*****
A New Title for March, 2024:
Morgenstern’s Magic
A bilingual selection of poems by Christian Morgenstern
Translated by Timothy Adès
Christian Morgenstern (1871-1914) is best known as a nonsense poet, above all for his Gallows Songs and the two characters, Korf and Palmström. These works have always been very popular, appearing in numerous editions, much quoted, and set to music. He could be serious too: he was an essayist, and an acclaimed translator, especially from Norwegian and French. Health problems kept him constantly on the move,: this brought him many contacts and interesting encounters. His mystical side is less well known, especially to English readers.
Timothy Adès, born 1941, is a rhyming translator-poet. He has published several books from French, two from Spanish, and has awards for work from those two languages. He has rewritten all Shakespeare’s 154 Sonnets without using letter E. He can be found on Facebook and YouTube, and on his website which is www.timothyades.com . He keeps as close to the original text as he can, but most of all, tries to convey the spirit of the original.
Many of these poems by Morgenstern have inspired videos on YouTube, often more than once. There is so much to enjoy, from great classical singers through folk and jazz to talented children, creative visuals, and some very effective readings. As an exciting innovation in publishing, and a great enrichment of this volume, we offer you a selected list, to be found at the end.
United kingdom
United States
*****
Submissions:
PLEASE NOTE THAT THE HIGH WINDOW PRESS IS WORKING THROUGH A SMALL NUMBER OF REMAINING COMMITMENTS BUT WILL NOT BE TAKING ON ANY NEW PROJECTS.
*****
However, all collections accepted for the current year are now available via Amazon or The High Window’s own website : The Boycott by Sally Michaelson, Slippage, Poems 2013-2018, a new collected edition of David Cooke’s more recent collections, Walking Away, New and Selected Poems, by Shaun Traynor, The Leading Question by Roger Elkin, Mollusc by Mark Totterdell, Silver Samovar by Jenny McRobert and Of Gardens and Witches, a Herbal, by Adrienne Silcock, Shepherd’s Warning by Mervyn Linford, Modern Ancient by Timothy Dodd.
*****
All other currently available titles can be browsed here.
*****
New Titles for Spring 2023
Rainer Maria Rilke: The Book of Hours, a Version by Robert Saxton
Here for the first time Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Book of Hours is rendered into satisfying poetry in English in a version that follows the rhyme patterns of the original German. An introduction covers the sources of Rilke’s inspiration, as well as the principles Robert Saxton has followed in his approach to the work.
Rilke’s earliest masterpiece is compelling, outspoken, impassioned, strange and wholly alive. It catches the reader off-guard with surprises and frissons of all kinds. Varied and restless, it presents a kaleidoscopic picture of the poet’s complex and shifting relationship with God, which at times feels like a love affair. Key themes include doubt, desire, art, nature, time, nothingness, pilgrimage, the city, poverty and death. All this is set within a vibrant world, peopled by memorable characters, including a young monk resisting the temptations of the flesh, Michelangelo, Botticelli, the Virgin Mary, St Francis, farmers, monks and a sinister nightwatchman.
United Kingdom
United States
*****
Alan Price: The Cinephile Poems
‘Here is something new and different—a totally original way of dancing through film history. With a rat-a-tat-tat James Elroy delivery of plot points, Price ends each prose-poem with a little bouquet of memories. This is when I first saw it, this is what I thought, this is what I felt. Beautiful, touching, moving—a new way of viewing the classics.’ Mark Rappaport, film director.
‘How to capture the first impact, and the lasting memory of a movie? Alan Price has found his own way in these often eloquent prose poems, recording flashes of inspiration, and especially the variety of ways we encounter films, and how they stock and shape our imagination. It’s a collection to respond to, sometimes argue with, but above all the record of a lifelong love-affair.’ Ian Christie, Professor of Film and Media History, Birbeck, University of London
‘The Cinephile Poems responds, with eloquence and precision, to a wide range of classic films. Individually, each poem is a celebration of a beloved movie; collectively, they a dmit the sombre truth that “Transcendence can happen in the movies. / But in life, the other side of the camera… much less.” Alexander Jacoby, Senior Lecturer in Japanese Studies, Oxford Brookes University
United Kingdom
*****
Submissions:
PLEASE NOTE THAT THE HIGH WINDOW PRESS IS NOT CURRENTLY CONSIDERING NEW PROJECTS.
However, all collections accepted for the current year are now available via Amazon or The High Window’s own website : The Boycott by Sally Michaelson, Slippage, Poems 2013-2018, a new collected edition of David Cooke’s more recent collections, Walking Away, New and Selected Poems, by Shaun Traynor, The Leading Question by Roger Elkin, Mollusc by Mark Totterdell, Silver Samovar by Jenny McRobert and Of Gardens and Witches, a Herbal, by Adrienne Silcock, Shepherd’s Warning by Mervyn Linford, Modern Ancient by Timothy Dodd.
