Search results for ""Nine Arches Press""

Richie McCaffery's debut collection of poems, Cairn, begins in a dedication and ends with ghosts - in between lies hoards of artefacts and long-forgotten antiquities; a police whistle, a tarnished silver spoon, the bookmark lodged in a boring book decades before that sings of a lost age. These poems find their stories in the overlooked places of everyday, and take utter delight in the unexpected image and turn of phrase. Soaring, often short and bitter-sweet, the poems form markers in the landscape of love, lore and family, making mementoes to the buried and the living.Richie McCaffery (b. 1986) lives in Stirling and studies and works as a teaching assistant at The University of Glasgow. He is the author of two poetry pamphlets, Spinning Plates (HappenStance Press, 2012) and Ballast Flint (Cromarty Arts Trust, 2013). His poems have appeared in journals and anthologies such as The Dark Horse, Stand, The Rialto and The Best British Poetry 2012.

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Read a sample poem for free - just click the Extracts tab above.Shortlisted for the 2013 Michael Murphy Memorial Prize.In her debut collection, Melanchrini, Maria Taylor's distinctive poetry slips fluently amidst the worlds and underworlds of classical mythology and modernity; between her own Greek Cypriot heritage and British urban upbringing; among betting shops, schools, bar-rooms and hospitals. Lively and ebullient, from moments of quirky humour to poignancy, these poems demonstrate a poet who isn't afraid to leap into the heart of circumstance and treasure what she finds there. Melanchrini finds personal histories at the kitchen table, tears in the soapsuds, and a moment's sensuality in the midst of a city market. Maria Taylor's poems are deceptively plucky; as entertaining as they are inventive and quietly determined. "Enjoyable, engaging, serious but unpretentious, confident and well-crafted, this is a debut collection that should attract attention – and ought to win Maria Taylor a lot of readers. Above all the book is full of life, of real lives. It has variety and surprise but is very clearly by one voice – a voice that it is good to listen to because it sees so much."Peter Sansom"Maria Taylor's poems sing with the extraordinary in the everyday, full of those moments where something or someone is briefly transformed: a woman takes a merman home; a dead Aunt's house becomes a museum where the main object is missing; the memory of morning coffee is full of birds' wings. The power of these poems is that they constantly invoke the unexpected, and the colours and textures of both times past and yet to come."Deborah Tyler-Bennett "This is a distinctive and assured collection of poems. The writing is at once clear-sighted and fully realised. In its mystery, precision and surprise, Melanchrini shows the truth of a powerful new writer."David MorleyMaria Taylor is a Leicestershire-based poet. Her writing has been published in The North, The Guardian, the TLS, Staple and others.

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In 2018, the Poetry School and Nine Arches Press launched their nationwide Primers scheme for a fourth time, in search of exciting new voices in poetry, with Kim Moore and Jane Commane as selecting editors. After reading through hundreds of anonymous entries, and narrowing down the choices from longlist to shortlist, three poets emerged as clear choices: Lewis Buxton, Amelia Loulli and Victoria Richards. Primers: Volume Four now collects together a showcase from each of the three new poets It is an irresistible invitation to step out of ourselves and our bodies and drop your expectations on the dancefloor, to take the plunge on the rollercoaster-ride of grief, motherhood and new life, and to meet desire in all its outrageous, dazzling and joyous forms. Secrets, disclosures, changed names and brilliant disguises make for a vivid, adventurous and often deeply moving selection of new work from some of poetry’s most talented emerging voices.Praise for Primers: Volume Four“All three poets are rooted in the territory of the body and the expectations placed on it by society though their concerns range widely – from an examination of toxic masculinity to female desire and motherhood. Their approach to language and form is varied, but what is consistent is their ability as poets to invite the reader to see the world in a different way.” – Kim Moore

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Read three sample poems for free - just click the Extracts tab above.Daniel Sluman's Absence Has a Weight of Its Own is an unflinching study of serious illness, sex, death and decadence. In sometimes brutal and spare cadences, Sluman explores the extremities of human experience in poems that are skilfully, icily primed. This debut collection is at times provocative and by turns tender and wry. Frailties and vices are held up for inspection in a ruined landscape of disappointing highs, hung-over regrets and head-on collisions, haunted by figures such as Roman, an unrepentant and debauched womaniser. In the aftermath, real love and hope remain stubbornly, emerging into the sunlight of an unexpected new day. "Dan Sluman is a poet accomplished beyond his years. His work demonstrates a maturity and control of image and form which gives his use of the poetic line all the tension of a band-saw. These poems have teeth. They are as brave and uncompromising as their imagery is startling. Not only that but he reads his work with extraordinary confidence and power. He is definitely a young poet to be watched."Nigel McLoughlin"Daniel Sluman is a name to watch for. His poems are sharp and crafted with not a word out of place and he has a talent for the unexpected metaphor and simile which jolts with its fittingness. These are not comfortable poems, they can't be read – or heard – casually but this is a poet who clearly loves language and has the skill to work it. The one thing I demand from poems I read is that they change me in some way – and these do."Angela France"This is a strong and sometimes violently beautiful debut that wears your heart in its mouth as much as it wears its heart on its sleeve. It is also a distinct pleasure to read aloud, its delicate musics blooming sharp as lime on the tongue. Here's to Sluman's next book!"Adam Horovitz"Daniel Sluman's debut collection crackles with energy; his language is physical, fast-paced, passionate, fearless. A real discovery by Nine Arches Press.'Penelope ShuttleDaniel Sluman is a poet based in Gloucestershire. His poems have appeared widely in journals such as Cadaverine, Popshot, Shit Creek Review and Orbis. He is the poetry editor of Dead Ink, and is on the editorial board for Iota.

