INPRESS BOOKS P O E T RY JULY–DECEMBER 2015
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Inpress: supporting leading literary book publishers for over a decade Dear Poetry-Lover, We’ve a host of exciting, challenging, important and rewarding poetry titles for you this Autumn. October sees Michael Rosen’s first collection for adults since 2008, Don’t Mention the Children. It’s an indication of the rising status of independent publishers that a poet of Rosen’s calibre and reputation has actively chosen North-East based independent Smokestack for this collection. Just as impressively, down in the South West, Bristol-based Burning Eye brings us Things You Find in a Poet’s Beard: a Children’s collection from the ever-popular A.F. Harrold – illustrated by the recently-appointed Children’s Laureate, Chris Riddell. Our poets explore all corners of human existence – from the deeply personal to the public and political. Penned in the Margins brings us Futures: Poetry of the Greek Crisis, providing new ways of looking at and thinking about European politics. Meanwhile CB Editions publish New Life, Dan O’Brien’s sequel to the Aldeburgh Prize winning War Reporter. Arc Publications continue their important work as the UK’s most dedicated publisher of poetry in translation, with the work of Syrian poet, Maram al-Masri whose collection Barefoot Souls captures women’s experiences of the Syrian war. Peepal Tree continue to bring us verse Caribbean-style, with John Lyons’ delightful illustrated children’s collection Dancing in the Rain (now there’s a title that chimes for summer 2015 so far). This season’s poetry catalogue jacket image comes from Two Rivers’ A Murmuration – continuing this Readingbased press’s track record for great poetry in combination with beautiful production values. Similarly Tynesidebased Iron Press have encased Limehaven by Vicky Arthurs in one of this season’s most gorgeous covers – perfectly reflecting the charm, natural world subjects and spare elegance of Arthur’s poems. Emma Press continue to develop their quirkily illustrated and eclectic collections with Malkin, based on the 1612 Pendle Witch Trials and AWOL: a poetic dialogue on the pros and cons of travel. As ever, Salmon Poetry bring us a cluster of strong Irish voices, including Lorna Shaugnessy’s Anchored. A “surprise” Irish poet is brought to you in the form of John Sheahan’s collection Fiddle Dreams from Dedalus Press. Sheahan is the last surviving member of legendary and hugely popular band, The Dubliners. A returner to the Inpress family, Hull-based Wrecking Ball Press, brings us a clutch of titles as hard-hitting as the imprint name suggests: Collision Forces from Kath McKay being a case in point. Rugby-based Nine Arches continue to carve out their list of strong modern poets with collections including Birmingham Laureate David Hart’s love-song-come-eulogy for libraries, The Library Inspector and Myra Connell’s debut collection, House. There just isn’t enough space to tell you all there is to say about this season’s poetry offering, so enjoy browsing. There are worlds of rewarding poetry reading here for you. Yours, Sheila
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Smaller Ones Are Better Never get a pet bigger than yourself – oversized animals are bad for your health – take a snake that could swallow you whole – a great white shark won’t fit a fish-bowl – you might try to keep a polar bear in the freezer, but don’t tell your mum, ’cause the news wouldn’t please her – a bottlenose dolphin hogs the bath – a big butch hyena is good for a laugh but when it gets peckish, starts looking for lunch, the last sound you’ll hear will be a meaty munch – and it’s the same with a tiger, the same with a lion – don’t get a walrus, and don’t think of trying to befriend a blue whale – they’re bigger than buses – and when the food bill arrives, then you’ll see what a fuss is – don’t get a pet bigger than a person – smaller ones are better – you bet you’d start cursing if you had to clear up all the mess that you find fallen to the floor from an elephant’s behind – a rhinoceros might be a tough old trooper but it tends to overwork the tired pooper-scooper – stick to a stick-insect, stick with the cat,
A.F. Harrold’s latest collection, published in October by Burning Eye, is illustrated by the new Children’s Laureate Chris Riddell. Fancy a sneak peak? Of course you do…
befriend a little rabbit or a mouse or a rat or a sensible dog or a gerbil or a parrot or smallest and safest – a crunchy tender carrot.
Talking to the Dead For the past five years the poet Gordon Hodgeon has been confined to his bed, unable to move his arms and legs or breathe without the help of a ventilator. In the last few months he has lost the power of speech. Today he can only communicate with the outside world by blinking at a Dynavox computer screen. But although he is condemned to painful silence, Gordon has continued to write. The result is an extraordinary series of new poems from the furthest edge of human endurance. These are the words of a man who cannot speak, the poems of a writer who cannot pick up a pen. Talking to the Dead is a book about disability and mortality, a painful study in helpless silence. But it is also, movingly, the defiant song of a personality still open to the world and its endless futures. For more information see page 25.
Talking to the Dead
January Twilight
I am talking to the dead,
for Mike
who are sullen, not responding. I try their silent language, fail over and over. Who can teach me, guide me through their dark palaces, their ungrowing fields? Sometimes one seems to speak to me, but there is no air to carry the utterance. Faces
Sun wants off quitting this grey, raggedy, old overcoat, the garden. Too cold out there for me, shrivelled flowerbed, brittle birds.
are blank zeros, sighs, unfathomable.
I retreat under my blanket,
This might be a welcome, a warning.
again read Lawrence’s
Should I tell them what it is
impassioned plea,
I need to know or turn my back on them,
a new spring
talk to the living while I can? These
bluebell-singing
seem just as incommunicado,
primrose-shouting.
standing off, not wasting breath. The sunlit living, they witness how I slide, though they will follow me down. I must talk with the inarticulate dead again, learn to be one with them, wear the common habit, nameless, and innumerable.
My dark night, I still see flashes of our love the bright colours our meld of ancestors field hands, weavers foundrymen, colliers. Even here, even now, out in the garden you can read helpless signs, the firstblind shoots, snowdrops, a miniature iris. A new world. Always.
POETRY A Good Enough Love Owen Gallagher “An open-eyed, quirky, quietly dexterous collection from Southall, from Ireland, from the bedroom and doctor’s waiting room. Owen Gallagher’s poems should be more widely known.” Moniza Alvi In his third collection of poetry, Owen Gallagher explores the notion of ‘a good enough love’ from ‘The Breast Thief’ to family love in ‘The Cure For Homosexuality’. “Gallagher has a genius for the short poem. He is witty, funny, surprising, radical without being ideological and very, very dexterous in his use of language. If Gallagher were Poet Laureate, they wouldn’t let him near the barge.” Alan Dent “Gallagher is a trouble-making poet, stirring things up. He’ll keep you asking yourself which side you’re on.” Mike Rosen Salmon Poetry • Paperback • £10.00 9781910669198 • 215x134mm • 96pp August 2015
A Murmation David Cooke “A fine poet.” William Bedford, The London Magazine In A Murmuration, David Cooke’s fourth collection, there are poems evoking his Catholic adolescence: dancing at a teenage disco or listening to the blues in the ruins of a medieval abbey. There are poems too that look back to the early days of his marriage. Yet from the outset we find a new concern: to go beyond appearances; to read landscapes, and explore the blurred frontiers where nature and civilisation merge. Frequently praised for the clarity and musicality of his verse, Cooke is an accessible yet nonetheless ambitious poet who does not shy before intractable themes. In previous volumes David Cooke has explored his family origins in the West of Ireland and his upbringing in an Irish family in Berkshire. Grounded in experience, his poems have frequently explored questions of belief and identity in a wide-ranging historical context. Two Rivers Press • Paperback • £8.95 9781909747111 • 210x135mm • 64pp
Anchored Lorna Shaughnessy “Shaughnessy writes with lyric intensity and uncompromising music.” Mary O’Donnell Anchored, Lorna Shaughnessy’s third collection of poems, explores what it means to be anchored in the physical world, in the limitations of the human body, in the present and in the past. The themes of witness and survival seen in previous collections are re-visited in ‘The Injured Past’, a sequence of poems based on events in mid-Ulster in the 1970s. Conflict and the dynamics of power are also central to the ‘Aulis Monologues’ inspired by Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia when the Greek flight is anchored in Aulis, awaiting departure for Troy. These are challenging poems that penetrate the nature of what it means to be ‘anchored’ in many realms of experience, whether emotional, physical or political. Multiple voices and perspectives draw the reader into close quarters with the realities of human limitation. Candidly direct, the language is precise, probing and fresh.
September 2015 Salmon Poetry • Paperback • £10.00 9781910669228 • 135x215mm • 90pp October 2015
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Arc David Clarke “Technically adroit, and often provocative, nuanced, and concerned with the world about it in a way which much other poetry is currently not.” Sabotage Reviews David Clarke’s first full collection follows on from an acclaimed and award-winning pamphlet Gaud (winner of the 2013 Michael Marks Pamphlet Prize). By turns subtle, bittersweet and wickedly sharp, this is a debut collection of poems to be savoured. “David Clarke’s exact, unsparing poems are executed with an eerie coolness. His intriguing narratives have their own sensual music, as subtle as his rhymes.” Alison Brackenbury “In these poems the body is political space, tussled over by sharps, transvestites, revolutionaries, pornographers and lovers; and the landscape is a semiotic battlefield, from which this sharp-eyed reporter delivers his slant despatches.” David Briggs
AWOL John Fuller & Andrew Wynn Owen AWOL is a charming collaboration between the eminent poet John Fuller, whose his career spans over 50 years, and bright young poet Andrew Wynn Owen, whose first pamphlet was published in 2014. In rural Wales, wandering the dunes west of Pwllheli, John Fuller has carefully composed a letter on the subject of travel: warning against it, wondering about people’s presences and absences, and serenely admiring ‘the Wales of sheep and song’. Andrew Wynn Owen has replied with friendly enthusiasm, matching John’s poetic form and his musings on travel. The epistolary poems are composed in terza rima in tetrameter lines, reflecting both poets’ love of metre and fiendish formal challenges.