*****
New Title for Winter 2023
*****
Carla Scarano D’Antonio: Workwear
‘These poems are extraordinary, in the full sense of the word, rich in texture and tone and with an emotional range that sweeps the reader on a journey through the colour, drama and intensity of poems in the first section and then, in contrast, leads on to the poignancy of poems about background and family. A stunning collection.’ Mandy Pannett
‘The poems are sometimes quite startlingly frank and even as they celebrate the peaceful fruits of human labour (wheat and corn stretch to the horizon) they insist on pointing out the bitter costs of human foolishness.’ Michael Bartholomew-Biggs
‘I am here to tell the truth, D’Antonio writes…embroidering poems, imagining realities. She resolutely finds poetry woven into the fabric of the everyday and the domestic, connecting effortlessly with personas from the past, and with the reader.’ Dawn Wood
NB: Copies of Carla’s book are no longer available via THW. Please contact me via THW and I will put you in touch with her family.
*****
New Title for Autumn 2023
Anthony Howell: Invention of Reality
Anthony Howell’s first collection, Inside the Castle, came out in 1969. In 1973 he was invited to participate in the International Writers Program at The University of Iowa. In 1997 he was short-listed for a Paul Hamlyn award. His versions of the poems of Statius were well received and those of Fawzi Karim were a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for 2011. He was the founder of The Theatre of Mistakes and editor of Grey Suit Editions. His most recent book of poems is Songs of Realisation, The High Window Press 2017.
This collection demonstrates the stylistic range of the poet’s output. First, a sequence of dizains records the experience of a stay at Hawthornden Castle. After that, the reader embarks, as did the castle’s owner William Drummond, on a tour of Europe, returning to an England that prompts jaundiced satire. Finally there is an elegiac sequence dedicated to the author’s friend Iraqi poet Fawzi Karim – imaginary ‘versions’ of poems written from the afterlife.
United Kingdom
United States
*****
New Titles: Summer 2022
Mervyn Linford: Shepherd’s Warning
‘In this collection Linford asks ‘Do we ever grow old, or is winter where we find what we have lost?’ Abounding in both Christian and pagan imagery, Linford scans the measure of the Earth, the unspoken language of animals and flowers, insects and birds, rivers and woods. These seasonal poems with their references to the phases of the moon, fair weather clouds and the constellated seed heads of dandelion clocks surprise and confound the way we think of time.’ Neil Leadbeater
‘With his strong sense of place, Mervyn Linford celebrates the Essex and the Suffolk countryside with the rich and sensual language of nature. He charts the seasons and the weather with words that draw the reader inexorably into his countryside and his memories of a lifetime spent by the rivers and marshlands of East Anglia. This is a poet who can talk to the bees and whose work transcends the limitations of paper and ink.’ Adrian Green
United Kingdom
United States
*****
Timothy Dodd: Modern Ancient
‘In Modern Ancient, Timothy Dodd creates a landscape of time, the ‘timescape’ implied in the title. Dodd writes a poetry of movement, by mixing and arranging poems from a distinct palette of formal approaches. The narrative of the book flows backwards while the poems move in and out from symmetric quartets in soft enjambments to dislocations of words across the page. This is how Dodd empties time from place: by creating a sense of nomadic poetry that travels and expresses the sense of chaos and alienation. In the end, Dodd finds us seeking codes of meaning as we transit through the realm of affects, the dwelling place of poetry, where everything could be good and better. Elidio La Torre Lagares
‘In Timothy Dodd’s poetry collection, ancient knowledge comes together to assist our disconnection with everyday experience in modern times. Following Neruda’s tradition in Alturas de Macchu Picchu, a journey to origin to enlighten the present, Dodd proposes writing as archeology for emotion. The poetic image connects us with past realities, allowing ancient light to assist our return to a conscious experience of the present. Modern Ancient acts as a vortex that links everyday adventures with a sense of transcendence. To invigorate this path, Dodd visits different textual strategies and registries. He also takes from his background as a visual artist to create writing that is always concrete and powerful. Andrea Cote
United Kingdom
United States
*****
New Title: September 2021
Adrienne Silcock: Of Gardens and Witches, a Herbal
‘In writing Of Gardens and Witches Adrienne Silcock has created moving, beautiful poetry on the significance of herbs, their ancientness and immediacy. She touches on familiar species with traditions of healing; she reaches for their more elusive meanings relating to myths, histories, cultures and civilisations. In the same breath she weaves in her own experiences, sometimes personifying a herb as if addressing a curative friend, such as Aloe Vera. Each plant is described with a sense of its unique character and natural personality on the earth and in the cosmos. Also the book feels contemporary and utterly relevant, inspired by the global message that we must become ecologically aware or we will perish as a species ourselves. In the end I wish to hold the book in my hand and seek out these herbs, some only steps from the back door, and breathe in their healing fragrance of love and warning. ‘ Paul Sutherland