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In Angela France's third poetry collection, Hide, what is invisible is just as important as what lies within plain sight. Layers of personal history are lifted into the light and old skins are shed for new; things thought lost and vanished long ago are just on the edge of perception, yet certainties before our eyes vanish in the blink of an eye.These poems possess their own rich heritage of stories and experiences; themes of magic, wisdom, age and absence are woven into the fabric of this skilful and succinct collection. Readers should also keep their wits about them, for these poems are cunning and quick; they hide nothing, but delight in camouflage, disguise and secrets, patiently awaiting someone who will seek."France's writing engages sensitively with the world as she searches for meaning in the ordinary and movingly explores the borders between shared and private experience. These are poems that make an honest deal with discomfort, following the trails and 'ghostly outlines of existence' with integrity, thoughtfulness and care." Deryn Rees-Jones"'Invisibility must be achieved for success', writes Angela France, revealing one of the truths of why the best poets serve language and are annihilated in the process. Hide is a book of wisdom, dignity and first witness. It offers poems of scrutiny and strength of character. And the poet's language possesses and is possessed by a gloriously sheared weight and shared music." David Morley"Angela France's new collection is a deft and resonant exploration of the half-hidden, taking us 'over there' and 'in there' under the hide of the 'other' and the liminal spaces they inhabit, all evoked with an uncanny command of language and image." Nigel McLoughlin"There are fifty-two complex, thought-provoking poems in this, Angela France's fascinating third collection, all of them engaged with what are clearly deep, lastingly cental preoccupations and, despite her view in "Anagnorisis" that "My only surety is carbon and water, ashes; / language as sensation, / no words", more than justifying the fulsome back-cover endorsements of Nigel McLoughlin, Deryn Rees-Jones and David Morley, who speak of the "integrity, thoughtfulness and care of her work", its "uncanny command of language and image", the sensitivity with which she perceives the world "as she searches for meaning in the ordinary" and its "gloriously sheared weight and shared music"."Ken Head"Angela France's collection not only brings immediate rewards - its depth satisfies more and more on rereading. I enjoyed it immensely."Matthew Stewart, Rogue StrandsAngela France has had poems published in many of the leading journals, in the UK and abroad and has been anthologised a number of times. She has an MA in Creative and Critical Writing from the University of Gloucestershire and is studying for a PhD. Publications include Occupation (Ragged Raven Press) and Lessons in Mallemaroking (Nine Arches Press). Angela is features editor of Iota and runs a monthly poetry cafe, Buzzwords.

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"Here is a press that genuinely revels in publishing new and exciting poetry; when I read a Nine Arches Press book I know that my mind will be a bit bigger once I've finished it. And my smile will be wider. Let the revels begin!" - Ian McMillanPoems – maps designed to get you lost, to discover magic in the everyday. Maps & Legends is a new anthology celebrating the best of Nine Arches Press over the past five years.Plotting points from urban backwaters to wild imagined spaces, editor Jo Bell guides us through those shadow places poetry inhabits, places that fall well and truly off the map.Featuring poems from Claire Crowther, David Morley , Luke Kennard, Matt Merritt, Maria Taylor, Angela France, Daniel Sluman, Alistair Noon, Tony Williams, David Hart and more.Jo Bell is the former director of National Poetry Day, and is now the UK's Canal Laureate. She has been a Glastonbury Poet in Residence, and programmed the Ledbury Poetry Festival in 2011. She has also appeared on BBC Radio 2 and 4, and at the Hay and Cheltenham Festivals. Her own poems have been commended in the Wigtown Poetry Competition and the Hippocrates International Prize.

