throughout this country and abroad. After six prints of the first edition, this title is now reprinted in a new format. “Like all the best borrowings, Phil Woods’ script captures in its own satiric style the comic essence of Chaucer’s glee.” The Guardian Phil Woods started writing for the theatre in 1970. Since then he has been commissioned to write more than fifty plays. Whilst working as Resident Writer with Michael Bogdanov at the Phoenix Theatre, Leicester, he adapted the Canterbury Tales and Dracula. For the New Vic Touring Theatre he also adapted The Three Musketeers, Sons of the Musketeers, The Last of the Mohicans and Frankenstein. He lives in County Durham and has written many plays for local companies, including Live Theatre and Newcastle Playhouse. His television work includes The Forsyte Saga and 130 episodes of Coronation Street.

Iron Press | Paperback | £5.95 978-0-906228-43-2 | 145x210mm | 72pp | March

Art in the Light of Conscience: Eight Essays on Poetry Marina Tsvetaeva (translated by Angela Livingstone) Essays in defence of poetry by one of Russia’s 20th century greats. Marina Tsvetaeva’s richly diverse essays provide incomparable insights into poetry, the poetic process and what it means to be a poet. This collection features the essays ‘Art in the Light of Conscience’, her spirited defence of poetry, and ‘The Poet on the Critic’, which earned her the enmity of many. The book also includes a celebration of the poetry of Pasternak, along with reflections on the lives and works of other Russian poets. Angela Livingstone’s translations bring the English-speaking reader as close as possible to Tsvetaeva’s inimitable voice. First published in English in 1992, Art in the Light of Conscience includes an introduction, textual notes and a glossary, as well as revised translations of twelve poems by Tsvetaeva on poets and poetry. “For me, there are no essays on poetry as unique, as profound, as passionate, as inspiring as these.” C.K. Williams Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941) was one of the four great Russian poets of the 20th century, along with Akhmatova, Mandelstam and Pasternak. She also wrote outstanding prose. Endowed with “phenomenally heightened linguistic sensitivity” (Joseph Brodsky), Tsvetaeva was primarily concerned with the nature of poetic creation. Bloodaxe Books | Paperback | £9.95 978-1-852248-64-2 | 212x138mm | 224pp | April

95 | Ap ril


NON -F IC TION

Slanderous Tongues: Essays on Welsh Poetry in English, 1970-2005 Daniel Williams (editor) Redresses significant gap in Welsh literary studies of English-language poetry. Lively and informed, provocative and perceptive, this specially commissioned book is a superb guide to Welsh literary studies of English-language poetry over the last thirty years. For the very first time, here is a book which looks at the subject in the round, and in its many diversities. It is distinctive too for being the work of Wales’s young critics, who bring fresh perspective while acknowledging the legacy of academics like Wynn Thomas and James A. Davies. Slanderous Tongues works through the prisms of politics, nationhood, gender, the environment, external influences (particularly Welsh language, American and Irish), and experiments in translation. Among the many poets whose work is considered are R.S. Thomas, Dannie Abse, Robert Minhinnick, Ruth Bidgood, Gwyneth Lewis, Menna Elfyn, Pascale Petit and Medbh McGuckian. Daniel Williams is a Senior Lecturer in the English Department at Swansea University, and Assistant Director of CREW (the Centre for Research into the English Literature and Language of Wales). He has written on a range of subjects within the field of Welsh writing in English for a wide number of books, journals and magazines.

Seren | Hardback and Paperback | £24.99 (hb) £14.99 (pb) | 978-1-854114-62-4 (hb) | 978-1-854114-58-7 (pb) | 138x216mm | 260pp April

may | 9 6

Holy Wells: Cornwall Phil Cope Combines stunning photography with poetry and historical content. Sacred wells have played an important part in the culture and landscape of Cornwall for several millennia, and continue to do so. Holy Wells: Cornwall is a collection of over 150 beautiful colour photographs of forty-five of the most important and pre-eminent wells in the county, accompanied by an informative text about the history and legends associated with them, and a number of poems celebrating them by Robert Southey, Arthur Quller Couch and others. Like Wales and Ireland, Cornwall was an influential centre for the Celtic church: many Celtic saints are referenced in the names of churches and wells which stand in towns and villages, alone on moorland next to stone circles and Iron Age settlements, hidden in valleys and even in sea caves. Phil Cope takes the reader on a journey of discovery through densely wooded terrain and along almost forgotten roads and tracks, to lead us to special places of wonder and enrichment. Phil Cope is a photographer, writer, teacher, and cultural exhibition designer whose recent subjects have included the footballer John Charles, Paul Robeson and Wales and the Spanish Civil War.

Seren | Hardback | £20.00 978-1-854115-28-7 | 220x240mm | 220pp May


NON -F IC TION

Eat Wild Duncan Mackay A book for first-time wild food foragers and outdoor cooks. In Eat Wild, Duncan Mackay offers imaginative ways to cook wild food outdoors: whether over a fire, on a BBQ or even, as a last resort, in a kitchen. This hands-on guide, beautifully illustrated by Sally Castle, is proud to be described as ‘rough cooking’ – the antidote to ‘fine dining’. It offers experiences that you simply can’t buy in a shop and would only rarely savour in some of the world’s most expensive restaurants. It’s a month-by-month look at what’s out there, what’s easiest and safest to identify and, of course, what’s tastiest to eat. “Beyond the wildest fantasies of Heston Blumenthal.” Richard Mabey Duncan Mackay is the author of The Secret Thames (1990), a cultural journey along the Thames from source to sea, and Apples, Berkshire, Cider (Two Rivers Press, 1996), an A–Z guide to all things pomological and ciderish. He is currently working on Long, Slow and Wiggly, a cross-section of UK life as experienced on a folding bicycle, following the longest straight line in Britain: from the Isle of Wight to Cape Wrath. Duncan is a regular contributor to ecos, and in 1996 he was awarded the Henry Ford European Award for Conservation.

Two Rivers Press | Paperback | £8.95 978-1-901677-69-0 | 210x154mm | 82pp May

Poor Man’s Parliament: Ten Years of the Welsh Assembly Martin Shipton Inside track from political journalist of 30 years standing. After a decade of devolution, 6 out of 10 Welsh voters don’t know which parties form the Welsh Assembly Government. This book seeks to explain why the hopes of 1999 failed to materialise and why the National Assembly has yet to capture the nation’s imagination. Poor Man’s Parliament covers the Assembly from its beginnings in 1999 to Rhodri Morgan’s resignation in November 2009, exploring the record of government by Labour and Plaid Cymru, along with analysis of recent electoral trends. It is written from a pro-devolution viewpoint, though one dismayed by events thus far. As a journalist with the inside track on a number of aspects of the Assembly’s life, Martin Shipton promises, as ever, a no-holds-barred account. Martin Shipton has written about the National Assembly from its outset, initially as Chief Reporter of Wales on Sunday and, since 2002, as Chief Reporter of The Western Mail. He is an award-winning journalist of thirty years standing and a graduate of the School of Journalism at Cardiff.

Seren | Paperback | £12.99 978-1-854115-16-4 | 138x216mm | 300pp now February 2011

97 | M AY


NON -F IC TION

Second Exile Aleš Machácek and Jane Kirwan

No Redemption Keith Pattison and David Peace

Bold mix of personal memoir, historical documentary and poetry.

Photography from behind the scenes of the Miners’ Strike.