‘A magical and atmospheric collection, celebrating and illuminating the properties of herbs — many that the reader will have heard of and some they may not — and delving into the mythology that has surrounded them throughout history. But the poems don’t stop there. Through her focus on the significance we have ascribed to herbs, Adrienne Silcock also creates a gripping and unsettling picture of humans. Her investigations into the things we want herbs to give us and the things we want them to prevent serve to bring all our hopes, fears, desires and superstitions to the fore.’ Mandy Sutter
‘Loved this poetic alphabet of herbs. It did hold the magic.’ Patricia Borlenghi
United Kingdsom
United States
*****
New Titles: June 2021
Jenny McRobert: Silver Samovar
‘I loved this collection. Whether writing gentle and delicately beautiful nature poems, poems about childhood evoking a lost world of winceyette and Bakelite, or handling the pain and cruelty of antisemitism, this poet writes with honesty, a light touch and a sense of humour. I was particularly struck by the way food is used as a strong theme throughout, cooking with its smells and tastes is always associated with family, love, the past and what a rich and fascinating past it is.’ Carole Bromley
‘In Silver Samovar there is a poetic pulse that carries us through the celebrations and betrayals of youth, as well as the frailties of later life; a pulse that communes in ‘silvery silence’ and frees ‘the locked-down past’ of persecutions, departures and arrivals – each revelation laced with the sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and texture of journeys, nations and relationships. In poems written with the lightest of touches, but with the gravitas of truth, the book coheres around its centrepiece, the long poem, ‘A Place called Golgotha’, in which the poet’s search for connection, her anthem to heritage and belonging, triumphantly finds its voice.’ Claire Dyer
United Kingdom
United States
Mark Totterdell: Mollusc
Poetry of this quality makes you wonder why Totterdell isn’t better known within the mainstream of British poetry as I’ve seen far lesser poems than this highly praised in the national press. His exploration of the relationship between people and his planet’s co-inhabitants has something of the intellectual and emotional power to be found in Helen Macdonald’s prize-winning prose work, H is for Hawk…Stimulating, erudite and unpretentious. Great stuff. Steve Spence in Stride on This Patter of Traces.
Much-anticipated, the new book surpasses expectations, its sections staking out Totterdell’s characteristic territories: the engagingly reflective lone walker at large in OS maps; the meticulous describer of the natural world whose endlessly resourceful language is our connection to its otherness; the connoisseur of the evocative names (and interiors) of pubs. Scintillating. Alasdair Paterson on Mapping.
United Kingdom
United States
*****
New title: May 2021
Sally Michaelson: The Boycott
Sally Michaelson lives in Brussels where she worked at the EU as a conference interpreter for forty years . She recently retired and enjoys her beautiful grown-up children, writing poetry, jazz dance and walking in the forest. Her poems have been published widely but this is her first collection.
‘In The Boycott Sally Michaelson takes us on a tour through the eerie alleyways and secret passageways of history. The 50th Floor of the Empire State Building, the Long Island Sound and hot streets of Alexandria are juxtaposed with Coney Island, blaring sirens and butchers being given a slap with a moist piece of liver. The collection opens with a compelling sequence of poems related to the circus and lives of The Lorch Family: daggers through tarpaulin, and ashes stashed “in the wheels of the trailer…. to spin some cartwheels.” A rich and evocative collection, quite unlike anything else.’ David Tait
‘Sally Michaelson’s poems are disarming, incidental and dark. There are two competing forces: a warmth generated by people going about their daily work; and an ever-present sense of danger. Disaster sometimes takes place before your eyes in her writing, but she does not flinch. There is a light touch in this writing which holds the background violence at bay. It always invites the reader in, and before you know it, you experience the yearning, the terror, the resignation or resilience of the characters she animates. The Boycott is a powerful collection of glimpses.’ Bill Greenwell
United Kingdom
United States
Back to the top Further Titles
*****
New title published in March 2021
*****
Roger Elkin: The Leading Question
In this sequence of poems Roger Elkin explores aspects of the Great Irish Famine (1845-51) including the arrival of blight, pestilence, evictions, forced emigration, and coffin ships. The sequence grew out of a visit by Roger Elkin to the Co Roscommon Mahon/Hartland Estate of Strokestown Park House, home to the Irish National Famine Museum.
‘There is a stunning energy behind the characterization of the protagonist and the rendering of his various encounters with the consequences of the famine. The hunger-driven thrill of the kill is wound through Taking Sheep, where the drive to survive compels a brutal humanity … The same shrewdly-extended syntax achieves a different kind of grimness … where Dan takes an old friend on his final journey to the ‘Famine pit’ Will Daunt, Envoi
‘Roger Elkin’s poems burst with sharply observed and well-chosen detail, and are simply very interesting.’ Don Paterson
United Kingdom
United States
*****
New Books for December 2020
*****
David Cooke: Slippage, Poems 2013 – 2018
Slippage, Poems 2013-2018, brings together the contents of three full collections published over a five year period and is an ideal introduction to Cooke’s work. It dovetails neatly into A Slow Blues, Poems 1972-2012, which is also available from The High Window Press.