Barefoot Souls Maram al-Masri Powerful, haunting and delicate work from this renowned Syrian writer, now based in Paris. Set against the backdrop of the ongoing Syrian War, these poems, capturing the unheard voices of women whose lives are suppressed in unimaginable ways, allow us to explore moments never mentioned in the news reports. This collection is potent, never failing to capture the essence of the feminine experience. It offers remarkable insights into life for Syrian women, often forgotten or neglected in the news stories of war and male politicians. Arc Publications • Paperback • £8.99 9781910345385 • 216x138mm • 88pp September 2015
The book will be beautifully produced on heavy art paper, and with hand-drawn line illustrations and watercolours by Emma Wright. The Emma Press • Paperback • £12.50 9781910139288 • 200x200m • 36pp
Nine Arches Press • Paperback • £9.99
October 2015
9780993120152 • 216x138mm • 80pp September 2015
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Biography of an Exile Adnan Al-Sayegh, trans. Stephen Watts A politically charged, hard-hitting and thought-provoking collection by one of Iraq’s best-known poets, Adnan al-Sayegh. Throughout this collection, Adnan explores the exhausting struggle for acceptance that follows being forced into exile. His poems, at first glance innocent and lyrical, are infused with darker undercurrents and nightmarish imagery. A distinct poetic voice; one which refuses to adjust to the expectations of a society, after being humiliated and shamed by its horrifying dictatorship. Passionate, outspoken and moving, these poems capture the power and resilience that come with mortality.
Bockwurst Halal Alistair Noon “Knockout poet.” Kelvin Corcoran Alistair Noon’s new collection of poems roams borders and hinterlands whether on the edge of nations and continents, history or even of the realms of possibility. A unique lyric energy enlightens everything it comes into contact with in these poems; where history, landscape and language and loom large, Noon’s attentive rhythms and acute wit bring out even the most subtle detail. These quicksilver poems invite the reader out and beyond, into new uncertain territories, subject to change without notice. Noon’s first full collection, Earth Records, was shortlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize.
Burning Books Jess Green “Somehow Jess manages to be hard hitting in a way that’s so subtle you don’t realise until the bruises comes up.” Scroobius Pip Jess Green hit the headlines when her poem ‘Dear Mr Gove’ went viral with over 290,000 views in the first week of its release on YouTube. Her first collection is taken from her spoken word show set in an inner city secondary school suffering the cuts and blows of government. Burning Books champions underdogs; the unnoticed and unheard stories bearing witness to the gritty reality of the UK’s education system. Jess has a solemn wit which brings social and political issues to the forefront of her personal stories.
Arc Publications • Paperback • £10.99 9781910345184 • 216x138mm • TBC September 2015
Nine Arches Press • Paperback • £9.99 9780993120169 • 216x138mm • 68pp October 2015
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Burning Eye Books • Paperback • £9.99 9781909136625 • 129x198mm • 100pp October 2015
Cinema Stories James Nash & Matthew Hedley Stoppard Launched to coincide with the Leeds International Film Festival. Before the Second World War, there were around seventy cinemas operating in Leeds. Since 2014, Valley Press poets James Nash and Matthew Hedley Stoppard have been visiting the sites of these abandoned picture-houses, and writing about them – and cinema going – in verse. Matthew Hedley Stoppard’s debut collection of poetry, A Family Behind Glass, was published by Valley Press in May 2013, and was included in the Guardian’s Readers’ Books of the Year. James Nash is the author of several books of poetry, most recently Some Things Matter: 63 Sonnets (Valley Press, 2012). Valley Press • Paperback • £7.99 9781908853523 • 198x129mm • 56pp October 2015
Collision Forces Kath McKay This beautifully intricate collection displays a gimlet eye for detail and a huge passion for the tiny dramas of everyday life. Kath McKay’s dense, fragmentary lines recount the quiet firestorms that fuel human relationships and the seismic reverberations that ensue. Set within an urban landscape of canals and parks, her poetry plays out the daily tragicomic dramas of life in a large city. No detail escapes her: headlice and bullying are intermingled with stories of love and death. Wrecking Ball Press • Paperback £8.95 • 9781903110287 • TBC • TBC October 2015
Coming Up Hot Eight New Poets from the Caribbean Here is an opportunity to discover some of the best new, unpublished poets from the Caribbean. Meet Danielle Boodoo-Fortune and her richly gothic take on love and its complications; Danielle Jennings’ exuberant narratives of family history and the struggles for respect between men and women; Ruel Johnson’s often witty attempts to confront the insanity of contemporary Guyana’s race wars and political corruption through the formal coolness of poetry; Monica Minott’s frank celebrations of women’s sexuality and her attempt to re-enter the world of spirit possession and trance; Debra Providence’s spare womanist reflections that pack a more devastating punch by saying more with less; Shivanee Ramlochan’s confidently experimental poems that explore the threatening uncertainties of the present through the imagery of speculative fictions set in some post-disaster world; Colin Robinson’s polyphonic, modernist reflections on the queer Caribbean and its joys and sorrows; and Sassy Ross’s tightly structured explorations of memory between the here and there of St Lucia and New York. Peepal Tree Press • Paperback • £8.99 9781845233099 • 206x135mm • 214pp August 2015
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DISTANCE DECAY
Cathy Eisenhower
Cornrows and Cornfields Celeste Doaks
Dancing in the Rain John Lyons
Cornfields and Cornrows is a heartfelt journey from the childhood fields of Indiana to the glittering metropolis of Chicago.
A collection of poems for 7-11 year olds that delights and celebrates universal human experience.
Spinning together memory, popular culture and personal politics, Celeste Doaks makes words dance, weep, wail and sing – often within the space of just a couple of lines.
Fans of John Lyons’ lively and appealing style will not be disappointed in this brand new collection of poems for younger readers aged 7-11.
This sublime collection of delightfully bold and vivid poems stay with you long after the final page is turned.
A breath of Caribbean fresh air, these poems are humorous, beautifully crafted, and perfectly pitched to their audience, though readers of any age will enjoy his painterly use of language.
Wrecking Ball Press • Paperback £8.95 • 9781903110218 • TBC • TBC August 2015
Lyons conjures up vivid images, situations and emotions which appeal both for their universality as well as their freshness, as he examines and comments upon the world around him with wit and empathy. A staple of school poetry anthologies, John Lyon’s poems never fail to stand out for their originality and exuberance. Peepal Tree Press • Paperback • £8.99 9781845233143 • 135x206mm • 64pp October 2015
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Distance Decay Cathy Eisenhower “Rife with elliptical magic & profound intelligence.” Carol Mirakove Tangling the language of socialscientific investigations of rape; media constructions of perpetrators and victims, and autobiographical memory, Distance Decay moves through that linguistic (and conceptual) mess via disclosure and even lyric. In attempting to come to literal terms with the experience of rape, the book establishes a playground in language for personal, historical emotion through personality theory and affective genealogies. This is an eagerly anticipated new collection from the poet-librarian living in Washington, DC. Ugly Duckling Presse • Paperback £10.50 • 9781937027520 • 6x8.25in 128pp • November 2015
Don’t Forget the Couscous Amir Darwish
Don’t Mention the Children Michael Rosen
Don’t Forget the Couscous is a book of poetry about exile and home, love and loss.
“There are few forms of wordsmithing at which Mr Rosen does not excel.” the Guardian.
This collection is a beautiful lovesong to the Arab world – Syria, Kurdistan, Morocco, Palestine and the poet’s native Aleppo. It is a memoir of the failed Arab Spring and the civil-war that has turned his native Syria into a ‘fountain of blood’. A bitter account of the demonization of Islam in the West, and the violent interference of the West in the Islamic world. It is about being a Muslim and not a terrorist. Amir Darwish draws on the magical-realism of Naguib Mahfouz, the social satire of Muhammad alMaghut and the love poetry of Rumi to describe the experience of Islam in Europe. This is a book about travel and love, and an apology on behalf of Muslims everywhere for having contributed nothing to the modern world except astronomy, coffee, clocks, algebra, falafels, apricots and doner kebabs. And don’t forget the couscous... Smokestack Books • Paperback • £7.95
Although Michael Rosen is one of our best-loved writers for children, his poems for grown-ups are less well known. Don’t Mention the Children is his first collection since Selected Poems (Penguin) in 2007. At the heart of the book is a remarkable series of poems about anti-Semitism, Fascism and War, connecting the contemporary world – UKIP, Marine le Pen, Palestine (the title poem refers to the refusal of the Israeli broadcasting authorities to mention the names of children killed during the Israeli shelling of Gaza in 2014) – to the lives of Rosen’s parents and grandparents – the General Strike, the Battle of Cable Street, Vichy, Auschwitz. Fans of his children’s books will enjoy the way these poems combine the silly and the sinister to catch the surrealism of everyday life. Few poets writing today can move so effortlessly between childishness and childlike seriousness.
Everything Crash Tim Wells “A poet of wit and brilliance.” the Guardian “Tim Wells is exactly the poet for our times. Sharp, witty and ultimately unforgiving in all the right places.” Phill Jupitus “A London poetry landmark.” The Times A piano is thrown from the top of an East London tower block. A Goth is sick on the bus. Crises, curses and kisses punctuate this new book of poetry by Tim Wells. Wells’ tightly honed poems satirise the slide towards a world of frustration, gentrification and heavy manners. Sometimes hilarious, often angry, always decisive, Everything Crash is a fierce examination of love, loss and the politics of modern living. This is poetry that challenges austerity and pretension with a cutting wit. Penned in the Margins • Paperback £9.99 • 9781908058218 • 216x138mm 80pp • Poetry (DCF)
9780993149030 • 197x127mm • 80pp October 2015
Smokestack Books • Paperback • £8.95 9780993149023 • 197x127mm • 168pp October 2015
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Cover TBC
Evidence of Freewheeling Trevor Conway
Ex-Libris David Hughes
Trevor Conway’s debut poetry collection touches a vast spectrum of tones and themes, blended with rhyme or free verse
A posthumous collection of poetry by beloved York-based English teacher, David Hughes.