“Second Exile is an unusual prose-and-poetry documentary set in Communist and post-Communist Czechoslovakia. Aleš Machácek’s memoir, with its fastmoving, clipped, laconic prose-style, is complemented by Jane Kirwan’s focussed, sensuous poems meditating on events in her partner’s narrative and exploring stories of her own… an invaluable record of some of the most significant and chilling events of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.” Carol Rumens

At the height of the Miners’ Strike of 1984-85, Keith Pattison spent eight months living in the Durham coastal village of Easington Colliery, photographing the people there as events took shape. With the government’s increasing determination to break the strike and force miners back to work, he witnessed from the inside a community laid siege by the state. In 2010 David Peace saw the photographs, recognised their relevance to present-day Britain and became deeply involved. He went to Easington Colliery with Pattison on Election Day, 6th May 2010, to interview three of the people caught up in the strike. Together they make explicit the dignity, anger, bewilderment and humanity captured in the photographs.

Aleš Machácek was born in 1946 in Prague. In 1977 the Communist government sentenced him to three and a half years in prison for subversion of the state for his part in the underground distribution of Western books. In May 1985 he emigrated to London. In 2001 he was given the Gratias Agit in recognition of his activities. He was first published in a collection of texts by political prisoners, Bytem v hruze, in 2002, expanded upon here to include his childhood, the students’ movement and memories of Russian occupation. Jane Kirwan has published some of the poems that appear here in the collection The Man Who Sold Mirrors (Rockingham Press, 2004), for which she was awarded an Arts Council Writers Award in 2002.

Rockingham Press | Paperback | £8.99 978-1-904851-37-0 | 140x210mm | 88pp June

JULY | 9 8

Keith Pattison’s exhibitions include The Borrowers, Home & Away and Easington 1984. Photographs from this collection were included in Making History: Art and Documentary in Britain from 1929 to Now at TATE Liverpool in 2006. David Peace is the author of the Red Riding Quartet, GB84 (2005), awarded the 2004 James Tait Black Memorial Prize and relaunched in 2010 as part of Faber’s Revolutionary Writers series, and The Damned Utd (2007). He was chosen as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists in 2003 and GQ Writer of the Year in 2007.

Flambard Press | Paperback | £20.00 978-1-906601-20-1 | 240x240mm | 104pp July


NON -F IC TION

The Russian Word’s Worth Michele A. Berdy

Fire Drill: Notes on the 21st Century John Barnie

A humorous and insightful guide to Russian language, culture and translation.

Essays from prominent Welsh commentator and former editor of Planet.

Since 2002, readers all over the world have been enjoying and learning from Michele A. Berdy’s column ‘The Word’s Worth’ in The Moscow Times. A quirky, opinionated, authoritative guide, Berdy looks at Russia’s changing culture, politics, and daily life through language and the art of translation. In the over 200 columns gathered in this volume, she explores the language of popular and youth culture, politics, the workplace, culture high and low, and the comical struggle of expats trying to feel at home. She tackles subjects not found in any Russian textbook or cultural guide, from the serious (expressing condolences, mastering church etiquette) through the annoying (dealing with the plumber, writing the perfect robbery report), to the essential (excusing oneself – politely and not – to use the rest room). Sometimes hilarious, always thoughtful, her columns throw open a window on Russian life in the 21st century.

Fire Drill is an ambitious collection of essays in which the author attempts to make sense of the first decade of the twenty-first century. These essays fly in the face of ‘junk culture’, political expediency, cultural imperialism and globalisation. The essays are liberal, humanist and informed by varying degrees of altruism, environmentalism and culture. They are concerned with humanity and how it responds to and is manipulated by capitalism, religion, politics and technology, and by how buying into this exploitation (knowingly or not) has created a reduction in human experience. Barnie doesn’t set out to be popular (or unpopular); the careful, informed setting out of argument and opinion is just one of the book’s many strengths.

Michele A. Berdy has lived and worked in Moscow for most of the last thirty-two years, working in documentary film, TV production, public health communication and journalism. She has written four guidebooks about Moscow, St. Petersburg and Russia, and is co-author of a Russian-English dictionary.

Glas | Paperback | £12.00 978-5-717200-87-5 | 145x200mm | 400pp September

John Barnie is a poet and essayist whose books include a recent memoir, Tales of the Shopocracy (2009), about life growing up in his father’s sweet and ice-cream shop in Abergavenny. Formerly the editor of the cultural magazine Planet, he has written about Wales, the environment and contemporary society for many years. He was on the panel of judges for the 2009 Wales Book of the Year, and is a Fellow of Academi. He lives in Comins Coch, Aberystwyth.

Seren | Paperback | £9.99 978-1-854115-19-5 | 208x135mm | 192pp September

99 | SEp te mb er


NON -F IC TION

Hurting God: Part Essay Part Rhyme Rita Ann Higgins

Stress Fractures: Essays on Poetry Tom Chivers (editor)

Innovative mixture of essays, poetry and memoir from one of Ireland’s best-loved authors.

Examining the future for poetry in the modern world.

God, jiving factory girls, a crocodile-wielding father, longlost lives and equally long-lost multinationals all form part of this brilliant collection of Rita Ann Higgins’ essays and poems. For over two decades Rita Ann Higgins has been a poetic voice for the voiceless; this is as true in her plays as in her poetry. Now, in these essays, which together form a poetic memoir, she shows yet again that she is one of Ireland’s best contemporary writers. “Higgins’s work does not function to keep anyone out, but invite them to sit on the back wall with her, looking in all directions from this edge.” Moynagh Sullivan Rita Ann Higgins was born in 1955 in Galway. She won the 1989 Peadar O’Donnell Award and has received several Arts Council of Ireland bursaries. Her first five collections were published by Salmon: Goddess on the Mervue Bus (1986); Witch in the Bushes (1988); Goddess and Witch (1990); Philomena’s Revenge (1992); and Higher Purchase (1996). Bloodaxe Books published her next three collections: Sunny Side Plucked (Poetry Book Society Recommendation, 1996); An Awful Racket (2001); and Throw in the Vowels: New & Selected Poems in May 2005 to mark her 50th birthday.

Salmon Poetry | Paperback | £10.00 | 978-1-907056-51-2 210x134mm | 90pp September

O CTOB ER | 1 0 0

Where can the poem go in the age of the supercomputer? Why is poetry taught so badly at school? What do Wordsworth, Byron and British rapper Roots Manuva have in common? Would Emily Dickinson have watched vampire series Twilight? Is slam poetry any good, and what is “postavant” anyway? These are just some of the questions posed in Stress Fractures, a new and wide-ranging collection of essays on the future of poetry. “Good news for poetry.” Richard Morrison, The Times on Penned in the Margins The contributors to Stress Fractures are David Barnes, David Caddy, Theodoros Chiotis, Tom Chivers, Tim Clare, Emily Critchley, Katy Evans-Bush, Adam Fieled, Luke Kennard, Sophie Mayer, Alex Runchman, Hannah Silva, Ross Sutherland, Simon Turner and James Wilkes. Tom Chivers was born in 1983 in south London. A writer, editor and promoter of poetry, his publications include The Terrors (2009) and How To Build A City (2009). A winner of the inaugural Crashaw Prize, he is Associate Editor of Tears in the Fence, was Poet in Residence at The Bishopsgate Institute, London, and has appeared on BBC Radio 3 and 4. Tom is Director of Penned in the Margins and Co-Director of the London Word Festival.