‘He has an innate poetic ability to stud the everyday, the unpretentious, with telling little details, perfectly nuanced turns of phrase, that cumulatively vouchsafe the collection’s ability to linger in the reader’s mind.’ Neil Fulwood, London Grip
‘Cooke is canny at keeping his language smart and direct (no self-indulgent meanderings), and the pacing of the poems fluid and unfaltering.’ Neil young, The Interpreter’s House
‘… a welcome lack of showiness.’ John Greening, Times Literary Supplement
‘Cooke’s lyrical insight and precision make the personal universal.’
Poetry Book Society Bulletin
United Kingdom
United States
Back to the top Further Titles
*****
Shaun Traynor: Walking Away: New and Selected Poems.
‘ Shaun Traynor takes his place amongst his peers from the North of Ireland and the South. His dramatic Meditations on the Suspension of Stormont deserves its place in the canon.’ Desmond O’Grady, Hibernia Review of Books
‘The first thing that comes to mind is the beautiful clear diction. There is a calmness and gentleness in the writing which does not however hide its strength and sense of purpose.’ Sebastian Barker.
‘Shaun Traynor’s book is a delight, the writing is fresh and exact, he is in touch with the old spring, the old jauntiness of language, its resilience, its lasting singing power. His poetry is an act of faith, his rhythms a gift of grace. Traynor takes chances, there is a sense of risk in his poetry, a sense that this business of writing poetry actually matters.’
Robert Welch, Literary Review
‘I enjoyed every poem.’ Ted Hughes
United Kingdom
United States
*****
*****
Previously published and still available
Alice Allen: Daylight of Seagulls • Daniel Bennett: West South North North South East • Ken Champion: Of Course, the Yellow Cab • Kitty Coles: Visiting Hours • Belinda Cooke: Stem • David Cooke: A Slow Blues, Poems 1972-2012 • Anthony Costello: Angles & Visions • Anthony Costello (editor): Four American Poets • John Duffy: The Edge of Seeing • Steve Ely: Bloody, proud and murderous men, adulterers and enemies of God • Norton Hodges: Bare Bones • Wendy Holborow: Janky Tuk Tuks • Anthony Howell: From Inside • Anthony Howell: Songs of Realisation • Antony Johae: Ex- Changes • Wendy Klein: Out of the Blue, Selected Poems • Tom Laichas: Empire of Eden • Michael Lesher: Surfaces • Patricia McCarthy: Trodden Before • Alison Mace: Man at the Ice House • Tim Miller: Bone Antler Stone • Tim O’Leary: The Unmaking • Michael Onfray: Before Silence, a year’s Haiku (trans.by Helen May Williams. Bilingual French/English) • Bethany Pope: Dust • Alan Price: Wardrobe Blues for a Japanese Lady • Alan Price: The Trio Confessions • James Russell: Wounded Light • Frances Sackett: Cradle of Bones • Mario Susko: End Phrase • Marina Tsvetaeva: Forms of Exile (trans. by Belinda Cooke) • Margaret Wilmott: Man Walking on Water with Tie Askew • James W. Wood: The Emigrant’s Farewell • James W. Wood: Building a Kingdom, New and Selected Poems 1989-2019 • Martin Zarrop: Is Anyone There? • James W. Wood: Building a Kingdom, New and Selected Poems 1989-2019
*****
New Books for Summer 2020
*****
Michael Onfray: Before Silence, a year’s Haiku, translated by Helen May Williams (Bilingual French/English)
When Michel Onfray commenced writing his first haiku, he was not to know that this would be a year of grief and mourning, as his partner of twenty-seven years, Marie-Claude, would die of cancer during the course of the year. The resultant text faces his sense of loss with honesty and dignity; it reveals an individual experiencing the stark sense of being and nothingness pertinent to us all. Normally a fluent and prolific author, here Onfray chooses a poetic utterance a heart-beat away from silence.
Michel Onfray is the author of around fifty books, translated in thirty countries. In 2002, he founded the free Popular University of Caen. In 2016, he launched his independent, online TV channel: michelonfray.com.
Helen May Williams is a literary critic, poet, and novelist. She lives in West Wales and blogs at: helenmaywilliams.wordpress.com.
United Kingdom
United States
Back to the top Further Titles
*****
Alan Price: The Trio Confessions
The Trio Confessions consists of three parts. Twenty-seven poems (three each) by Rainer Maria Rilke, Salvatore Quasimodo, Li-Po, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Du-Fu, Eugenie Montale, Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire and Wang Wei, followed by Alan’s English versions and a short quatrain in response to them.
‘You feel that Price has a real love of these poets, and has sought to get to the heart, the breath of each poem and bring it vividly to life…a beautifully thought-out and elegant collection’ – Louise Warren.