He weaves startling imagery into his work, whether describing nature or capturing elements of modern life. Human nature is analysed, satirised and sometimes glorified. The world of sport is examined in minute detail. The creative impulse is explored in depth, as are the poet’s physical surroundings, particularly Sligo and Galway. Salmon Poetry • Paperback • £10.00 9781910669235 • 135x215mm • 92pp October 2015
David Hughes was born and raised in Liverpool. He taught English literature and language from 1975 to 2004 at St Peter’s School, York. When he died in 2011, he left over 200 poems preoccupied with the impact of war upon the individual, the landscapes of mountainous and glacial northern Europe, the ecology of school, his friends, Wales, Liverpool, York, moments of communal celebration, the eulogy. Valley Press • Paperback • £10.99 9781908853547 • 198x129mm • 128pp November 2015
Fence Tim Cresswell “Scientific knowledge, a quick linguistic wit, with echoes of folk song and a sharp but not unkind eye on the everyday – all fused by human warmth into a memorable voice.” Philip Gross “A distinctive, important new voice.” Jo Shapcott Fence is an epic of fragments that is at once beautiful and beautifully strange. In his exploration of the vast, frozen Svalbard islands, poet and geographer Tim Cresswell has created a kind of travel poetry whose taut, minimalist lyric synthesises subjects as diverse as history, politics and Arctic ecology. Echoing the mournful atmospherics of the great Anglo-Saxon elegies, this book-length poem is a powerful meditation on places that are slipping away. Penned in the Margins • Paperback £9.99 • 9781908058317 • 216x138mm 64pp • October 2015
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Fiddle Dreams John Sheahan
Finis-terre David Pollard
Fiddle Dreams is that rare thing – a collection of heartfelt, light-footed verses, and a unique insight into the mind of a musician at the heart of Irish cultural life.
“This is a remarkable and illuminating collection. It has already rewarded more than one reading and I am sure it will richly reward many more.” Acumen
John Sheahan is one of Ireland’s best loved musicians and the last surviving member of legendary band The Dubliners.
“It has such startling, accurate images, such lovely rhythms in its speech patterns, and repetitive echoes of images which unify the whole work (rather akin to the Four Quartets). Internalised images, classical allusions used to great effect, clever play on words, painterly colour – all with so many layers and levels of meaning.” Patricia McCarthy
That he is also a poet of considerable accomplishment is something of an open secret. In recent years his poems have been read and performed at countless events where music and the spoken word take to the stage together. In his debut collection of poems, Fiddle Dreams, Sheahan’s subjects range from childhood and family, through art and craft. But his main focus is the music that sustains him and the musicians who have played so significant a part along the way. Dedalus Press • Paperback • £12.50 9781910251102 • 140x216mm • 96pp September 2015
“This is a work to which I will return again and again.” Jason M Worth “Pollard’s new amplitude stretches his linguistic brilliance with a human resonance, confirming his unique voce and arguing – perhaps too quietly – for an essential place in British poetry.” Simon Jenner
Futures Theodoros Chiotos (ed.) An anthology of poetry and other writing about problems faced by contemporary Greece. These bold, impassioned and critically aware texts stake new poetic and political ground: they articulate what it means to live in a time when capitalism is buckling under its own weight and new ways of living and thinking seem to be emerging. In a time of crisis, Futures calls for solidarity, resistance and poetry as a political paradigm. Futures features some of the most daring new voices in Greek poetry, together with international poets with Greek connections. Penned in the Margins • Paperback £10.99 • 9781908058249 • 216x138mm 200pp • November 2015
Agenda Editions • Paperback • £6.00 9781908527226 • 150x210mm • 26pp August 2015
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Haiku Stanley Greaves
Half-Light and Other Poems Yevgeny Baratynsky
Illustrated poetry collection from renowned Guyanese painter, writer and artist, Stanley Greaves.
Half-Light & Other Poems brings together for the first time in English the most important poems of Yevgeny Baratynsky, one of Russia’s great 19th Century poets.
Gardens, household objects, frogs, dogs, birds, kites and a host of other flora, fauna, rocks and stones find their place in the fertile mind of this celebrated poet, painter, sculptor and musician. Haiku features eight pieces of original artwork: ink, brush and pen drawings and collages that offer an alternative vision to the poems. Peepal Tree Press • Paperback • £8.99 9781845232979 • 135x206mm • 56pp October 2015
In a new translation by Peter France, the philosophical, social and literary struggles of Russia under Tsar Nicholas I are brought to vivid life in the verses of a man who felt profoundly and was highly skilled at expressing his emotions and beliefs in dazzling, often fantastical fashion. Arc Publications • Paperback • £10.99 9781908376886 • 216x138mm • 144pp August 2015
Hit Parade The Orbita Group “Utterly without illusions, though redolent with delight (jocularity, longing, high velocity connectivity, and a profound appreciation for impossibility), these poets write in full knowledge that the human world is ridiculous... This is literature as the profoundest art, and one of the best collections of poetry I’ve ever encountered.” Lyn Hejinian Hit Parade is a bilingual RussianEnglish collection of poems by the four leading authors of the Orbita creative collective, based in Riga, Latvia: Semyon Khanin, Artur Punte, Vladimir Svetlov and Sergej Timofejev. Though their work is primarily written in Russian, the Orbita poets draw on European, Latvian and Russian traditions and contemporary scenes. Founded in 1999, Orbita has published a series of almanacs of literature and visual art and a number of bilingual Russian-Latvian books of poetry, essays, art and photography. Active in multimedia poetry installations for galleries and museums, Orbita has also organized three “Word in Motion” festivals of poetic video and multimedia art in Latvia. Ugly Duckling Presse • Paperback £11.50 • 9781937027568 • 5.75x8.25in 272pp • October 2015
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Cover TBC
Honoured Yvonne Green “This is a fine new voice, which deserves to be widely heard.” Elaine Feinstein “This collection is absolutely straightforward to read, but quite unforgettable.” Alison Brackenbury “There is a homeliness and accuracy of observation and diction in her work which reveal religious and social dignity.” Sebastian Barker “These poems draw you in gently but firmly, with telling detail and great emotional power. You share what Yvonne Green observes – very beautifully – about day-today experience; appreciate what she has personally learnt about suffering; and reflect with her on the contribution poetry can make to understanding (perhaps even resolving) the world’s problems.” Alan Brownjohn
House Myra Connell Myra Connell’s House is a startling debut collection from a poet adept at turning the poem’s confines in rooms for the reader to inhabit. These poems are by turns enchanting and darkly disquieting; they invite us in, ask questions, look for clues and mark out telling absences. Connell’s poetry is measured yet generous; experimental and adventurous; sharp, often angry, and yet tender. The house is question could be in the heart of the woods, high up on the moors, or a lone block at the end of a lost urban terrace. A cast of characters come and go from its spaces, life moves onwards as the day fades to twilight. The outside world presses in at the windows, a wilderness awaits at the threshold. Nine Arches Press • Paperback • £9.99
Smith Doorstop • Paperback • £9.95 9781910367568 • TBC • TBC October 2015
9780993120145 • 216x138mm • 72pp
How to Avoid Speaking Jaimee Hills “Jaimee Hills is enviably gifted, exuberantly ingenious, smilingly audacious.” Anthony Thwaite How to Avoid Speaking is the latest winner of the prestigious Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, and was selected from almost 500 submissions by the English poet, Anthony Thwaite. The collection is a catalogue of phobias, an exploration of sound and strange noises, which begins with the first confrontation with language and ends with a voice beyond the dead. It is a space where Brad Pitt becomes a 16th century anatomical drawing, where a Hemingway story melts under the threat of global warming, where Derrida agonizes over eating a Dorito. Jaimee Hill’s debut collection explores a philosophy of the awkward and the memento mori, in an investigation of what it means to own a body and speak through it.
July 2015 Waywiser Press • Paperback • £9.99 9781904130840 • 129x198mm • 112pp October 2015
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POETRY
In the Margin AC Clarke Recently long-listed for the National Poetry Competition, AC Clarke is a poet who consistently delivers honest, engaging poetry. Exploring the margin, whether of text or of personal or historical experience, Clarke skilfully focusses on ways in which reality can constantly shift, so that an affair outweighs vast political events or an unknown woman comes sharply into view. Poised and honed, at the heart of the collection is an affair that proceeds oblivious of the social and political context of the IRA mainland bombing campaign. The opening and closing sections contain mirror poems that push us inexorably to question the margin. Cinnamon Press • Paperback • £8.99 978909077959 • 216x140mm • 80pp November 2015
Indelible, Miraculous Julia Darling “The poems are funny, irreverent, moving and never sentimental. You can recognise yourself in them, recognise your family. They are warm, full of compassion; [...] a shining bright light.” Jackie Kay This collected edition commemorates the 10th anniversary of Julia Darling’s death, and includes a substantial selection of unpublished work. Julia Darling’s first novel Crocodile Soup was published by Transworld and was long-listed for the Orange Prize. Her second novel, The Taxi Driver’s Daughter, was published by Penguin, and long-listed for the Man Booker Prize. She also wrote many plays for stage and radio, including a linked series of plays under the collective title Appointments which were broadcast on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour shortly before her death. In 2003, Julia Darling’s first full-length collection of poems, Sudden Collapses in Public Places, was published by Arc and was awarded a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. At the time of her death, she was still revising her novel The Cure for Dying, the successor to The Taxi Driver’s Daughter.