Penned in the Margins | Paperback | £9.99 978-0-956546-71-5 | 216x138mm | 160pp October


NON -F IC TION

Real Bloomsbury Nicholas Murray New edition of immensely popular Real history/guidebook series. Bloomsbury is a central district of London in many senses. Home to Virginia Woolf and the rest of the Bloomsbury Set, the Pankhursts, and Edgar Allan Poe. Birthplace of Christian Socialism. Site of the British Museum, University College, RADA, the Friends House, the BMA, Great Ormond Street Hospital. But there is also working-class Bloomsbury and now Bengali Bloomsbury in the east. Nicholas Murray walks this crowded square mile or so to give Bloomsbury the ‘Real’ series treatment of history, memoir and oblique approaches to the familiar. His entertaining and informative text is accompanied by fifty equally unusual photographs, all of which present Bloomsbury as it’s never been portrayed before: intimate, contemporary, exploratory and occasionally downright strange. Nicholas Murray is a professional author, reviewer and cultural commentator. His work includes A Corkscrew is Most Useful: The Travellers of Empire (2009) and So Spirited a Town, a history of Liverpool (2008). Among his novels are Remembering Carmen (2003) and A Short Book About Love (2001), both published by Seren. He lives just to the north of Bloomsbury and is a daily visitor, researching at the British Museum and the British Library.

Seren | Paperback | £9.99 978-1-854115-26-3 | 216x138mm | 200pp | October

What Did You Do in the War, Mummy? Mavis Nicholson (editor) World War II through the eyes of women, with a special foreword by Dame Vera Lynn. What Did You Do in the War, Mummy? includes a wonderfully varied collection of women – some famous, some unknown – who talk to Mavis Nicholson about how they lived, worked, loved and managed during the Second World War. Their frank, vivid stories reveal the intimate details of women’s lives during those years: the new freedoms, the make-do and mend, the hope and the fears. The contributors include the remarkable resistance fighter Odette Hallows, novelist Mary Wesley, children’s author Kathleen Hale, human rights campaigner Helen Bamber OBE, TV and radio star Molly Weir and Phyllis Pearsall, creator of the first ever London A-Z. Oral history at its most engaging and significant. “Her high-octane ladies shine like searchlights in the blackout.” The Independent “I found it all riveting reading.” Richard Ingrams Mavis Nicholson was born in 1930 in south Wales. After university she became an advertising copywriter in London, socialising with the likes of Kingsley Amis and John Morgan. In her early forties she presented her first TV series, Good Afternoon, on which she founded a long broadcasting career as a celebrated interviewer. Still broadcasting, she is also the ‘agony aunt’ for The Oldie. Seren | Paperback | £9.99 978-1-854115-29-4 | 216x138mm | 280pp | October

101 | O C TO B ER


NON -F IC TION Anthony Hecht In Conversation by Philip Hoy Waywiser BTL | Paperback 168pp | £10.99 978-1-903291-15-3

The Art of Seamus Heaney by Tony Curtis (ed) Seren | Paperback 280pp | £12.95 978-1-854112-56-9

Blue Sky July by Nia Wyn Seren | Paperback 174pp | £6.99 978-1-854114-54-9

Consorting with Angels: Essays on Modern Women Poets by Deryn Rees-Jones Bloodaxe | Paperback 288pp | £10.95 978-1-852243-92-0

The Deregulated Muse by Sean O’Brien Bloodaxe | Paperback 320pp | £10.95 978-1-852242-82-4

Dylan Remembered: Vol. 1 (1914-34) by David N. Thomas Seren | Paperback/Hardback 314pp | £12.95/£25.00 978-1-854113-48-1 (pb) 978-1-854113-42-9 (hb)

Edward Thomas: The Annotated Collected Poems by Edna Longley Bloodaxe | Paperback 336pp | £12.00 978-1-852247-46-1

Four Fathers by Tom Palmer (ed) Route | Paperback 128pp | £8.99 978-1-901927-27-6

Germs: A Memoir of Childhood by Richard Wollheim Waywiser | Paperback 264pp | £10.95 978-1-904130-14-7

Poetry: Reading It, Writing It, Publishing It by Jessie Lendennie Salmon Poetry | Paperback 192pp | £12.00 978-0-956128-75-1

Some Girls’ Mothers by Anne Caldwell (ed) Route | Paperback 128pp | £8.99 978-1-901927-39-9

Writing Poems by Peter Sansom Bloodaxe | 128pp | £7.95 978-1-852242-04-6

SELECTED BACKLIST | 1 0 2


NON -F IC TION Ma g azine s

103 | SEP TE MB ER


MA G AZINE S

Acumen www.acumen-poetry.co.uk Acumen is a literary journal that places an emphasis on poetry. Edited for 25 years by Patricia Oxley, Acumen publishes a varied and impressive list of poets and critics. The magazine is also known to be on the lookout for highquality work by new and unknown talent of all ages. Published three times a year (January, May and September), the magazine contains approximately 50 new poems (including translations), reviews, poetry comment, and reader feedback. The critical articles are designed to set the reader thinking and thereby promote discussion within the correspondence columns of the magazine. “Acumen mixes poems and prose by celebrated and new writers who have something to say and say it well.” – Dannie Abse “Acumen deserves to be read for its first hand experience of poetry. The work it does is the opposite of academic and therefore valuable.” – Hugo Williams (winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize 1999) “A beacon of invention in the west, Acumen’s guiding light is valued throughout the wider world of letters. Printing the best, and not necessarily the most celebrated, is its policy.” – Peter Porter

| 104


www.banipal.co.uk Banipal has published hundreds of contemporary Arab authors in English translation – each magazine contains a wealth of poetry, fiction, interviews, book reviews and author photographs. In March 2008 Banipal won the UK Incwriters 2008-2010 Award for Outstanding Contribution to Literature (Magazines). The Banipal – Arab British Centre Library of Modern Arab Literature (BALMAL) was officially opened on 12 January 2010 at a reception to celebrate the 2009 winner of the Saif Ghobash–Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation. It is the first lending library for literature from the Arab world, translated into English or written originally in English. It is housed at 1 Gough Square, London EC4A 3DE. “Banipal is almost my chief source of information about current Arabic writing and cultural events. Without Banipal I would be much less well-read. Its past issues constitute an incomparable archive.” – Robert Irwin “A combination of newly awakened curiosity about the Arab world and the tireless efforts of Banipal, an independent magazine committed to making Arab authors available to an English readership, may be about to extend our horizons.” – Stephanie Merritt, The Observer

105 |

MA G AZINE S

Banipal


MA G AZINE S

Envoi www.cinnamonpress.com Now in its 53rd year, Envoi is a magazine with an eye for presenting poetry well on the page. Envoi welcomes all poets, both new and established, reflecting the best in Welsh writing on an international platform. Envoi is distinctive in that it publishes a small group of poems or a short sequence from each contributor rather than single poems. The style of the magazine is eclectic – its interest set on good poems in a wide range of styles, but with a leaning towards uncluttered, lucid modern poetry, particularly poetry that is willing to take risks. The magazine also features a substantial section of reviews and occasional poetry-related articles and poetry in translation. In addition, Envoi has a tradition of open poetry competitions with closing dates three times each year, with winning poems published in the magazine.

| 106


www.mptmagazine.com Modern Poetry in Translation was founded by Ted Hughes and Daniel Weissbort in 1966. Since then, its aim has been to bring foreign poetry into wider circulation in English translation, and in doing so, to enrich its readers. Relaunched under the editorship of David and Helen Constantine in 2004, today it remains a journal with an international reputation for the broad range of poets and translators that it presents, and for the serious and lively discussion of the art of translation that it prompts. The real circumstances of the world may have changed, but they are every bit as pressing as they were when the magazine began. As the English language marches towards an apparent hegemony, the need for its readers and writers to be confronted by what is foreign is even greater still. Issues of MPT generally offer a themed special section, in addition to a wide-ranging selection of poems from other times and places, plus essays and reviews. The average issue weighs in at around 200 pages, and has a cover specially designed by the artist and designer, Lucy Wilkinson.