United Kingdom
United States
Back to the top Further Titles
*****
Antony Johae: Ex- Changes
Antony Johae’s Ex-Changes returns the reader to the author’s childhood memory of the end of the Second World War. It then moves forward to his post-war family connection with Germany in the 1960s, and to his two-year residence there in the next decade. There are poems exploring love affairs and others in which he looks at University life and learning in the 1970s and, more particularly, the influence of Dostoevsky and Kafka.
United Kingdom
United States
Back to the top Further Titles
*****
Belinda Cooke: Stem
Belinda Cooke’s Stem contains beautifully clean, fresh poems, that, very well honed, pierce at once to the heart of their meaning. Place names, whether in Scotland, England, Ireland, or even Russia, have a ring of their own and anchor her lines in a world where nothing is quite sure. Love changes, the loved one is ultimately unknowable, the individual often isolated, a home can be homeless, and yet a certain wonder shines through, along with a lust for living life to the full. The landscape and seascapes are woven into human lives. Childhood memories, and memories of growing up, tinged with Catholicism, in Ireland, are vividly and hauntingly depicted. Reality contrasted with the dream is charged with a questing implication. Shadows, ghosts, and past selves throng the pages yet ‘the rhythms remain’. – Patricia McCarthy
United Kingdom
United States
Back to the top Further Titles
*****
New Books for Spring 2020
*****
Kitty Coles: Visiting Hours
Kitty Coles lives in Surrey and works for a charity supporting disabled people. Her poems have been widely published in magazines and anthologies and have been nominated for the Forward Prize, Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her debut pamphlet, Seal Wife (2017), was joint winner of the Indigo Dreams Pamphlet Prize. Visiting Hours is her first full collection. www.kittyrcoles.com
From reviews of Kitty Coles’s The Seal Wife
‘There are echoes of Freud, Kafka and Bettelheim in Kitty Coles’ remarkable debut collection, which won the Indigo Dreams Pamphlet Prize 2016. The imagery is frequently startling, the undercurrents frequently dark and unsettling. A memorable and impressive debut.’
– The Frogmore Papers
‘…by the second poem her changelings were creeping under my skin. A quiet horror permeates the collection…. The more I read of these legends and lore revisited the more I came by the impression that I could have just as easily been reading Carol Ann Duffy, because Kitty Coles too has that enviable talent of seeming to lull one with the predictable and then nudging one awake.’
– The Journal
United Kingdom
United States
Back to the top Further Titles
*****
Martin Zarrop: Is Anyone There?
Martin Zarrop’s Is Anyone There? offers the reader witty and accessible poems, which often look back, imaginatively and movingly, on the past. Later poems reflect on the emotional implication of scientific and technological advances, how it really feels to live in the age of the smartphone and the satnav. The author is adept at a range of forms and tones, is capable of writing both humour and deeply moving elegy and, above all, one feels that here is a poet who really cares about the reader. – Jonathan Edwards
From reviews of Martin Zarrop’s previous collections
‘Written with a mathematician’s eye and a poet’s heart, these poems are wide-ranging and thoughtful, with a quiet and insistent energy moving through them. The intersection of personal and world history is an on-going concern in this collection, and Martin Zarrop’s closely observed poems explore this with both tenderness and humour.‘
– Kim Moore on Moving Pictures
What caught my attention was the shadows. Often the form and tone of the poem seems cheery enough, but a single detail turns everything inside out…Behind many of the poems, memories of the violent past flicker like old new reel. Terrible things have happened. You can hide from the facts, but they don’t go away.
– Helena Nelson on No Theory of Everything
United Kingdom
United States
Back to the top Further Titles
*****
*****
Alice Allen: Daylight of Seagulls
‘Alice Allen spent her formative years in Jersey, and her poems are imbued with its landscape, language and people. The particular focus of Daylight of Seagulls is the occupation of the island during WWII and the bravery of its citizens in the face of invasion. But Allen’s poems offer more than a history retold – they are compassionate, lyrical, inventive, often taking on voices of ordinary men and women who’ve remained unheard. She unearths the island’s secrets and sets them in front of us – treasures from a bygone world. This is a beautiful debut from a poet who understands how to evoke the potency of place.’ Tamar Yoseloff
‘Like the granite of the islands, this collection glitters with facets, sharp-edged glints of many lives. Good writing of place is also about time; addressing a difficult history, these poems show how the past, especially the unspoken, lives in the present tense.’ Philip Gross
United Kingdom
United States
Back to the top Further Titles
*****
Daniel Bennett: West South North North South East
‘In West South North, North South East, Daniel Bennett envisages landscapes of decay; urban Britain as a ruined, post-apocalyptic wasteland, haunted by its past, at odds with its present, fearful of its future; countryside and coast bound loosely together by mud and mildew. A hauntingly compelling collection from a distinctive and thought-provoking new voice.“ “In West South North, North South East, Daniel Bennett envisages landscapes of decay; urban Britain as a ruined, post-apocalyptic wasteland, haunted by its past, at odds with its present, fearful of its future; countryside and coast bound loosely together by mud and mildew. A hauntingly compelling collection from a distinctive and thought-provoking new voice.’ Ben Baynard
United Kingdom
United States
Back to the top Further Titles
*****
Ken Champion:Of Course, the Yellow Cab
*****
David Cooke A Slow Blues, Poems 1972-2012
‘Cooke’s sensibility is European in a way unusual for an English language poet. There is a fine sensuousness in the language … a book of unexpected, quiet pleasures.’