Intervenir/Intervene Dolores Dorantes & Rodrigo Flores Sanchez Intervenir/Intervene is a searing, tender, unflinching collaboration between two of Mexico’s finest poets. They are Dolores Dorantes, who lived in Ciudad Juárez for 25 years and now has political asylum in Los Angeles, and Rodrigo Flores Sánchez, who lives in Mexico City. Intervenir/Intervene asks questions no one should have to ask: in a climate of state sponsored violence, what kinds of speech, writing, relation are possible? We are being intervened. How do we collaborate? How do we resist? Translated by Jen Hofer, a Los Angeles-based poet, translator, social justice interpreter, teacher, knitter, bookmaker, public letterwriter, urban cyclist, and co-founder of the language justice and literary experimentation collaborative Antena. “How we write about disappearance, murder and massacre is an unsolvable problem that requires an irreplicable mixture of honesty, empathy, love, strength and fear that is evident and alive in this beautiful, powerful work by Dorantes, Flores Sánchez and Hofer. ” Daniel Borutsky Ugly Duckling Presse • Paperback
Arc Publications • Paperback • £11.99
£11.00 • 9781937027414 • 5.75x8in
9781910345306 • 216x138mm • 168pp
208pp • September 2015
July 2015
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It Is I Who Speak Nigel Gerrans
Kitsune Jane McKie
Leaving Atlantis Esther Phillips
One of the great ‘undiscovered’ postwar British poets.
New collection from the award winning poet and former Poetry Book Society pamphlet choice.
Poems about the miracle of love, and how it may come at any time.
Nigel Gerrans’ sixty-year creative journey has been marked by personal reflection, piercing observation and eclectic spirituality. This generous new selection offers readers the best possible overview of his remarkable body of work. It Is I Who Speak is a book filled with energy; a fascinating and vital record of a wonderful writer; a collection of poems that will not fail to move and astonish all those who engage with them.
Accomplished, precise and lyrical, these poems are both spare and visceral, strange yet accessible. Memory in all its bodily forms and the way relationships make, tangle and transform us are captured in arresting images. The fourth collection from this talented poet delivers surprise without gimmicks and bears repeated reading. Cinnamon Press • Paperback • £8.99 9781909077843 • 216x140mm • 80pp
Valley Press • Paperback • £9.99 9781908853516 • 198x129mm • 136pp July 2015
November 2015
Leaving Atlantis is a suite of poems that explores the unstable territory between public and private. They are addressed to the great Barbadian novelist and thinker, George Lamming. The suite works at multiple levels, as a record of the negotiation of feelings, permissions, exclusions and treaties between two writers who have to confront the reality of their long lives. What the poems also deal with in a moving but resolutely unsentimental way is the fact that the age of one of the partners makes the temporal finiteness of the relationship a matter of acute awareness. Peepal Tree Press • Paperback • £8.99 978184523143 • 135x206mm • 64pp October 2015
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Letters to Akhmatova Patricia McCarthy “McCarthy has a graceful eloquence.” The Independent on Sunday. “This is a real treat: fascinating material which Patricia McCarthy has entered or ‘voiced’ so naturally with a musical mix of forms and rhythms. A very moving and original collection, reviving and giving new life to the great Russian Classical period.” William Bedford “This collection is riveting, moving, very well researched. McCarthy’s fluency is paramount and she identifies so closely with the great Akhmatova that the two become one. A collection not to be missed.” W S Milne Agenda Editions • Paperback • £9.00 9781908527219 • TBC • 48pp August 2015
Library Inspector Or: The One Book Library David Hart The latest collection from the former Birmingham Laureate. David Hart’s Library Inspector is a requiem to libraries and to the power of books, with imaginative origins in the new Library of Birmingham, and its realisation in the windswept landscape of coastal Mid-Wales. As the figure of the Library Inspector struggles to keep up with disappearing and contrary librarians in their tiny libraries, with their perplexing opening hours and their prized stock of just a few books, the landscape itself is changing, and memories and books alike are taken by the breeze and swallowed by the sea. Dreamlike and darkly-humoured, the library inspector’s journey reveals a vanishing world and long shadows on the horizon. The narrator might be decidedly unreliable, and the fables fabulous, but at this poem’s heart is melancholy in the face of a reality of library closures and fleeting time, for memory, for love and for the sake of words.
Limehaven Vicky Arthurs This collection is a celebration of the bond between young and old, of time spent together and wonders shared. Some of these poems are seen through the eyes of a child, others are remembrances and re-imaginings of Vicky Arthurs’ grandparents’ lives. Her grandfather was a butcher who lived through two World Wars, though he fought in neither. Shaped by wartime, they lived almost self-sufficiently. Her grandfather hoed and dug, while her grandmother stewed, baked, bottled and preserved. Their home was a haven, their garden a place of wonder and discovery. Borders brimmed with blooms. A lush lawn gave way to apple trees, raspberry canes, gooseberry bushes and row upon row of vegetables. Here three generations watched birds build their nests and listened to their chicks peeping in the hedges, pulled potatoes from the earth and tasted fresh-picked fruit. Iron Press • Paperback • £8.00 9780993124525 • 210x148mm • 68pp
Nine Arches Press • Paperback • £9.99 9780993120138 • TBC • 80pp July 2015
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July 2015
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Lost Evenings, Lost Lives: Tamil Poetry from the Sri Lankan Civil War Lakshmi Holmström and Sascha Ebeling (trans.) A hard-hitting, aesthetically moving anthology by poets from across the Tamil diaspora. In May 2009, the Sri Lankan government announced the official end of a civil war that had been ravaging the island for almost three decades. Throughout the conflict, Tamil poets commented on the war, forming what constitutes an extraordinary body of poetry. We find poems of violence and trauma, loss and exile, as well as courage and hope. Together these poems present an alternative history of the war. This collection, translated from the original Tamil, comes with an afterword that will provide readers with the historical and political context of Sri Lanka’s war, while also mapping literary developments during that period. This is a significant milestone in the representation of this largely unreported conflict.
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Malkin Camille Ralphs
Masculine Happiness David Foster-Morgan
A book of poems about one of Britain’s most famous witch trials.
A provocative debut poetry collection from Wales-based David Foster-Morgan.
Malkin is a vivid evocation of the 1612 Pendle Witch trials. The sequence of poems is delivered in the form of epitaphic monologues, with the accused men and women eerily addressing the reader with their confessions and pleas. Strikingly, poet Camille Ralphs has employed the technique of ‘free spelling’ throughout the monologues, bringing out new meanings in familiar words. Malkin offers a bold new way at looking at the trials, by giving the accused men and women voices. Fully illustrated with woodcut-style drawings from Emma Wright. The Emma Press • Paperback • £5.00 9781910139301 • 110x178mm • 36pp November 2015
Many of these poems, some years in the making, are inspired by the poet’s reading of American literature: the conversational tone of Frank O’Hara and the long-lined garrulity of Allen Ginsberg, as well as the models of masculinity handed out to us by Hollywood characters like John Wayne. Foster-Morgan is also a writer who casts a cold eye on the natural world, at one point lauding a landscape and the next mourning its depredation. There is also a considerable amount of humour here, along with astute satire and insightful character poems. It is elegy and satire for a lost industrial age. Seren • Paperback • £9.99 9781781722671 • TBC • 64pp October 2015
Arc Publications • Paperback • £10.99 9781904614999 • TBC • 128pp October 2015
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POETRY
If you liked this, you’ll love...
Sea Swim John Wedgewood Clarke “I am thrilled to be patron of this simple and simply beautiful idea. Poetry is going down to the sea again.” Carol Ann Duffy Throughout 2011, Sea Swimmers swam in Scarborough’s South Bay as part of imove, the Cultural Olympiad Programme in Yorkshire. They were led bravely into the waves by poet John Wedgwood Clarke, this is the resulting eighteen-poem sequence. The poems explore the fluent, fragile and sometimes agonisingly pleasurable relationship between the swimmer, the land and the sea around Scarborough; how swimming transforms the way we feel ourselves to be in our bodies, and the liberating effects these changes have on the imagination. Sea Swim may be as close as you can get to swimming in the sea without donning a wetsuit. “His work is amongst the best to have emerged from new poets in this country over the past two or three years.” Simon Armitage Valley Press • Paperback • £5.99
Mrs Uomo’s Yearbook Danielle Hope “Danielle Hope is a biting satirist, hitting out at the sham in all departments of life.” Patricia Oxley
“The inner world and the outer set one another alight in Robin Lindsay Wilson’s poems.” Envoi
Mrs Uomo’s Yearbook is Danielle Hope’s fifth collection of poetry and the second to feature her character Mrs Uomo – who muddles through modern urban society. Here Mrs Uomo teaches her cat about monetarism, struggles with the bureaucracy of the NHS and browses through her idiosyncratic yearbook.
In his second collection, Robin Lindsay Wilson pushes his distinctive style of short lines that become run-on sentences often traversing the poem in a single, frequently unpunctuated sentence, to develop an intriguing and powerful voice. Astute and full of wit and inventive ways of seeing, whether the subject is a relationship or issues of social class, these are dense poems full of layers, but never obscure.