107 |

MA G AZINE S

Modern Poetry in Translation


MA G AZINE S

Naked Punch www.nakedpunch.com Founded in 2002, Naked Punch is an art, politics, philosophy and poetry magazine run by a voluntary collective of young London-based thinkers. Essentially a non-institutional project, Naked Punch is the spontaneous collaboration of thinkers and artists residing in different cities of the world. Naked Punch aims to challenge sectarian positions and dogmatism of all kinds, while encouraging a sharing of new ideas to enrich everyday being. Past issues have featured extensive dossiers on such fields as Lebanese art, Latin American politics, Pakistani art, Arabic poetry, and many other global themes. The world’s leading intellectuals have contributed to Naked Punch, including the likes of Zizek, Simon Critchley, Spivak, Arthur Danto, Zia Sardar, Tariq Ali, Noam Chomsky, Arundati Roy, Howard Zinn, Wim Wenders, Ranciere, and many many more. The Summer 2010 issue of Naked Punch contains an extensive Art section, including a special report on the new wave of exciting young British poets based in Brighton, along with a featured essay by Latin American poet Martín Espada on poetry in Puerto Rico.

| 108


www.thelondonmagazine.net From the 1700s to the present day, The London Magazine has played a vital role in the literary world, as a cultural review renowned for publishing only the best writers, artists and commentators from London and beyond. It has championed the work of Wordsworth, Lamb, De Quincey and Clare, as well as the ‘Cockney School’ of poets. Welcoming the publication under John Lehmann’s editorship, T. S. Eliot saw it as “the magazine which will boldly assume the existence of a public interested in serious literature”. Recent contributors have included Michael Blackburn, Roddy Lumsden, Mario Petrucci, John Hartley Williams, George Szirtes, Martyn Crucefix and many more. Consistently on the pulse of what is happening on the literary scene, The London Magazine is a meeting place of the day’s greatest minds.

109 |

MA G AZINE S

The London Magazine


MA G AZINE S

The North www.poetrybusiness.co.uk The North is intelligent and generous, essential reading for all lovers of good poetry. As a small independent magazine, The North does not follow trends, foster political affinities or keep up appearances. It doesn’t do lots of useful, necessary and boring things and it doesn’t put up with middle-of-the-road ideas. The most important thing is the quality of the writing. Recent contributors to The North include Simon Armitage, George Szirtes, Allison McVety, Gillian Allnutt, Alan Brownjohn, Alison Brackenbury, Yvonne Green, John McAuliffe, Carol Ann Duffy and Roy Fisher. “Excellent.” – Carol Ann Duffy, The Guardian “Redressing the balance of English poetry.” – Poetry Review “The North grows in authority with every issue.” – Andy Croft

| 110


Published three times a year since 1984, The Rialto is a magazine where you’ll find the poets you should be reading. Currently celebrating its 25th anniversary, it publishes a wide range of poets and styles, from eminent international names to emerging new writers. In recent issues you will find poetry, reviews and features from the likes of Fleur Adcock, Carol Ann Duffy, Les Murray, C.K. Williams, Linda France and Simon Armitage. “The Rialto is a poetry magazine that sets its bar perennially high. The formula is simple but effective: exceptional poetry and lots of it…” – The Guardian “The Rialto, Good Luck To It!” – Les Murray “Poetry gives us essential human pleasures and rewards, not least because it allows us to discover richer versions of ourselves. The Rialto, being reliably full of excellent new work, is an excellent place to find these pleasures and rewards.” – Sir Andrew Motion

111 |

MA G AZINE S

The Rialto


MA G AZINE S P U B LI SH ER P r of i l es

| 112


www.aflamebooks.com Aflame Books is an independent publisher that publishes world fiction and poetry in English translation. Aflame was created to give a voice to writers whose brilliance has been hidden from the English-speaking world by barriers of culture and language. It publishes writing that deserves to be read, because it is fired by passion and originality and relates stories never before told.

Arc Publications www.arcpublications.co.uk Arc publishes contemporary poetry from new and established writers from the UK and abroad, specialising in the work of international poets writing in English and the work of overseas poets in translation.

Aflame’s principal focus is on literature originally published in languages from regions once collectively known as the Third World but today more positively referred to as the Warm World: Africa, Latin America and the Middle East. It actively reaches out to other regions, in keeping with the belief that fine literature is truly universal. Aflame has published the work of writers from Iran, Guatemala, Angola, South Africa, Egypt, Argentina, Brazil, Costa Rica and Mexico, many of whom are award-winners in their own language.

Arc Publications was established by Tony Ward in 1969 with the principal aim of introducing new work to an eager readership, initially through a series of hand-produced pamphlets and later through full collections. Over forty years on, he runs the press with fellow director Angela Jarman and an Editorial Board of three, from a converted textile mill on the Yorkshire-Lancashire border in the north of England, producing upwards of 20 new titles a year. To this day, Arc still adheres to its founding principles: to introduce the best of new talent to a UK readership, including voices from overseas that would otherwise remain unheard in this country, and to remain at the cutting edge of world poetry.

Alcemi

Banipal Books

www.alcemi.eu

www.banipal.co.uk

Alcemi believes in publishing success stories, kept on a human scale. Editor Gwen Davies has experience of developing new fiction writers such as Richard Gwyn, Rachel Trezise and Tristan Hughes, who have gone on to make their name worldwide with publishers like Doubleday and Picador. Alcemi’s own plaudits include Gee Williams’ Salvage as nominee for the prestigious James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction and Fflur Dafydd having been named as the Oxfam Hay Emerging Writer of the Year in 2009, for her novel Twenty Thousand Saints.

Banipal takes its name from Ashurbanipal, last great king of Assyria and patron of the arts, whose outstanding achievement was to assemble in Nineveh, from all over his empire, the first systematically organised library in the ancient Middle East.

Alcemi’s tastes are for literary fiction by the writers of Wales; genre only if it has an intelligent twist; not so much fantasy as magic realism; not so keen on historical as retro; definitely surrealism, black comedy, sex. Urban, yes, but also rural voices which avoid sentimentality. Alcemi’s novels for Autumn 2010 are the Croatian-set The Deer Wedding by Penny Simpson (“Compelling, humane... a novel of remarkable delicacy and power...” Michael Symmons Roberts), and Bangkok novel Bamboo Grove by Romy Wood (“Buzzes with insight and imagination... A very fine debut.” Richard Gwyn, author of The Colour of a Dog Running Away).

Banipal Books was established in 2004 by Banipal’s editor, Margaret Obank, in order to strengthen and expand the work of Banipal magazine by publishing in book form works by contemporary Arab authors. Its first two titles arrived in 2005, and it now publishes a wide range of poetry and fiction from the Middle East, North Africa and beyond.

113 |

p u blish er pr of iles

Aflame Books


p u blish er pr of iles

Bloodaxe Books www.bloodaxebooks.com

Comma Poetry

Bloodaxe has revolutionised poetry publishing in Britain over the past 30 years. Internationally renowned for quality in literature and excellence in book design, its authors and books have won virtually every major literary award given to poetry, from the T.S. Eliot Prize and Pulitzer to the Nobel Prize. Anthologies like Staying Alive and Being Alive have broken new ground by opening up contemporary poetry to many thousands of new readers. These two best-selling anthologies will be joined by a companion volume, Being Human, in March 2011.

www.commapress.co.uk

Widely respected for its innovative, international and diverse range of poetry publishing, including a substantial list of books in translation, Bloodaxe publishes both new and established poets from Britain and Ireland, as well as many poets from the US, including the new Poet Laureate of the United States, W.S. Merwin, and former Laureate Robert Hass. A growing number of Bloodaxe publications now include audio CDs or films on DVD of poets reading their work.