Catriona O Reilly, Poetry Salzburg Review
‘Cooke’s lyrical insight and precision make the personal universal.’
Poetry Book Society Bulletin
‘… a welcome lack of showiness.’
John Greening, Times Literary Supplement
United Kingdom
United States
Back to the top Further Titles
*****
Anthony Costello Angles & Visions
The poems in Angles & Visions are all inspired by cinema. A life-long cineaste, Anthony Costello has been compelled, often in haunting and obsessive ways, to construct his own personal filmography and place it in the poetic present
United Kingdom
United States
Back to the top Further Titles
*****
Anthony Costello (editor): Four American Poets
Four American Poets is a collection of incandescent poems about the experience of living in, and trying to understand, America. In streetwise ballads and searching monologues, Philip Fried, Nicole Callihan, Jay Passer and Michalle Gould reinvent form and stretch the boundaries of poetic language in their quest for truth and integrity in a dangerous and fragmented world.
United Kingdom
United States
Back to the top Further Titles
*****
John Duffy: The Edge of Seeing
‘John Duffy’s The Edge of Seeing is a collection full of a deep-rooted love, one that finds its anchor in the sheer reliable physicality of the world and the universe it turns in. The poems range widely through Celtic legend, through revolutionary France and the schoolrooms and parlours of a Glasgow childhood. They move easily from the lyrical to the heft and swagger of Glasgow demotic speech. They are crowded with voices, and the felt observation of the natural world, its birds and its animals. They are, as he memorably writes of a new born fawn ‘as tough as mice / or daisies’. The edge of seeing a delight from beginning to end.’ John Foggin
United Kingdom
United States
Back to the top Further Titles
*****
Steve Ely: Bloody, proud and murderous men, adulterers and enemies of God
Bloody, proud and murderous men, adulterers and enemies of God brings together for the first time Steve Ely’s recent poetry about violence. Addressing content that includes the First World War, the Falklands War, the Rwandan genocide, gangland vendettas, the violence of children and the process of colonialization that established the British state, Ely rejects simplistic responses, seeking rather to expose and understand the roles and causes of violence. Informed by a wide-ranging vision that takes in Pharaonic Egypt, York Castle, coal mining, American prison gangs, the Geneva Bible, neo-Nazi extremism, the Balkans’ conflict and the English education system, the book’s survey of human savagery ultimately finds hope in the potential of ordinary people to resist injustice and the coercive state.
Back to the top Further Titles
United Kingdom
United States
*****
Norton Hodges: Bare Bones
Distinguished by their clarity and wry wisdom, the poems of Bare Bones, drawn from four earlier collections, explore the aspirations of the men who returned from the Second World War and their determination to build a brighter future for their children. In poems that are accessible, eloquent and unfailingly authentic, Norton Hodges evokes the consequences for his generation of better education and wider opportunities, aware that losing sight of one’s roots can become self-destructive and that, in the end, what will help to pick up the pieces are: love, dancing, silence, simplicity, ‘small contentments’, and accepting ‘the way the river writes.
United Kingdom
United States
Back to the top Further Titles
*****
Wendy Holborow: Janky Tuk Tuks
‘Wendy Holborow has done it once again with a splendid new collection, her most ambitious yet, based on her recent visits to India and Africa. It contains a ‘fabulous rabble’ of rattling good poems, and a chilling short fiction, ‘Ngozi’, which has a twist guaranteed to shake us out of our habitual complacency about the endemic refugee crises not only in Africa, but around the world. This is no mere word-painting or poetry tourism, although difference is celebrated and the poems are full of wordplay and relish of language for its own sake – ‘janky tuk tuks’, which refer to Indian scooter-taxis, and the ‘nielloed silver’ of the Nile are just two memorable examples – and she ingeniously mixes traditional verse forms, open field and concrete poetry to convey the richness of the encounter between her imagination and different cultures.’ Professor John Goodby
United Kingdom
United States
Back to the top Further Titles
*****
Anthony Howell From Inside
Anthony Howell is a poet and novelist whose first collection of poems, Inside the Castle was brought out in 1969. A former dancer with the Royal Ballet, he is also a performance artist. In 1986 his novel In the Company of Others was published by Marion Boyars. Another novel Oblivion was published in 2006 by Grey Suit editions. In 1997 he was short-listed for a Paul Hamlyn Award for his poetry. His poems have appeared in The Guardian, The TLS and The Spectator. His versions of the poems of Statius were well received and his versions of Fawzi Karim were a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for 2011.