Other poems in this collection reflect Danielle’s fascination with trees, coastal towns and cargoes, people who are not-so-ordinary and her memories of growing up on a farm. There are also translations of Italian poets, Giovanni Pascoli and Eugenio Montale. “Danielle Hope shares with William Carlos Williams a gift for observation; with Dannie Abse a lyricism and satirical edge; and with Chekhov a compassion manifesting itself in elegies and political poems borne out of long acquaintance with suffering.” John O’Donoghue in Poetry Express
9781908853066 • 198x129mm • 32pp April 2012
Rockingham Press • Paperback • £9.99 9781904851639 • 210x148mm • 80pp October 2015
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Myself and Other Strangers Robin Lindsay Wilson
Throughout the collection runs a sense of striving to connect, whether with the self or with other strangers, making this an eminently humane as well as highly accomplished collection. Cinnamon Press • Paperback • £8.99 9781909077836 • 216x140mm • 80pp November 2015
New Life Dan O’Brien “Very powerful poems.” Andrew Motion War Reporter (2013) – described by Patrick McGuinness in the Guardian as “a masterpiece of truthfulness and feeling, and a completely sui generis addition not just to writing about war but to contemporary poetry”– was the fruit of an unlikely and testing bond between the poet Dan O’Brien and the war correspondent Paul Watson. In New Life the scope of that bond is both deepened and broadened, taking in not just the Arab Spring and its aftermath in Syria, Libya and Egypt but Afghans on the tourist trail in Canada, meetings with Hollywood producers, and changes in the personal lives of the war reporter and the poet. Nothing is off-limits. This is a way of writing unique in contemporary literature, and New Life is a triumph of bearing witness. War Reporter won the 2013 Fenton Aldeburgh Prize for a first collection, and was shortlisted for the Forward First Collection Prize.
Nice Robert Garnham Nice, the debut collection from Robert Garnham, is a selection of whimsical ideas grounded in everyday experiences. Comedic, a little bit deadpan, ever so slightly surreal and comfortably whimsical, Garnham’s poetry brings a playfulness to literature that is warm and open to every reader. His comic poetry offers an escape from reality often veering into surrealism before swinging back to uncover the overwhelming hilarity of everyday life as he writes about relationships, love, custard cream biscuits and why the moon is called Simon. Burning Eye Books • Paperback • £9.99 9781909136649 • 129x198mm • TBC November 2015
No Other Gods Todd Hearon “The mastery displayed in Todd Hearon’s poems—in the complexity and clarity of his rhetorical frames, the beauty and balance of his artifacts, the power and freedom of his imagination, the precision of his music, his anthropological stringency—is astonishing enough. Astonishing beyond hope is the commitment to reality, the developed vision, that this mastery serves.” Vijay Seshadri – Winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry Todd Hearon’s second collection, No Other Gods, draws richly on his gifts as poet and dramatist. His poems strike the full octave with a jazzed, symphonic roots-music. In its play of masks and voices, the reader meets a pantheon both sacred and profane. No Other Gods is, ultimately, a paean to the human imagination, the force that in the face of negation and nothingness. Salmon Poetry • Paperback • £10.00 9781910669167 • 135x215mm • 86pp August 2015
CB Editions • Paperback • £8.99 9781909585102 • 210x135mm • 132pp October 2015
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Or, The Ambiguities Karen Weiser
Paradise Empty Hugo Mujica
“The meditative variation at play in this ambitious collection shines forth brilliantly, at any hour of the day or night.” Susan Howe
Hugo Mujica (Buenos Aires, 1942) is one of Argentina’s leading intellectuals and one of the foremost poets in the Spanish language.
Or, The Ambiguities is a book of long poems that asks how we correspond with the dead. Inspired by various works by Herman Melville, the poems in this collection invent new visual forms in order to playfully enact Jack Spicer’s idea that poems are “how we dead men write to each other.”
Mujica’s award-winning poetry, comprising more than 20 volumes, has been published in 15 countries.
“Weiser’s figures of speech are gloriously two-headed and unpredictable” Stephen Burt Ugly Duckling Presse • Paperback £9.50 • 9781937027612 • 6x9in • 80pp November 2015
Paradise Empty: Poems 1983-2013 is a bilingual edition offering the English-speaking reader a representative selection of all of Mujica’s poetry for the first time. His work is wide-ranging, covering philosophy, anthropology, fiction, and poetry and is where idea and feeling, synthesis and eloquence, truth and beauty come together. At the age of thirteen, Mujica began working at a glass factory, taking over from his father, who was blinded in a work accident. Ten years later, he arrived in the US in the early sixties and spent the decade in Greenwich Village and at the Free University studying the visual arts. He later became a Trappist monk and took a sevenyear vow of silence. He has been a Catholic priest for more than two decades. In 2013, Vaso Roto, one of the Spanish-speaking world’s most prestigious presses, published his Complete Poetry, 1983-2011.
The Parrot, the Horse and the Man Amarjit Chandan Amarjit Chandan was born in Nairobi, Kenya in 1946, and lives and works in London. He has published seven collections of poetry and four books of essays in Punjabi and his poems have appeared in anthologies and magazines world-wide. He has edited and translated into Punjabi about thirty anthologies of Indian and world poetry and fiction by, among others, Brecht, Neruda, Ritsos, Hikmet, Cardenal, Martin Carter and John Berger. He was one of ten British poets selected by the Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion, on National Poetry Day in 2001, and he participated in the International Aldeburgh Poetry Festival the same year. He has received numerous literary awards for his work, including the Life-time Achievement Award by the Language Department of the Punjab Government, India in 2004; the Life-time Achievement Award by the Panjabis in Britain All-Party Parliamentary Group, London in 2006; and the Life-time Achievement Award by the Anad Foundation New Delhi in November 2009. Arc Publications • Paperback • £9.99
Arc Publications • Paperback • £10.99
9781910345245 • 216x138mm • 128pp
9781910345146 • 215x138mm • TBC
August 2015
October 2015
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Pilgrim Tongues Cliff Forshaw Dense, rich and complex this collection draws on a fertile heritage of myth and legend, evoking lands long forgotten and landscapes rendered new by this most modern and lyrical of voices. Cliff Forshaw left school at sixteen and worked in an abattoir before studying painting at art college and developing an interest in languages and literature, which he studied sporadically at Warwick, Cambridge and London. His unusual freelance and academic career has involved working in locations as diverse a Snowdonia and Mexico, Tasmania and Bangor, Sheffield and New York. He is an experienced performer of his work and collaboration include performances of Trans set to music by Roddie Harris and Bethan Jones. With a long string of awards and artistic residencies behind him, Cliff now teaches at Hull University.
plenty-fish Sarah James “Highly recommended.” Luke Kennard Sarah James’ precise and astonishing poetry invites us to taste and touch the flavours, shapes, memory and experiences. The tang of sea-salt tempers the irresistible physicality of these adventurous poems. In this collection, the natural and emotional worlds merge in kaleidoscopic colours and all around us, nature runs riot. Humans are organisms in an ever-growing, changing and vanishing habitat; the family an ecosystem complicated by love, loss and letting go. The poems gather and swirl about you, a shoal of brilliant, electric moments. The water may be deep and clear, but the undertow is strong and dark, and sharp enough to cut to the bone. Nine Arches Press • Paperback • £9.99 9780993120121 • TBC • 72pp
Wrecking Ball Press • Paperback £8.95 • 9781903110317 • 150x210mm TBC • October 2015
July 2015
Providential Colin Channer Channer’s debut poetry collection achieves an intimate and lyric meditation on family, policing, loss, and violence. This collection is enlivened by humor, tenderness, and the rich possibilities that come from honest reflection. Combining the capacity to offer physical landscapes with painterly sensitivity and care, a graceful mining of the nuances of Jamaican patwa and American English, and a judicious use of metaphor and similie, Providential is a work of “heartical” insight and vulnerability. Not since Claude McKay’s Constab Ballads of 1912 has a writer attempted to tackle the unlikely literary figure of the Jamaican policeman. Now, over a century later, Channer draws on his own knowledge of Jamaican culture, on his complex relationship with his father (a Jamaican policeman), and frames these poems within the constantly humane principles of Rasta and reggae. Peepal Tree Press • Paperback • £8.99 9781845232481 • 135x206mm • 96pp October 2015
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Quiet in a Quiet House Richard W. Halperin “A passionate exploration of what makes life beautiful and devastating, a journey in delight, bereavement and above all memory.” Eiléan NíChuilleanáin Quiet in a Quiet House is a collection of poems about people and places no longer here. The landscape, whether Ireland, Italy, France or Japan, is characterised by quiet – interrupted at points by keening, by gales of laughter, by rants. Memory cuts both ways, past and future. Richard W. Halperin’s uniquely conversational poetic mode is known to those who have followed his ‘late arrival’ beginning with the seminal Anniversary (2010, Salmon Poetry). Salmon Poetry • Paperback • £10.00 9781910669204 • 135x215mm • 80pp October 2015
Quintet Jane McLaughlin, Mair Pitt, James Roberts, Joanne Stryker & Cathy Whittaker et al An anthology of emerging five emerging poets plus outstanding poems from entrants to the Cinnamon Press Debut Poetry Collection Competition. Jane McLaughlin writes poetry and fiction. She was longlisted in the National Poetry Competition 2012 and shortlisted in the Bridport Prize 2013. James Roberts lives in the Black Mountains of Wales. He is editor of Zoomorphic a new online magazine of wildlife writing. His crossover novel The Man in the Mountain was published in 2015 by Sea Campion Press. Mair De-Gare Pitt lives in Cwmbran with her family where she works as a tutor in English and Creative Writing. She writes drama, critical work, fiction and poetry. Cathy Whittaker’s poems have been published in many magazines and anthologies and she won the Stratford upon Avon Literary Festival Prize. Joanne Stryker has been active in the poetry world in Ontario, Canada. Her poems have been published in several Canadian literary journals and she currently lives between Canada and Yorkshire. Cinnamon Press • Paperback • £9.99 9781909077744 • TBC • 120pp October 2015
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Red Roar – 20 Years of Words Niall Griffiths A giant of modern literature, Niall Griffiths’ first poetry collection is every bit as exhilarating as his celebrated novels. Selected from two decades of notebooks, diaries and the sodden backs of beermats, Red Roar – 20 Years of Words celebrates Griffith’s journey towards redemption through language. Here is poetry that strips the human experience back to its barest bones and exposes the raw and unflinching essence within. Niall Griffiths is an author of novels and short stories set predominantly in Wales and Liverpool. His best known works include his first two novels Grits and Sheepshagger and his 2003 book Stump, which won the Wales Book of the Year award. The film adaptation of Kelly + Victor won a BAFTA for Best Debut Director for Kieran Evans in 2014. Red Roar – 20 Years of Words is Griffiths’ first published poetry collection. Wrecking Ball Press • Paperback £12.00 • 9781903110201 • TBC • TBC September 2015
Requiem Razmik Davoyan A powerful, poignant affirmation of the Armenian nation. After the Ottoman Empire’s entry into the First World War on 29 October 1914, the Armenians were accused – sometimes – of conspiring with the advancing Russian forces to ensure Turkish defeats. The legend of ‘Armenian treachery’ gave the Ottoman government a pretext to sanction measures designed to remove all traces of the Armenian population from the empire. From someone whose family suffered immeasurably, Requiem is an astonishingly measured and considered narrative of loss and survival. In an attempt to answer the moral questions raised by the event and its aftermath, Razmik Davoyan remembers and commemorates without bitterness. First published in 1969, this is a classic Armenian text by Armenia’s most loved living writer. Requiem tells of the struggle to survive and come to terms with a terrible human catastrophe.