Comma Press is a not-for-profit publishing initiative dedicated to promoting new poetry and short fiction. It is committed to a spirit of risk-taking and challenging publishing, free of the commercial pressures placed on mainstream publishers. Poets on its list include the Yorkshire-based author Gaia Holmes, punk performer Joolz Denby, Dadaist artist and songwriter turned poet Ed Barton, and science writer Helen Clare. Based in Manchester and built on the literary wreckage of the now collapsed City Life magazine, Comma also runs a film-adaptation project, which commissions short film realisations of published poetry by aspiring independent film-makers, in conjunction with Version Festival.

Dedalus Press www.dedaluspress.com

Cinnamon Press www.cinnamonpress.com Cinnamon Press is five years old in 2010 and the fastest growing small press in Wales, publishing about twenty-five titles a year in fiction, poetry and occasional non-fiction. Wales has a strong literary tradition and Cinnamon aims to contribute to that by bringing in authors from around the world – Italy, Finland, Sweden, Bosnia, South Africa, Kenya, Zimbabwe, New Zealand, China and the USA to name a few, as well as those from Britain and Ireland, with a strong core of Welsh writers. Cinnamon takes great pride in being independent and innovative, taking risks with high quality unusual projects: the multi-genre two-part memoirs, Three-three, two-two, five-six and Discussing Wittgenstein by Ann Drysdale; the genre-defying epistolary Felicity and Barbara Pym by Harrison Solow; the bilingual experimental poetry of Rhys Trimble, Keinc; and I Spy Pinhole Eye, Philip Gross’s poetry in response to Simon Denison’s pinhole photography, which won the 2010 Wales Book of the Year Award. Several titles have won or been shortlisted for major literary awards, including those by debut poets or novelists, many of whom come to Cinnamon through its literary competitions for novelists, poets and short story writers.

| 114

Twenty-five years old this year, Ireland’s Dedalus Press is dedicated to contemporary poetry from Ireland, and to poetry from around the world in English translation. Under its current editor, the poet and broadcaster Pat Boran, Dedalus continues to introduce the work of new writers and, through anthologies and other projects, to reintroduce readers to its many backlist titles. As well as poetry titles per se, the press occasionally publishes prose volumes on the subject, or titles by poets working in other forms. Established with a broadly modernist outlook, the press is primarily interested in serious writing but recognises and celebrates the broad diversity of styles that makes up contemporary poetry, from Ireland and further afield. Described by UNESCO.org as “among the most outwardlooking poetry presses in Ireland and the UK”, Dedalus publishes its own podcast on iTunes (‘AudioRoom: New Writing from Ireland’) and is actively engaged in ‘spreading the word’ in print and online.


www.eggboxpublishing.com Founded in 2002 and incorporated in 2006, Egg Box is an independent poetry publisher whose influence continues to grow and be felt far and wide. It is based in Norwich and is run by the poet Nathan Hamilton. True to its name, Egg Box is predominantly a publisher and promoter of newcomers and is interested in talented writing with an experimental or intelligent edge – fresh eggs. As well as exciting collections from the likes of Agnes Lehoczky and Vahni Capildeo and its Stop Sharpening Your Knives series of trend-setting anthologies, each year Egg Box publishes the Poetry and Prose anthologies of the University of East Anglia, one of the world’s leading Creative Writing schools.

Elastic Press www.elasticpress.com Elastic Press published from November 2002 until November 2008, specialising in short fiction collections and anthologies in a variety of genres. During this time they won seven separate awards, including two British Fantasy Society Best Small Press awards (2005, 2009), three British Fantasy Society Best Anthology awards, an East Anglian Book award, and - perhaps most significantly - the Edge Hill Prize for Short Fiction, won by Chris Beckett’s collection, The Turing Test, in 2009. This title, along with some of their back catalogue, is still available although the press itself has ceased to publish due to the owner’s other commitments.

Flambard Press www.flambardpress.co.uk Flambard is an independent press now based in Newcastle upon Tyne. Established in 1990, Flambard publishes about ten books of poetry and fiction a year. Flambard’s list includes writers from all across the UK and abroad, yet the press remains especially supportive of writers from northern England. Flambard’s poetry forms the backbone of the press. Flambard has published several collections by well-known poets such as Peter Bennet and S.J. Litherland, coupling this with a policy to incorporate first collections into each year’s planning. Flambard’s growing fiction programme has seen the press publish novels by established authors such as John Murray and Martin Edwards, while also actively looking to take on first and second books. The press is an enthusiastic supporter of the short story, and recent highlights include Four Taxis Facing North by the Caribbean author Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw. The Flambard Modern Classics series brought the work of legendary Newcastle author Sid Chaplin back into print, and the press has also published books with a visual-art element, such as Night Train by Sean O’Brien and Birtley Aris.

Glas New Russian Writing www.glas.msk.su The premier showcase for contemporary Russian writing in English translation, Glas has been discovering new writers (Pelevin, Ulitskaya, Babchenko) and rediscovering under-appreciated past masters (Bulgakov, Platonov, Krzhizhanovsky) since 1991. Based in Moscow, Glas began as an anthology of diverse writers grouped around a unifying theme (revolution, fear, childhood, women’s views). Later issues have focused on single authors to give the reader a better sense of their work. With more than 100 names represented, Glas is the most comprehensive English-language source on Russian letters today – a must for libraries, students of world literature, and all those who love good writing. “Glas has become almost disturbingly indispensable. The texts and voices out of Russia come through with formidable insistence. More now than ever before, precisely because hopes on their native ground are again precarious.” – George Steiner “Glas is a first-rate series, well planned and very well translated. Anyone interested in Russia and good writing should seek it out.” – The Observer

115 |

p u blish er pr of iles

Egg Box Publishing


p u blish er pr of iles

Menard Press Hearing Eye

Menard Press

www.hearingeye.org

www.menardpress.co.uk

Hearing Eye is a small independent press established by John Rety and Susan Johns in 1987 with the publication of the pamphlet Cats’ Parnassus by John Heath-Stubbs. Since then, Hearing Eye has published over 200 books and pamphlets by new and established poets, ranging from selections of haiku to epic poems.

Menard Press was founded as a small magazine in 1969 and brought out its first book in 1971. It has specialised in literary translation, mainly of poetry. In addition to literary texts – original and translated poetry, original and translated fiction, art and literary criticism – the press has published essays on the nuclear issue (by Sir Martin Ryle and Lord Zuckerman, among others) as well as works and testimonies by survivors of Nazism, including the first English edition of Primo Levi’s poems.

Hearing Eye is based at the Torriano Meeting House in Kentish Town, north London. The Meeting House has hosted weekly Sunday-evening poetry readings since the mid-1980s with a wide range of readers, including Dannie Abse, Les Murray and Mimi Khalvati. Many Hearing Eye books are written by poets who have read at the Meeting House, including many who have initially read a poem from the floor and, a couple of years later, have ended up having their first pamphlet published.

Menard Press inherited F.T. Prince from Fulcrum Press in 1975; other senior poets on the list are Brian Coffey (Advent and The Death of Hektor) and Nicholas Moore (Spleen). Translated poets include Nerval, Mallarmé, Rilke and Mandelstam, plus Sylvia Plath’s translations of Ronsard and one of Elaine Feinstein’s selections from the work of Marina Tsvetaeva. Among the works of prose criticism Menard has published are studies of Charles Reznikoff, Fernando Pessoa and Primo Levi, Octavio Paz’s intellectual autobiography Itinerario and Geoffrey Dutton’s extraordinary account of his garden in Scotland, Harvesting the Edge, illustrated not by photos but by his poems.