United Kingdom
United States
Back to the top Further Titles
*****
Anthony Howell: Songs of Realisation
Anthony Howell is a poet and novelist whose first collection of poems, Inside the Castle was brought out in 1969. A former dancer with the Royal Ballet, he is also a performance artist. In 1986 his novel In the Company of Others was published by Marion Boyars. Another novel Oblivion was published in 2006 by Grey Suit editions. In 1997 he was short-listed for a Paul Hamlyn Award for his poetry. His poems have appeared in The Guardian, The TLS and The Spectator. His versions of the poems of Statius were well received and his versions of Fawzi Karim were a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for 2011.
United Kingdom
United States
Back to the top Further Titles
*****
Wendy Klein: Out of the Blue, Selected Poems
‘With passion and immense technical control, Wendy Klein’s Out of the Blue takes us from the Cuba of Hemingway and Viva la revolución, to Jackson Pollock and Disney’s Cinderella, Ho Chi Minh and the Laugharne of Dylan Thomas. Blue is indeed the colour of wisdom in these inspiring poems of twentieth century history, and nowhere more powerfully than in the stories of the poet’s own family.’ William Bedford
United Kingdom
United States
Back to the top Further Titles
*****
Tom Laichas: Empire of Eden
‘Tom Laichas has gone back to the beginning and given us a real gift. Empire of Eden retells our earliest stories so completely that I felt as if I was encountering them for the first time. An unforgettable book of poetry that risks the most daring creation and succeeds.’ Tim Miller, author of Hymns & Lamentations and Bone Antler Stone
United Kingdom
United States
Back to the top Further Titles
*****
Michael Lesher: Surfaces
Michael Lesher’s Surfaces is a celebration of what might be called the central paradox of poetry: that every attempt to plumb the depths of lived experience must begin, and end, in the impenetrable surface world of words printed on paper. Somehow, the shape of a collection of letters placed on a page, and the sounds they produce when pronounced, have to convey a sense of the most inward levels of experience.
United Kingdom
United States
Back to the top Further Titles
*****
Patricia McCarthy: Trodden Before
‘Patricia McCarthy is a serious poet and a seriously good one. Trodden Before touches deeply on a wide-ranging history, adding the author’s own special imaginative warmth to the strange and challenging story of Colonel McCarthy. The story begins in Ireland in 1916 and moves from there across the globe, touching on her personal experience in the East. It is a journey beautifully told and worth following and the technical skill of the poet, applied with delicacy and grace, colours the tale with rhyme, half-rhyme and a widely-ranging linguistic awareness. The result is a subtly musical and enchanting mix of fact and fiction. A rich addition to Patricia’s already substantial achievement.’ John F Deane, founder of Poetry Ireland
United Kingdom
United States
Back to the top Further Titles
*****
Alison Mace: Man at the Ice House
‘A welcome full first collection from Alison Mace. Poems about family relationships, and by implication love and loss, are delicately and minutely observed and felt. She writes fearlessly on ageing and death, but these are not mournful poems – rather they are truthful and moving. Mace is skilled in sustained verse form and also subtle in her use of it, as, for example, rhymes and half-rhymes which make their impact within lines as surely as they do when they appear as line endings. Included is a long novelistic sequence set in New England – an absorbing tour de force commemorating the long life of her American aunt.’
Joy Howard, Editor, Grey Hen Press
United Kingdom
United States
Back to the top Further Titles
*****
Tim Miller: Bone Antler Stone
Passing through more than thirty thousand years of history, the poems of Bone Antler Stone are a panorama of Europe from the painted caves of Chauvet and Lascaux to contact with Greece and Rome. The changing spiritual and material lives of the earliest Europeans are vividly imagined through their artwork, burials, architecture, and their interaction with the landscape, the seasons, and one another.
United Kingdom
Back to the top Further Titles
*****
Tim O’Leary: The Unmaking
‘True poetry has the intellectual and formal rigour to tell us stories of the way we live. In Tim O’Leary’s Manganese Tears, there are wonderful elegies for the village community og the poet’s childhood, and most powerfully the slow dying of his mother whose ‘life has moved downstairs / with the vase of shrivelling daffodils’ and the limited horizons where ‘Each kiss is a kiss goodbye’. The grieving is genuine, but what makes it especially moving is the intellectual honesty, for the poet his mother’s ‘thankyous’ meaning ‘as much as / amens muttered during mass— / religiously bare’. Even for friends in the village, refusing o admit they were ever ill ‘the steel is in their gazes, / and the gaze at the abyss’. Love is what holds personal and communal life together, as the chemical element Manganese holds together the health of both body and brain. But with tears.’ William Bedford on Manganese Tears
United Kingdom
United States
Back to the top Further Titles
*****
Bethany Pope: Dust
‘Like a seed that lodges in the brain and slowly germinates, the deeper meanings emerge gradually long after the final sonnet has been read.’ Jonathan Doyle, New Welsh Review
‘Pope’s writing has an intensely visual quality. Her use of imagery is strong – often unflinchingly so.’ Neil Fulwood, Stride
‘In Bethany W Pope’s A Radiance darkness and light play before the eyes with extraordinary and often disturbing effect.’ Sarah Cole, New Welsh Review
United Kingdom
United States
Back to the top Further Titles
*****
Alan Price: Wardrobe Blues for a Japanese Lady
Alan Price was born in Liverpool and now lives in Camden, London. He is an ex-librarian, poet, scriptwriter, short story writer, film critic for the online Filmuforia and blogger at alanprice69.wordpress.com. Two stories were broadcast on Radio 3 and published, with others, in his 1999 collection The Other Side of the Mirror (Citron Press). A TV film, A Box of Swan, was broadcast on BBC2 in 1990. He has scripted five short films. The last one, Pack of Pain (2010), won four international film festival awards. Alan’s debut collection of poetry Outfoxing Hyenas was published by Indigo Dreams in 2012. His pamphlet of prose poems Angels at the Edge (Tuba Press) appeared in 2016. And the chapbook, Mahler’s Hut was published in 2017.