Return to the Streets of Eternity Jan Carew The collected poems of internationally acclaimed Black writer. Return to Streets of Eternity brings together, for the first time, poems by one of the great Black intellectuals of our times. Written during a life-time of passionate engagement in anti-colonial, civil rights, black power and liberation movements, it includes many previously unpublished tributes to nineteenth and twentieth-century revolutionary leaders and to writers like Martin Carter, Dennis Brutus, Agostinho Neto, Andrew Salkey, Alejo Carpentier and Mumia Abu-Jamal. Jan Carew (1920-2012) was born in a village in Guyana, and educated in the US, at Charles University in Prague and the Sorbonne in Paris. A prolific author of fiction, history, essays, children’s books, plays and poetry, his books include Black Midas, The Last Barbarian, Rape of Paradise and The Guyanese Wanderer. Smokestack Books • Paperback • £9.95
Arc Publications • Paperback • £9.99 9781907376787 • TBC • 96pp September 2015
9780992740986 • 197x127mm • 165pp October 2015
A Science Not For the Earth Yevgeny Baratynsky “In one of my last travels I got a volume of a poet in Pushkin’s circle, though in ways much better than Pushkin—his name is Baratynsky.” Joseph Brodsky It is only in the past quarter-century or so that Yevgeny Abramovich Baratynsky (1800–1844) has gained wide recognition in Russia as one of the great poets of the 19th century. While the psychologically acute love elegies and meditations he wrote in the early 1820s earned him some fame during his lifetime, his later lyric verse was ignored or misunderstood by most of his contemporaries. Yet it is this body of work in particular, where he explores fundamental questions about the meaning of existence from an analytical epistemological perspective, that today seems remarkably modern. Featuring some 75 poems, from early works to poems from his final years, this is the first representative collection of the poet’s lyric verse in English. “Yevgeny Baratynsky was the most daring and dark of the nineteenth century poets.” Michael Wachtel Ugly Duckling Presse • Paperback £16.50 • 9781937027131 • 5.75x8.25in 640pp • October 2015
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Slow Bruise Aideen Henry “Aideen Henry has no more emerging to do as poet. She has arrived.” Kevin Higgins, The Galway Advertiser Slow Bruise is a collection where emotion is intensely felt, but tamed. Poems are cool and palatable and yet red hot with feeling. Henry reveals all facets of romantic entanglement from tentative beginnings on into the sensuous, finally reaching the forensic brutality of a relationship ended, combining unashamed desolation with a dignified grappling with grief. How we use language is also examined, and an undercurrent of Irish runs beneath these poems. Aideen Henry, a humanist minister, lives in Galway and also works as a writer, physician and lecturer. Her poems have been published previously in several literary journals and magazines and she is a popular performer at poetry events around Ireland. She was shortlisted for the Hennessy X.O. Literary Awards in 2009.
Slow Things Rachel Piercey and Emma Wright (ed.) A relaxing book which takes the long view of life and finds comfort in the passing of time. What’s so good about being fast? Sometimes a little patience goes a long way, and a slow thing can be both lovely and just what you need. Slow walks, slow thoughts and slow afternoons in the sun all provide inspiration for the poets in Slow Things, an anthology which celebrates taking life at a leisurely pace and casts a spotlight on slow processes and the passage of time. Ageing and decay progress with soothing, even reassuring inevitability and the poets invite us to see beauty in the stillness of the night and the ooze of a snail trail. The Emma Press • Paperback • £10.00 9781910139165 • 184x123mm • 72pp July 2015
Smithereens Tariq Latif “There’s an understanding of the beauty of the language, which means you have to have a very good ear – which he [Latif] has.” Andrew Motion This collection features evocative, spiritual poems from a Pakistanborn poet living and working in the Scottish Highlands. Latif’s work captures the moments of beauty, alienation, distance and intimacy he finds in the wilderness and remote towns of a region so often associated with emptiness, but which the poet shows us is rich with vivid life. Tariq Latif was born in a small village outside Lahore in Pakistan. He graduated from Sheffield University with a degree in Physics and worked in Manchester for fifteen years in a family printing business. He was the First Prize winner of the Daily Mail National Poetry Competition 2004, and his work has been featured on BBC2 television and BBC Radio 4. This is his third collection from Arc. Arc Publications • Paperback • £5.99 9781910345276 • TBC • 40pp
Salmon Poetry • Paperback • £10.00 9781910669174 • 215x135mm • 92pp August 2015
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July 2015
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Sons Noel King “This collection is a gathering together of the memories, stories and experiences that have shaped him. Often the tone is wry, melancholic, bitter even— but there is a breezy humour that occasionally bursts through.” Afric McGlinchey Bold sons, calm sons, bullying sons, dead sons, unborn sons, grim sons, farming sons, pilot sons, gay sons, straight sons, wishful sons, tearful sons, broke sons, rich sons, howling sons, bereaved sons, dressed-up sons, cast-out sons, disinherited sons; the sons in Noel King’s Sons could be your sons, or our sons. They permeate the boundaries of our expectations of how sons could or should behave. Noel King writes in many different voices and personas almost always in the first person narrative, giving an immediacy to this absorbing 21st century collection which is rooted in 20th century appeal and experience. Salmon Poetry • Paperback • £10.00 9781910669211 • 135x215mm • 88pp October 2015
Strange Fruit Kamau Brathwaite
Talking to the Dead Gordon Hodgeon
A rare collection that confronts old age with frankness and wisdom from one of the best known Caribbean poets.
A well-loved North-East poet who has chronicled his illness for many years.
Kamau Brathwaite has discovered a rich new vein of inspiration late in life, writing poems of urgency, wisdom, pain and brave humour. No poet since Hardy and Yeats has written about old age so insightfully and with such deep feeling. What you also hear in the poems, reaching back through Brathwaite’s distinctive Barbadian nation-voice, his creolisms of sound and graphic display, is a dialogue with ancestors of all kinds, including English poets such as Blake, Wordsworth and John Clare, as fellow visionary spirits who call through the ages with their sense of place, the loneliness of vision and the oneness of life. Always the innovator of language, Kamau uses form, phrase and sound to full effect in this collection. Peepal Tree Press • Paperback • £12.99 9781845233082 • 207x262mm • 124pp September 2015
For the past five years the poet Gordon Hodgeon has been confined to his bed. Following a series of unsuccessful operations on his spine, he is now unable to move his arms and legs, and cannot breathe without the help of a ventilator. In the last few months he has lost the power of speech. Today he can only communicate with the outside world by blinking at a Dynavox computer screen. Although he is condemned to painful silence, Hodgeon has continued to write, recording the changing seasons of his disability and the changeless seasons outside his window. The result is this extraordinary series of poems from the furthest edge of human endurance. These are the words of a man who cannot speak, the poems of a writer who cannot pick up a pen. Talking to the Dead is a book about disability and mortality, a painful study in helpless silence. But it is also, movingly, the defiant song of a personality still open to the world and its endless futures. Smokestack Books • Paperback • £4.95 9780993149009 • 197x127mm • 36pp July 2015
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If you liked this, you’ll love...
Adoptable Patrick Hicks
The Don’t Touch Garden Kate Foley
Thousands of childless couples in North America are increasingly turning to international adoption in order to become parents.
An absorbing account of the legacy of being an adopted child.
While there are many wonderful things about transracial international adoption, it is at its heart a breaking away. To adopt a child from another country necessarily means taking them away from their culture, their language, and their ancestral background. As the child grows up, what affect does this have? What does it mean to look across a border and bring a young life towards you? In this new collection, Patrick Hicks explores the thorny connections between home and away, blood and belonging, fatherhood and place, and he examines what it means to be a family. Salmon Poetry • Paperback • £10.00 9781908836823 • 210x134 mm • 74pp July 2014
Thank you for your donation of two and sixpence ... I am delighted to tell you we have for you a dear little catholic baby girl ... if you like baby you may take her away ... no need to bring any clothes, baby will have a small bundle... So wrote the Adoption Society to the woman who became Kate Foley’s adoptive mother. Sixty years later she was standing with her newly discovered brother by the bronze plaque commemorating their mother in a San Francisco graveyard. But this is not just the well-worn story of abandonment and discovery, although the poems hinge around those facts. While these poems will resonate strongly with those of us adopted as children, and with adoptive parents; all of us grow up wondering who we are and who we might be, and need to see, accept and parent the face we find in the mirror.