Iron Press www.ironpress.co.uk Iron Press is small but beautiful. It was set up in the north-east of England by the writer Peter Mortimer in the long-lost days of 1973, and Mortimer has remained the editor to this day. In more than a third of a century it has produced a truly eclectic body of work, championing the most interesting writers from its own region, the rest of the country, and sometimes worldwide. Among its more distinctive anthologies are Voices of Conscience – an ambitious collection of work from poets persecuted (and sometimes murdered) by the state, and probably the only book to include both Oscar Wilde and Ho Chi Minh. The Poetry of Perestroika was the only anthology in the west to concentrate on poets emerging in the glasnost era, while Star Trek - The Poems was a different kettle of fish altogether. Iron is the country’s leading independent publisher of haiku, and published the first two books by David Almond in his pre-Skellig days. Latest on the list is The Iron Book of New Humorous Verse, edited by Eileen Jones, and a collection which acknowledges the impact of performance poetry and slams.

Penned in the Margins www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk Penned in the Margins is a dynamic literary arts company which combines live events, projects and tours with a commitment to publishing exciting, risk-taking new poetry. Their books span mainstream, performance and avant-garde poetries, have been Highly Commended in the Forward Prize, and featured on Newsnight and in Time Out. Many of their covers are designed by leading design agency Mercy. Penned in the Margins specialises in first collections by exciting young poets such as Ross Sutherland, Sarah Hesketh, Siddhartha Bose and George Ttoouli and is also known for the acclaimed anthologies Generation Txt and City State: New London Poetry. Their recent publishing ventures include Stress Fractures: Essays on Poetry, and a series of limited edition, boxed mini-books. The company is led by writer and arts producer Tom Chivers, recipient of a prestigious Paul Hamlyn Foundation Breakthrough Award for his work with the annual London Word Festival. “Good news for poetry.” The Times

| 116


www.therialto.co.uk The Rialto’s First Collection and Bridge Pamphlet series feature poets who are taking the first step from magazine to book publication. With its commitment to placing the best new talent alongside established names, The Rialto is wellplaced to spot and nurture new talent. The Rialto’s list of authors includes Allan Crosbie (Outswimming the Eruption, 2006), Emily Wills (Developing the Negative, 2008), John Siddique (The Prize, 2005) and Josephine Dickinson (Scarberry Hill, 2001). It has also published collections to mark the early deaths of poets Julia Casterton (Night Lightning, 2007) and Andrew Waterhouse, whose debut In won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2000 (2nd, 2002).

Route www.route-online.com Route is a terraced publishing house in the north of England that publishes novels, short stories, cultural nonfiction and performance poetry titles. Its author list is an eclectic mix that includes Nobel laureates and first time writers, music superstars and warehouse operatives. Route’s principal commitment is to authentic stories and good books. Route publishes stories in print, audio and digital forms, creating books one way or another. “The sharpest, on the button writing you’ll read all year. Route could soon start taking on a Samizdat level of importance as it quietly ushers in the beginnings of a much needed literary renaissance.” – The Big Issue “The most interesting and vibrant publishing house around today.” – Nottingham Evening Post

Rockingham Press www.rockingham-press.co.uk

“Now we rely on small independent publishers such as Route, often based outside London, to support authors such as Michael Nath. Two or three decades ago, a novel this unusual would not have seemed out of place on, say, Picador’s list.” – Nicolas Royle, The Independent

Rockingham Press was set up in 1991 to champion new and neglected poets and also Middle East poetry in translation. Since then, each year Rockingham has published on average four paperback collections (always including a first collection) and one or two pamphlets. Its Middle East titles have included Modern Turkish Poetry (a Poetry Book Society Recommendation), Modern Persian Poetry, and works by Feyyaz Kayacan Fergar and Oktay Rifat.

Salmon Poetry

Rockingham Press

Poets published by Rockingham include Judi Benson, Anne-Marie Fyfe, Adèle Geras, John Greening, James Kirkup, Jane Kirwan, Lotte Kramer, William Oxley and Edward Storey. Rockingham has been a supporter of the Ware Poets in Hertfordshire since its beginning, and has published the twelve Ware Poets Competition anthologies.

www.salmonpoetry.com Salmon Poetry was established in 1981 with the publication of The Salmon, a journal of poetry and prose, as an alternative voice in Irish literature. Since then over 300 volumes of poetry have been produced, and Salmon has become one of the most important publishers in the Irish literary world. Salmon’s catalogue includes initial works by Irish poets Rita Ann Higgins, Theo Dorgan, Moya Cannon, Mary O’Donnell, Eamonn Wall, Mary O’Malley, Eva Bourke, Kevin Higgins, Dave Lordan, Janice Fitzpatrick-Simmons and Gerard Donovan. Salmon has also published a range of international poets including Adrienne Rich, Ray Bradbury, Marvin Bell, Richard Tillinghast, Carol Ann Duffy, R.T. Smith, Linda McCarriston, Allan Peterson, Ron Houchin, Andrea Cohen, Philip Fried and Ben Howard. Salmon’s anthologies include In the Chair: Poets from the North of Ireland (ed. John Brown) and The White Page: 20th Century Irish Women Poets (ed. Joan McBreen).

117 |

p u blish er pr of iles

The Rialto


p u blish er pr of iles

Seren www.serenbooks.com Seren is a dynamic independent publisher of awardwinning poetry, fiction, translation, biography, art history, history and current affairs titles. For the last thirty years Seren has aimed to publish the best quality and most thought-provoking writing on offer, in well designed, well produced books. At the heart of the Seren list is a good story told well, or an idea or history presented interestingly and provocatively. Many of Seren’s books and authors are shortlisted for – and win – major literary prizes across Britain and America, including the Costa, Forward, T.S. Eliot, Glen Dimplex and Ondaatje Prizes. Seren also publishes Poetry Wales magazine and maintains strong links with writing from Wales, as showcased in the popular Retellings of the Mabinogion series. Prominent Seren authors include Dannie Abse, Sheenagh Pugh, Owen Sheers, Gwyneth Lewis, Niall Griffiths, Pascale Petit and Kathryn Simmonds. And although its roots remain firmly in Wales – ‘seren’ means ‘star’ in Welsh – both its authorship and readership are international in scope, proving that writers from a small country with an intricate culture have a truly worldwide relevance.

Smokestack Books www.smokestack-books.co.uk ‘... and on every side smokestacks were dancing on rooftops...’ Vladimir Mayakovsky Smokestack Books aims to hold open a space for what is left of the English radical poetic tradition in the twentyfirst century. Smokestack champions poets who are unfashionable, radical, left-field or working a long way from the metropolitan centres of cultural authority. Smokestack is committed to the common music of poetry; is interested in the World as well as in the Word; believes that poetry is a part of and not apart from society; argues that if poetry does not belong to everybody, it is not poetry. Since 2004, Smokestack has published over forty titles. Smokestack’s authors include Linda France, John Lucas, Katrina Porteous, Alison Fell, Kevin Cadwallender, Kathleen Kenny, Tom Wintringham and Sebastian Barker. Smokestack’s growing and distinguished international list includes Martín Espada (Puerto Rico), Francis Combes (France), Kristin Dimitrova (Bulgaria), Sergei Samolyenko (Russia), András Mezei (Hungary), Heinrich Heine (Germany), Nikola Vaptsarov (Bulgaria) and Gustavo Pereira (Venezuela). Coming soon from Smokestack are books by Jeremy Cronin (South Africa), Olga Berggolts (Russia), Richard Schaaf (USA) and Victor Jara (Chile).