United Kingdom
United States
Back to the top Further Titles
*****
James Russell: Wounded Light
‘Russell has hit upon is a pleasing blend of the imagination working with the stuff of the real world…. Coming through virtually every line of the poem there is a poet’s delight and sometimes bemusement in and with the pains and pleasures and potentials of ordinary life and language coupled with a sense of what a poem and its reader can do without recourse to either bland commonplaces or as-good-as-unreadable “innovative” strategies. My God, it’s a breath of fresh air. Martin Stannard on Properly Nuanced
Strong, compulsive, often brilliant, never less than buoyantly intelligent, full-on, mostly and rightly comfortless, impressively rangy and full of involving stuff from underneath the arches and wilder reaches of a prickly brain. Most contemporary poetry is dull and preachy by comparison. John Kerrigan on Arnos Grove
United Kingdom
United States
Back to the top Further Titles
*****
Frances Sackett: Cradle of Bones
‘Sensuous, painterly and compassionate, with a good ear and an uncommon lightness of touch, she handles the language with sureness, and a relish for the subtle reverberations of sound and sense.’ New Welsh Review
‘The imagination that informs this varied collection is both dramatic and painterly, the poetry that of a cultivated mind and sensibility, which reveals the unexpected from differing angles of vision.’ Jill Farringdon – Poetry Wales
United Kingdom
United States
Back to the top Further Titles
*****
Mario Susko: End Phrase
‘Susko leaves his readers with no easy answers. We must weigh dozens of opposing concepts in our own minds, and decide for ourselves what to keep and what to let go,
to construct a self-defined sense of security in a disquieting world… It is a small comfort, but at least it is a real one. Mario Susko’s poems make no false promises,
but instead offer authentic experiences and, yes, pleasures.’ Amy Schrader
United Kingdom
United States
Back to the top Further Titles
*****
Marina Tsvetaeva: Forms of Exile: Selected Poems (trans. by Belinda Cooke)
‘This collection is valuable for its steady faithfulness to the original, its breadth of poems, and in particular for so many of the pre-revolutionary poems.’ Emily Lygo, Modern Poetry in Translation 2009
United Kingdom
United States
Back to the top Further Titles
*****
Margaret Wilmott: Man Walking on Water with Tie Askew
‘Margaret Wilmot writes like a true citizen of the world. She writes with a gleaming, persistent sense of wonder. Small, yet vital details are spotted, pondered and
brought into the spotlight of her keen gaze, becoming poignant, whimsical and deeply
significant in turn. This collection breathes with her dazzling use of language, and what I can only define as a sort of heightened energy underpinned by an indefinable sense of spirituality. It is a unique and welcome addition to a sometimes rather tired contemporary poetry scene.’ Wendy Klein
United Kingdom
United States
Back to the top Further Titles
*****
James W. Wood: The Emigrant’s Farewell
The Emigrant’s Farewell tells of the migrant Scots who made Canada their home. Updating the traditional Scots ballad, the poem weaves together stories of imaginary immigrants from the nineteenth, twentieth and early twenty-first centuries to ask questions about how immigrants change and are changed by the cultures they inhabit. As Canada grows, the poem asks us to remember those “whose names have died/yet live on in the streets and cities of this place” – the Scots, whose pioneering activities gave birth to so many of Canada’s institutions but who are now broadly forgotten.
United Kingdom
United States
Back to the top Further Titles
*****
James W. Wood: Building a Kingdom, New and Selected Poems 1989-2019
‘James W Wood cares about the precision and possibilities of language and about honesty when dissecting the subtleties of human emotion, neither one to the exclusion of the other. His work is a pleasure to read and, when questioning or provocative, none the less pleasurable for that.’ Rob Mackenzie
‘James W. Wood is fired by an intense love of the art, informed by extensive study and a keen ear for cadence and phrase. He’s a key player in the new poetry life of Scotland, a dynamic member of the younger network, unafraid to speak out with grace, spirit and intelligence.’ Helena Nelson.
United Kingdom
United States
*****
The High Window 