The Emma Press Anthology of Age Sarah Hesketh (ed.) An unsentimental collection which captures the difficult combination of the pain and the pleasures of old age. We’re all ageing. All of us, all of the time. As a society we’re getting even older, but we seldom seem to stop and think about the huge mental and physical changes that happen to us as we get old, or what it’s like to live as an old person. The Emma Press Anthology of Age contains poems that challenge, celebrate and give age a voice, showing how fun it can be to be old and how hard it can be; what it’s like when some things just don’t work anymore – and when some are better than ever. With poems from 34 poets including Alison Brackenbury, Doireann Ní Ghríofa, Julia Bird, Harry Man, Hugh Dunkerley and Anja Konig. The Emma Press • Paperback • £10.00 9781910139318 • 184x123mm • 72pp September 2015
Arachne Press • Paperback • £9.99 9781909208193 • 198x129mm • 64pp October 2015
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A Formula for Night: New and Selected Poems Tamar Yoseloff “For me Yoseloff really stands out.” Chris Beckett Tamar Yoseloff’s A Formula for Night: New and Selected Poems includes dazzling new work as well as selections from her print collections and pieces from collaborations with artists. The title poem was commissioned by the Hayward Gallery for their 2013 exhibition Light Show and is based on an installation by the Welsh artist Cerith Wyn Evans – a meditation on the space between heaven and earth. The poems in this collection are concerned with heavenly presences, evil spirits and explorations of light and dark. As well as the title piece, many other poems are informed by the work of visual artists, such as David Harker, Alison Gill, Susan Collis and Fred Sandback. The book also includes some poems from Formerly, a chapbook published in 2012 which included photographs by Vici MacDonald. Seren • Paperback • £12.99 9781781722688 • TBC • 180pp October 2015
The Gardening Fires: Sonnets and Fragments Jérôme Luc Martin
The Hole Story of Kirby the Sneak and Arlo the True Greg Williamson
Debut collection of poetry from a respected academic.
A fully illustrated collection of children’s poetry.
The Gardening Fires is Martin’s first collection of poems – a sonnet sequence set among the pines and inlets of the Mediterranean coast.
When Kirby the sneaky, dog-genius steals the hole Arlo dug in the yard, social order begins to break down. The ants get lazy. The brook dries up. The dragonfly has engine trouble. Kirby faces grave, injurious peril in getting it back and restoring cosmic harmony.
Each sonnet is coupled with a fragment that simultaneously extends and deconstructs the original poem’s language, theme, and music. These pairs of poems, which balance formal rigour with cascading incompleteness, are rooted in a tradition reaching from Lowell back to Petrarch, and deal the loss of love and its haunting persistence. Waywiser Press • Paperback • £9.99 9781904130666 • 129x198mm • 112pp October 2015
Reflecting upon the hole’s eerie influence, he contemplates spider webs, Newton, The Old West, Scottish history, Templars, the Roundtable Knights, the existence of dragons, and the nature of time, itself, on the way to devising his Theory of Something, The Downhole Effect. “In The Hole Story Greg Williamson once again demonstrates that he is a writer as metrically and intellectually nimble, as witty, and as line-by-line delightful as we have– or might hope to have–in American poetry.” Michael Griffith “It has been ages since a children’s poem showed this degree of polish, of unforced and uncloying smarts and brio and wit.” Brad Leithauser Waywiser Press • Paperback • £10.99 9781904130833 • 202x152mm • 120pp October 2015
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THE NARCOIMAGINARY Essays Under the Influence
RAMSEY SCOTT
The Learned Goose Jo Brandon “Here is a collection that leaps across time and space, between the domestic and mythical, with a fearless and lyrical grace.” Jacqueline Saphra The Learned Goose is a collection preoccupied with storytelling and the search for answers – often in surprising and ill-considered places. The learned goose was a genuine 18th century touring sensation: a goose that could predict the future, tell time and read you like a book. The learned goose is an oxymoron: geese are considered silly creatures, regulars in fairytales and rich pickings for derogatory idioms and expressions, and yet here we are turning to a goose for answers. From reimaging historical petit récits to contemporary misgivings The Learned Goose is a compendium of voices; a reminder of why we turn to words for comfort. “A bewitching collection containing the sensual and the witty, the sacred and profane, and glorious language with profound psychological insight, Jo Brandon is a very fine writer indeed.” James Nash Valley Press • Paperback • £8.99 9781908853554 • 198x129mm • 96pp November 2015
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The Narco Imagery Ramsey Scott
The Odd Sock Exchange David Mark Williams
Debut avante-garde collection of lyrical essays from a widely published American based academic.
Debut collection from a widely published poet.
Written according to its own dictum, “language is the universal inebriant,” these epistolary essays, personal narratives, meditations on avantgarde writers, and unorthodox forays into the “narco-imaginary”—the habits and conventions surrounding literary and cultural representations of drug use—attend to the residue of transient impressions that remain, long after the delirium of creative activity subsides.
Chosen by WatchWords in their “quest for the literary stars of tomorrow as recommended by the literary stars of today”, David Mark Williams was noticed for “the originality of his voice and quirky insights”, features that characterise his first full collection. From the intriguing title piece the tone is set for a collection that will challenge, entertain and surprise. Honed, accessible and brimming with mischief, there is also a dark thread and serious attention to life in this finely tuned debut.
Ugly Duckling Press • Paperback £11.00 • 9781937027445 • 5.5x8in 208pp • November 2015
Cinnamon Press • Paperback • £8.99 9781909077850 • 216x140mm • 80pp November 2015
If you liked this, you’ll love...
My Lord Buddha of Carraig Éanna Paddy Bushe ‘Paddy Bushe is a significant and necessary voice in Irish poetry.’ The Irish Times. My Lord Buddha of Carraig Éanna is a new English-language collection from one of the best-known bilingual Irish poets, following the much-lauded To Ring With Silence: New and Selected Poems of 2008. These poems see Bushe further exploring the mountains of distant Nepal and, closer to home, the geographical and literary landscape of west Kerry, where he has lived for many years. “... the voice adroit and confident, the poems strong, supple, sophisticated and articulate.” Macdara Woods, Poetry Ireland Review Dedalus Press • Paperback • £10.00 9781906614522 • 216x140mm • 96pp February 2011
The Rain Barrel Nicholas McLachlan The Rain Barrel is Nicholas McLachlan’s first collection of poetry. The poems are demonstrations of compassion, love and respect in a variety of locales – west Kerry, Dublin, Austria, Spain, and include meditations on the landscape and its effect on the psyche; on men and women and how they relate to one another; on the natural world of birds, trees, weather, found objects; as well as poems about family, friends and community. Salmon Poetry • Paperback • £10.00 9781910669181 • 215x134mm • 78pp August 2015
The Rilke of Ruth Speirs: New Poems, Duino Elegies, Sonnets to Orpheus, & Others John Pilling & Peter Robinson (ed.) First collection of Rilke’s work from the celebrated translator Ruth Speirs. Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) is universally recognized as among the most important twentiethcentury German-language poets. Here, for the first time, are all the surviving translations of his poetry made by Ruth Speirs (1916-2000), a Latvian exile who joined the British literary community in Cairo during World War Two, becoming a close friend of Lawrence Durrell and Bernard Spencer. Though described as ‘excellent’ and ‘the best’ by J. M. Cohen on the basis of magazine and anthology appearances, copyright restrictions meant that during her lifetime, with the exception of a Cairo-published Selected Poems (1942), Speirs was never to see her work gathered in book form. This volume brings Speirs’ translations the belated recognition they deserve. Rhythmically alive and carefully faithful, they give a uniquely mid-century English accent to the poet’s extraordinary German, and continue to bear comparison with current efforts to render his tenderly taxing voice. Two Rivers Press • Paperback • £10.00 9781909747128 • 210x135mm • 160pp October 2015
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The Secrets I Let Slip Selina Nwulu
The Shark Cage Laura Seymour
From reflecting on the complexities of belonging to coming home early for a sandwich at the back of the fridge, The Secrets I Let Slip is a collection of poems that bounce between the personal and political.
A powerful, innovative collection from a young poet to watch.
Inspired by themes of social justice, protest, identity and failed dreams of becoming a rock star, this debut pamphlet from Selina Nwulu considers the beauty and pain of living in a modern age.
“A poet whose company we might like to keep: wild, imaginative, surreal and witty.” Helen Ivory
Selina Nwulu is a environmental and human rights campaigner. Selina has worked for a number of not for profit organisations including the Equality and Human Rights Commission and as a researcher focusing on social justice, politics, education, and gender.
In a series of beautifully structured sequences, Laura Seymour deploys an extraordinary linguistic dexterity; muscular yet tender, precise and inventive, conjuring images that brim with surprise.
Cinnamon Press • Paperback • £8.99 9781909077751 • TBC • 80pp September 2015
The She Chronicles: History’s Maverick Women Lisa Rodgers A collection of poems inspired by history’s maverick women. The poems in this collection are inspired by the courageous, unconventional, pioneering and indomitable spirits of some remarkable Restoration and 18th century women. Their histories and accomplishments are mostly absent in the modern consciousness and were invariably ignored or belittles in their own time. The women are from different classes and circumstances but they are united by their audacity in being unconventional, or even simply notable, at a time when this was the prerogative of men. Including Dido Bell, Aphra Behn, Mary Wollestonecraft, Mary Shelley, Anne Bonny and Mary Robinson.