Smith/Doorstop (The Poetry Business) www.poetrybusiness.co.uk The Poetry Business publishes books, pamphlets and audio under its Smith/Doorstop imprint; runs the literary magazine, The North; and runs a national competition, Writing Days, the Writing School and residential courses. The directors and co-editors are Ann and Peter Sansom. Smith/Doorstop poets have won or been shortlisted for almost every major literary prize, including the Forward on 11 occasions, while The North has been described by Poetry Review as “redressing the balance of English poetry”. The prestigious Book & Pamphlet Competition has been credited with launching the careers of many poets of note, including Allison McVety and Yvonne Green. A 25-year history of supporting writers and nurturing interest in contemporary poetry led Sir Andrew Motion to describe the business as “One of the most vital and vitalising literature organisations in the country”. “A small but enterprising publisher talent-spotting marvellous new poets.” – The Independent “Smith/Doorstop have been quietly pushing new or developing talent for years now.” – The Guardian

| 118

tall-lighthouse www.tall-lighthouse.co.uk Since its inception in 1999, tall-lighthouse has established itself as a worthy competitor in the small poetry press market. It has remained independent of funding and is dedicated to supporting both new and existing poets from the UK and Ireland as well as the USA and Canada, producing a varied selection of full collections, pamphlets, chapbooks and anthologies. It also uses its series of events (including the Poetry Café, London) to promote poets and their work. In recent years tall-lighthouse has supported emerging poetic talent with the Pilot Series of pamphlet publications for poets under thirty. Its most recent publications include the debut British collection from Canadian poet Todd Swift, Mainstream Love Hotel, plus the Forward Prize-nominated Learning Gravity by Helen Oswald, and the selected poems of Keith Please and Brendan Cleary. “An unmissable landmark lighting up the London poetry scene.” – Coffee House Poetry at the Troubadour


p u blish er pr of iles

Two Rivers Press www.tworiverspress.com Founded in 1994 by Reading artist Peter Hay, Two Rivers Press is an informal, not-for-profit collective which has published over 70 titles. It has been described by the writer Keiren Phelan as “one of the most characterful small presses in the country.” Two Rivers is interested in new writing from Reading and the Thames Valley, focusing on local poets, local history, and new editions of classic poems, especially those with a Reading connection: for example, Oscar Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol. The Press is strongly rooted in the local community and has close links with the University, Poet’s Cafe and other local groups. A significant part of its work explores and celebrates local history and environment, such as Abattoirs Road to Zinzan Street: Reading’s Streets and their Names, and Down by the River: the Thames and Kennet in Reading. Its contribution to Reading’s culture won a Pride of Reading award in 2008. Poets published by Two Rivers include Adrian Blamires, Jane Draycott, A.F. Harrold, Kate Noakes, Peter Robinson and Susan Utting.

Waywiser www.waywiser-press.com The Waywiser Press, a small independent company, was founded in 2001 and has its head office in Oxfordshire and a subsidiary in Baltimore, USA. Waywiser specialises in modern poetry, publishing work by established writers such as Robert Conquest, Anthony Hecht, W.D. Snodgrass and Richard Wilbur as well as by newcomers such as Carrie Jerrell, Dora Malech and Chris Preddle. The press’s most recent publication is Joining Music with Reason, a 440-page anthology of work by the thirty or so poets who came to read for Christopher Ricks in Oxford during his five years as Professor of Poetry at the University. Waywiser runs the annual Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, which is open to anyone with a maximum of one previously published collection, and rewards its winner with a purse of £1,750 or $3,000 and publication on both sides of the Atlantic. Waywiser publishes not just poetry but literary books of all kinds, including works of fiction, memoir, criticism and history. Waywiser also has an imprint, Between The Lines, which publishes book-length interviews with senior contemporary poets: the list includes a number of the names above but also John Ashbery, Seamus Heaney, Donald Justice and Charles Simic.

119 |


IN DEX

Al Galidi, Rodaan . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92

Conquest, Robert . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75

Al Khamissi, Khaled . . . . . . . . . . . 92

Constantine, David . . . . . . . . . 33, 63

Abse, Dannie . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94

Constantine, Helen . . . . . . . . . 33, 63

Gallagher, Katherine . . . . . . . . . . . 23

Acharya, Shanta . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

Cope, Phil . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96

Gamble, Miriam . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48

Adcock, Fleur . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32

Copley, Jennifer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74

Goss, Rebecca . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49

Alam, MY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81, 90

Croft, Andy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76

Gough, Julian . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24

Aleson, Tina . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38

Curtis, Tony . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102

Green, John . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68

Fyfe, Anne-Marie . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58

Green, Yvonne . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49

Ang, Arlene . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Appanah, Natacha . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90

Dafydd, Fflur . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92

Griffiths, Niall . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87, 88

Archard, Cary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94

Daley, Ian . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81, 90, 90

Gross, Philip . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74, 76

Aronowitz, Richard . . . . . . . . . 79, 90

Daly, Padraig J. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33

Gwyn, Richard . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24, 87

Astley, Neil . . . . . . . . . . 74, 74, 76, 91

Dancing Bear, J.P. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Darbyshire, Bobbie . . . . . . . . . . . . 92

Halperin, Richard . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35

Barnie, John . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14, 99

Davies, Gwen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87

Hanlon, Noel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25

Barraclough, Simon . . . . . . . . . . . .45

Denby, Joolz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75

Hardy, Cynthia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36

Bartlett, Richard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78

Denison, Simon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74

Harmon, Maurice . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50

Beagrie, Bob . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

Dent, Alan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46

Haslam, Michael . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36

Beckett, Chris . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92

Dimitrova, Kristin . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47

Haynes, John . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50, 75

Bell, James . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

Donovan, Katie . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34

Healy, Daniel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58

Berdy, Michele A. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99

Dove, Richard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57

Heaney, Seamus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102

Bethell, Zillah . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85, 87

Dudman, Clare . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84

Hecht, Anthony . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102

Bialosky, Jill . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

Duff, Valerie . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

Henry, Aideen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37

Bianchi, Tony . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82

Duggan, A.J. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91

Henry, Paul . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63

Bielski, Alison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62

Dunkerley, Hugh . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

Hicks, Patrick . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

Bilton, Alan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87, 92

Dyson, Ketaki Kushari . . . . . . . . . . 61

Higgins, Kevin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Higgins, Rita Ann . . . . . . . . . . . . 100

Birtill, Paul . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Bogdanov, Michael . . . . . . . . . . . . 95

Edwards, Martin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90

Hillier, Sheila . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51

Boñcza, Michal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68

Egan, Michael . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73

Hoagland, Tony . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51

Boran, Pat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74

Ehin, Kristiina . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47

Hochel, Igor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

Bose, Siddhartha . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62

Elfyn, Menna . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

Hope, Danielle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25

Bourke, Eva . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

Eisner, Mark . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

Howitt, Holly . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71, 91

Browne, Catherine . . . . . . . . . . . . 90

Embry, Eduardo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68

Hoy, Philip . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102

Bushe, Paddy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70

Evaristo, Bernardine . . . . . . . . . . . 57

Hoyland, Kate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87

Caldwell, Anne . . . . . . . . . . . . 22, 102

Fainlight, Ruth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71

Caley, Matthew . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

Faragó, Borbála . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

Ibrahim, Sonallah . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92

Capildeo, Vahni . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76

Feeney, Elaine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53

Ironside, Hamish . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75

Celyn Jones, Russell . . . . . . . . . . . . 91

Ferguson, Alex . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79

Ivory, Helen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26

Chanter, Catherine . . . . . . . . . . . . 89

Finch, Peter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

Chaplin, Sid . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90

Fisher, Roy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48

Jaffe, Larry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26

Chiasson, Dan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46

Fitzgerald, Mark . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34

Jelnikar, Ana . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

Chivers, Tom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100

Ford, Robin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

Jenkins, Mike . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64

Chiziane, Paulina . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78

Forster, Andrew . . . . . . . . . . . . 22, 74

Jess-Cooke, Carolyn . . . . . . . . . . . 16

Cleary, Brendan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53

Fortune-Wood, Jan . . . . . . . . . 35, 71

Jones, Eileen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64

Cohen, Andrea . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75

Fortune-Wood, Rowan . . . . . 22, 56

Jones, Lloyd . . . . . . . . . . . . 87, 91, 91

Coles, Gladys Mary . . . . . . . . . . . . 86

France, Linda . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23, 74

Joso, Jayne . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92

Collins, Richard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91

Fuller, John . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37

Combes, Francis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46

Fulton, Robin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66

Hurn, David . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37

| 120

Kareva, Doris . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 Katwato, Ethel Irene . . . . . . . . . . . 21


Murphy, Gerry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67

Sabbagh, Omar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60

King, Noel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38

Murray, John . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90, 91

Sage, C.J. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30

Kirwan, Jane . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98

Murray, Nicholas . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101

Sail, Lawrence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68

Kolatkar, Arun . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72

Musariri, Blessing . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

Sansom, Peter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102

Kramer, Lotte . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76 Kušar, Meta . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

Sheers, Owen . . . . . . . . . . . . 9, 76, 92 Nagra, Daljit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 Narain, Apurva . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

Ladd, Matthew . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65

Narain, Kunwar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

Lawrence, Huw . . . . . . . . . . . . 22, 82

Nasser, Amjad . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75

Lawson, Sarah . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76

Nath, Michael . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81

Lehtpere, Ilmar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47

Neruda, Pablo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

Lendennie, Jessie . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102

Nichols, Grace . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41

Lewis, Gwyneth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88

Nicholson, Hubert . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73

Litherland, S.J. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39

Nicholson, Mavis . . . . . . . . . . . . 101

Livingstone, Angela . . . . . . . . . . . . 95

Noakes, Kate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76

Llewellyn, David . . . . . . . . . . . 90, 90 Longley, Edna . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102

O’Brien, Sean . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102

Longstaff, Marilyn . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65

O’Donnell, Mary . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42

Lordan, Dave . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54

O’Siadhail, Micheal . . . . . . . . . . . . 59

Lumsden, Roddy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

Obank, Margaret . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 Ország-Land, Thomas . . . . . . . . . . 52

Machácek, Ales . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98

Oswald, Helen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42

Machirori, Fungai Rufaro . . . . . . . 21

Owen, Llwyd . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83

Mackay, Duncan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97

Oxley, Patricia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29

Madec, Mary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27

Oxley, William . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76

Mahmutovi´c, Adnan . . . . . . . . . . . 80 Martinson, Harry . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66

Palacios, Manuela . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42

May, Stephen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92

Palmer, Tom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102

Mayakovsky, Vladimir . . . . . . . . . . 75

Partington, Stephen D. . . . . . . . . . 55

McCabe, Chris . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59

Pattison, Keith . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98

McDermid, Val . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92

Peace, David . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98

McDonagh, Philip . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39

Pereira, Gustavo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68

McEvoy, Gill . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54

Perova, Natasha . . . . . . . . . . . . 83, 92

McGovern, Iggy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66

Perry, Paul . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43

McKane, Richard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

Petit, Pascale . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43, 76

McVety, Allison . . . . . . . . . . . . 40, 75

Platonov, Andrei . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91

Mehrotra, Arvind Krishna . . . . . . 72

Preddle, Chris . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55

Meredith, Christopher . . . . . . . . . 91

Pugh, Sheenagh . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75

Mezei, András . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 Millar duMars, Susan . . . . . . . . . . 18 Molloy, Dorothy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 Monahan, Noel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 Monson, Jane . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 Morgan, John . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 Morley, Abegail . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 Morrison, Alan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .12 Mort, Graham . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 Mullen, Mary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41

Reading, Peter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72 Rees-Jones, Deryn . . . . . . . . . . . . 102 Reidy, Ger . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 Ricks, Christopher . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 Robertson, Wendy . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 Robertson-Pearce, Pamela . . . . . . 74 Robinson, Mary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Rogers, Bertha . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18

Shereni, Joice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 Shipton, Martin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 Shuttle, Penelope . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 Simmonds, Kathryn . . . . . . . . . . . 76 Simpson, Penny . . . . . . . . . . . . 86, 90 Skinner, Knute . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94 Slavnikova, Olga . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83 Smyth, Gerard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 Snodgrass, W.D. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 Solow, Harrison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 Steinherr, Ludwig . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 Street, Seán . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 Sutherland, Ross . . . . . . . . . . 60, 100 Swift, Todd . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 Szirtes, George . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Tagore, Rabindranath . . . . . . . . . . 61 Tessimond, A.S.J. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 Thomas, David N. . . . . . . . . . . . . 102 Thomas, Dylan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102 Thomas, Edward . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102 Thompson, N.S. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 Trimble, Rhys . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 Tsvetaeva, Marina . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95 Turner, Brian . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70, 74 Twichell, Chase . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 Tyler-Bennett, Deborah . . . . . . . . 13 Walker, Elaine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84 Walsh, John . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 Waterhouse, Andrew . . . . . . . . . . . 74 Watts, Stephen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Wells, Grace . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 White, Landeg . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 Williams, C.K. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 Williams, Daniel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96 Wollheim, Richard . . . . . . . . . . . . 102 Wood, Romy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 Woods, Phil . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95 Wyn, Nia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102 Zephaniah, Benjamin . . . . . . . . . . 76

Rouzeau, Valérie . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 Rumens, Carol . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52, 74

121 |

IN DEX

Kendall, Judy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27


S ALE S IN FO rm at ion

Distributors and Representatives Our primary distributors are Central Books; please contact them directly for trade orders. For all other enquiries, please contact Inpress directly. Central Books Ltd 99 Wallis Road London E9 5LN Tel: 44 (0)845 458 9911 Fax: 44 (0)845 458 9912 contactus@centralbooks.com www.centralbooks.com Littlehampton Book Services (for Bloodaxe Books orders) Faraday Close Durrington Worthing West Sussex BN13 3RB Tel: 44 (0)1903 828500 orders@lbsltd.co.uk www.lbsltd.co.uk Our sales representatives: London Henry Thompson henry@henrythompsonbooks.co.uk

Scotland Don Morrison donmo@blueyonder.co.uk

South East Felicity Knight felicityknight@btinternet.com

Ireland Geoff Bryan independentpublishersagent@gmail.com

South West and South Wales Ian Tripp iantripp@ymail.com

Spain and Portugal Peter Prout, Iberian Book Services pprout@telefonica.net

Midlands and East Anglia Phil Robey, Pegasus Publishing Services phil.robey@dial.pipex.com

Australia and New Zealand Eleanor Brasch, Eleanor Brasch Enterprises brasch2@aol.com

The North and North Wales Jonathan Brooks jbbltd@blueyonder.co.uk

Image credits Front Cover: Chiswick High Road (2008) by Sonya Vine Poetry: Spring Overflow (2001) by Jim Orvik Fiction: Cemetery (2010) by Jamie Hamley Non-Fiction: Deep Thoughts (1900) by Mikhail Nesterov; The Russian Museum, St Petersburg Magazines: Wallpainting of Ache Lhamo, the Tibetan Opera, Lhasa Tibet (2010) by Patrick Sutherland Publisher Profiles: McDonald’s Hamburgers Invading Japan/Chochin-me (1982) by Masami Teraoka; Image courtesy of the artist and Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco, California. Catalogue Design: Jeremy Hopes

| 122



Inpress Ltd Collingwood Buildings 38 Collingwood Street Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 1JF

“a powerf ul force for good” – Sir Andrew Motion Tel: 44 (0)191 229 9555 enquiries@inpressbooks.co.uk www.inpressbooks.co.uk


Turn static files into dynamic content formats.

Create a flipbook
Issuu converts static files into: digital portfolios, online yearbooks, online catalogs, digital photo albums and more. Sign up and create your flipbook.