Burning Eye Books • Paperback • £6.99 9781909136496 • 198 x 129mm • 36pp August 2015
Iron Press • Paperback • £8.00 9780993124518 • 210x148mm • 60pp July 2015
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The Singing and Dancing: Collected Poems Ann Atkinson Ann Atkinson, who died from a brain tumour in 2012 aged 64, was a talented and passionate poet. “Poetry for Ann was a currency, like conversation, its nature being to capture and clarify elusive ideas that might otherwise remain unformed: so her characteristic style was natural and conversational, often with a crackle of verbal play, and an alertness to the possibilities of language that enabled her to achieve an effect of sensuous exuberance without becoming incoherent or merely fancy. She was a pianist and a skilled listener to music, with a background in dance and an openness to visual art and design. In poetry she had an enviable talent for beginning a piece without ceremony and ending it without strain: not every poet can do both.” from the Foreword by Roy Fisher. The Poetry Business • Paperback £9.95 • 9781910367391 • TBC • TBC
The Stonegate Devil Carole Bromley
The Story of No Emma Hammond
“She gets under the skin of her subject in an impressively direct and imaginative way.” Don Paterson
“Wild and unsettling but also cool and convincingly modern. Emma Hammond is the real thing.” Hugo Williams
Carole Bromley’s second collection of poems, The Stonegate Devil, centres on her home town of York, exploring its personal stories and history in a way that is both playful and moving, addressing childhood, relationships and coming-of-age. A number of poems also explore the poet’s experiences of bereavement and loss.
In The Story of No Emma Hammond delivers an experimental lyric that is wild, weird and full of the errata of modern life. Her poems reappropriate the language of brands, pornography and instant messaging, and argue for Carry On films and Wotsits as the true subjects of poetry.
“Infused with the wit and pathos of the everyday, there is something undeniably very attractive about Bromley’s understated approach and cleareyed focus.” Kathryn Gray, Magma “Intriguing, alarming, Bromley’s poems make excellent travelling companions. Her best poems have a beautiful clarity of pattern and her strong, courageous work can carry readers to unexpected, transforming destinations.” Alison Brackenbury, Poetry Review
The shifts of register and voice alone range from the breathtaking to the disconcerting in what promises to be a much talked about second collection. Penned in the Margins • Paperback £9.99 • 9781908058300 • 216x138mm 64pp • September 2015
July 2015 The Poetry Business • Paperback £9.95 • 9781910367544 • TBC • 70pp October 2015
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the terrible Daniel Sluman “Daniel Sluman is a name to watch for. The one thing I demand from poems I read is that they change me in some way – and these do.” Angela France Daniel Sluman’s bleak brilliance in the terrible is a masterclass in the power of poetry to confront some of the most difficult subject matter with accuracy and painstaking openness. These are rigorous and exacting poems, that dare to go to some of the darkest places and interrogate a bare language to speak out with truthful precision. These poems may be stripped down, intense and frank, but they are not without great beauty; Sluman writes of the heady cocktail of being alive, where loss, love, sex, close shaves with mortality and the sharp narratives of pain and suffering are written in crystal-clear and humane clarity. “Crackles with energy; his language is physical, fast-paced, passionate, fearless. A real discovery by Nine Arches Press.” Penelope Shuttle Nine Arches Press • Paperback • £9.99
The Venus Papers Lydia Towsey “I think she will become one of the new, intriguing voices of her time.” Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze The title sequence of The Venus Papers takes as it’s starting point Botticelli’s 15th Century painting, ‘Birth of Venus’ where Venus is depicted arriving on a shell at a Cypriot beach. Transported to the 21st century UK; Lydia explores how Venus would respond to what she would find and what would she do next. Venus’s progression from innocence to experience is mirrored across numerous arrivals, departures, journeys and landscapes; from a dancing mother to a psychopathic Barbie, murderous mozzarella and a road trip across the Spanish Badlands. By viewing Venus as everywoman, outsider, traveller and immigrant Lydia explores how women are viewed and affected by cultural, political pressures. “Lydia Towsey is an imaginative poet and performer who carefully crafts her work for both the page and the stage. Her work is a pleasure to read and a joy to watch.” Kevin Fegan
9780993120183 • TBC • 72pp November 2015
Burning Eye • Paperback • £9.99 9781909136588 • 129x198mm • TBC October 2015
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The Very Best of 52 Jo Bell & Norman Hadley (ed.) An anthology of the best of the 52 project. The 52 project started with a simple idea: Write a poem a week. Start now. Keep going. It became a phenomenon. Hundreds of poets took up the challenge and their poems swept the board of poetry prizes, publications and personal successes. This little book offers a tiny sample of their work – one poem for every week, on themes ranging from colour to birdsong, from violence to snowfall. Nine Arches Press • Paperback • £7.99 9780993120176 • TBC • 76pp July 2015
Things You Find in a Poet’s Beard A.F. Harrold & Chris Riddell
True Tales of the Countryside Deborah Alma
UEA Creative Writing Anthology Poetry (2015) Introduction by Tiffany Atkinson
Fully illustrated by 2015 Children’s Laureate Chris Riddell.
Deborah Alma is The Emergency Poet, meaning she travels around fairs and festivals in a 1970s ambulance, prescribing poems for her ‘patients’.
With an introduction by Tiffany Atkinson, this collection from the most recent class of poets to graduate from the UEA’s renowned UEA Creative Writing MA brings together a sparkling constellation of new voices.
Things You Find in a Poet’s Beard is a collection of poems that have been shouted at children from schools to church halls. They are a curation of silly tales that have been illustrated and bound into a book. Perhaps you’ll want to annoy your family by reading them out; perhaps you’ll want to chuckle at them under the covers with a torch; perhaps you’ll want to stare at the drawings drawn by Mr Chris Riddell or maybe you’ll want to shout them aloud to capture the spirit of A.F. Harrold himself. A.F. Harrold’s children’s books, including the very funny Fizzlebert Stump series and the slightly scary novel The Imaginary are published by Bloomsbury. “I read one of A.F. Harrold’s poems to my two year old son and it disturbed him greatly.” Daniel Cockrill
Deborah Alma’s poems are gloriously pungent, teeming with colours, textures and smells. In her debut collection True Tales of the Countryside, Alma writes vividly about sex, love and ageing in rural Shropshire and Wales, and reflects on her experiences as a mixed-race, Anglo-Indian woman. Eyeballs pop, fresh piss steams and women come – loudly – in poems which often startle with their honesty and intimacy. The Emma Press • Pamphlet • £6.50 9781910139264 • 129x198mm • 36pp October 2015
“These are poems that look dangerous on the page. They travel a lot – often without the safety of a compass – and they frequently find their way into territory where a moment of change seems surprising and sudden and inevitable. That’s to say, these poems like to keep company with truth and risk and transformation. Yet sometimes they also pause in quiet places, where you can almost hear them whispering about beauty.” Bill Manhire, UNESCO City of Literature Visiting Professor, 2015. Egg Box • Paperback • £9.99 9780993296222 210x148mm • 64pp November 2015
Burning Eye Books • Paperback • £9.99 9781909136618 • 129x198mm • TBC October 2015
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Underneath the Roses Where I Remembered Everything Molly Case Molly Case is a multiple slam poetry winner who achieved a national profile after her poem Nursing the Nation received over 300,000 YouTube views in the first week of its release. Underneath the Roses Where I Remembered Everything is a collection of exposed and vulnerable moments from the perspective of a nurse. It explores the importance of memories and things that slip away as life goes on. These poems contain both blood and bile from first kisses and the last breath of lives beyond hospital walls.
Waymarks Mavis Gulliver
Wife Tiphanie Yanique
Latest collection from the widely published children’s novelist and essayist.
A long-awaited debut poetry collection from a successful novelist.
Delighting in the sound of language, this highly layered and lyrical collection gathers threads from nature and memory to explore the natural world; the marks we leave on it and it on us.
In Wife, both ironic and deeply serious, there are wittily sharp poems with a disabused feminist perspective on the gender inequalities and potential prisons of marriage, but they are in dialogue with poems that celebrate the physical joys of intimacy and poems that explore the processes of self-creation that take place in the closeness to the male other.
Intense observation is underpinned with a passion for seeing not just the surface of things, but into the heart. This is a collection filled with quiet wonder and exquisite precision. Cinnamon Press • Paperback • £8.99 9781909077867 • 116x240mm • 80pp
Burning Eye • Paperback • £9.99 9781909136632 • 129x198mm • TBC November 2015
November 2015
There are poems that are cutting about male self-deceptions and arrogations of power that speak to poems displaying deep sensitivity to the aloneness of the embattled male psyche. This is not verse in the confessional mode, but poems that take on other voices, other histories and explore the relationship between experiences and the way we mythologise them. Peepal Tree Press • Paperback £8.99 9781845232948 • 135x206mm • 72pp November 2015
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P oetry b a c k l i s t
Blood Work Matthew Siegal CB Editions • PB • £8.99 9781909585058 • 80pp
Campaign in Poetry: The Emma Press Anthology of Political Poems Rachel Piercey and Emma Wright (eds)
Cherry Pie Hollie McNish
Endless Running Games Gareth Durasow
Burning Eye Books • PB • £9.99 9781909136557 • 80pp
Dog Horn • PB • £8.99 9781907133909 • 64pp
The Emma Press • PB • £7.50 9781910139172 • 40pp
Haunt Mark Granier
Kissing Angles Sarah Fletcher
Kith Jo Bell
Life Class Jo Reed
Salmon • PB • £10.00 9781910669013 • 94pp
Dead Ink • PB • £5.00 9780957698574 • 30pp
Nine Arches Press • PB • £8.99 9780993120107 • 90pp
Valley Press • PB • £7.99 9781908853493 • 52pp
Oswald’s Book of Hours Steve Ely
Skipper Christy Ducker
Speculatrix Chris McCabe
The Sound Ladder David Attwool
Smokestack Books • PB • £7.99 9780957172234 • 64pp
Smith Doorstop • PB • £9.95 9781910367360 • 53pp
Penned in the Margins • PB £9.99 • 9781908058256 • 80pp
Two Rivers Press • PB • £8.95 9781909747098 • 72pp
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