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Elizabeth Bishop's hawkweed, John Berryman's hummingbirds, Ted Hughes's burnt fox - the birds, beasts and flowers of Isobel Dixon's new collection are at times kin to D.H. Lawrence, whose essay 'Whistling of Birds' lends this book its name, though each poem here is its own vivid testament to the natural world, and our often troubled and troubling place in it. Lyrical, vigorous, inventive, A Whistling of Birds is at times in conversation with Lawrence's iconic collection, Birds, Beasts and Flowers, but also ranges widely through the worlds of other writers and makers - from the Venerable Bede to Emily Dickinson, Georgia O'Keeffe to Glenn Gould, and a wealth of other connections closely examined and delicately drawn. An abundance of apricots in Santa Fe; bats, bees, tortoises, snakes, the generous body of a whale. Threaded throughout is the beautiful complexity and vulnerability of the planet, and the joy and difficulty of making art. Douglas Robertson's finely detailed images also speak of a close connection to the green world, ocean and sky, and a thoughtful dialogue between artist and poet. With its resonant elegies and notes of celebration, this is a collection that flexes, hums and brims with energy, yet surely draws you in to its quiet, reflective heart. "Isobel Dixon's writing is lit by a fierce sense of landscape. She is newly touched by the tiniest northern flowers, haunted still by powerful spirits of the south. Her work is visually exuberant; its sounds, delicious, especially when bound by rhyme. Dixon's lines flash with humour and tenderness. Her poems marry exactitude to emotion. In both, they are memorable." -Alison Brackenbury 'As Lawrence says, "The essential quality of poetry is that it makes a new effort of attention." Isobel Dixon's A Whistling of Birds does just that. Doing so, she gets, and shares with her readers, new slants on life on earth. I felt alerted again to things, fellow creatures, deeds, I hadn't paid due attention to, or had once and had become accustomed and needed to be shown afresh. This book gives shocks of pleasure and gratitude in equal measure.' - David Constantine

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You live and then you die. That’s the only certainty there is, right? Using love as its guide, Proof of Life on Earth, the debut poetry collection by Degna Stone, looks at all the stops between our arrival and our departure. These poems examine matters of the heart (both the metaphorical and medical kind), of race and discrimination, of the body, mind and self – each in forensic detail, attentive and curious of what moves, shapes, and makes us alive.In between are the landmarks which populate the rich terrain of this collection; not only of our lives through youth to adulthood, but of history, of the long shadows of empire, and of landscapes themselves - especially those of the northeast of England, evocative, rugged and monumental. Stone’s deft and scalpel-sharp poetry explores human existence shaped by mortality and experience, and asks what it means to do more than survive – to live in defiance, openness and awareness.

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There is (still) love here, the compelling new collection of poetry by Dean Atta, is a personal and powerful exploration of relationships, love and loss, encompassing LGBTQ+ and Black history, Greek Cypriot heritage, pride and identity, dislocation and belonging.Atta’s tender, precisely-crafted and generous poems seek consolation and affirmation. These are poems as an antidote for challenging times, whether facing prejudice or the challenges of the pandemic, experiencing grief or recovering from heartbreak. Here, we encounter blue feelings and homesickness, things lost in translation and the pressures of the many roles we play in life. We also find the recipes of home, gifts and giving, the togetherness of community and connection to help us to heal. There is still love here - and journeys towards forgiveness, acceptance, queer joy and the power to unapologetically be yourself and fully embrace who you are.

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Tania Hershman's Still Life With Octopus is an exquisitely-attuned second collection, a philosophical and poetic interrogation of the boundaries of animal and human worlds and the intimate nature of time, being and joy. Exploring the slippage between the life of the mind and the life of the body - in particular, those belonging to women – Hershman wonders what might happen if we let go of our preconceptions of both reality and language, taking nothing for granted and starting again from first principles, with fresh eyes. While trying to fathom our physical and metaphysical existence, Hershman doesn’t ignore the other forms of intelligent life we share our planet with; her octopus is envisioned both as a creature within and alongside us and as a way to consider our place as humans within a greater chain of co-existence. Still Life With Octopus is a precisely observed and open-hearted gift of a book.

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Space Baby asks difficult questions about the Earth, its beings, and what lies ahead for them; how do we look to the future on a planet that’s burning? How do we come to terms with our grief, and what can we believe in? If the human race destroys what we have, where will we go?In this dystopian, searching book, Evans mixes absurdity and wit with speculative, serious themes. Here, artificial intelligence and robots will ‘cuddle you to sleep’, the melting permafrost will reveal its surprises, and we encoutner the very first human baby born in space. Ultimately, Evans writes to acknowledge our responsibilities and interconnectedness with earth and all its lifeforms, as well as to our future generations. These are vivid, prescient poems of existence, and survival, which ask how we can still find joy on a ruined planet.

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In You have no normal country to return to, Tom Sastry explores questions of national identity and ‘the end of history'. A blistering, bleakly funny and timely second poetry collection, following his Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize shortlisted, A Man's House Catches Fire. By turns crisply satirical and questioning, You have no normal country to return to ranges across the legacies of Empire, postwar migration and the current crisis in English identity. Sastry’s precise, brilliantly attuned poetry asks how the times we live in and the tales we tell about them affect us; how our emotional landscapes are shaped by national myths and the more personal stories we tell about ourselves. It is a book about illusion, and discovering, again and again, that what was once taken for granted was never really there; a guidebook for an age of “enchantments collapsing on themselves”.

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Jane Burn’s new poetry collection Be Feared is a captivating reclamation of self, sisterhood, and love, encountering everything from the Snow Queen to monsters, plagues and infernos. Acknowledging fear, this book embraces discovery, a process of translation and transformation, of finding a voice radiant with both curses and psalms.Rebellious, bloody, and encroached upon by violence, Burn’s poetry examines survival, abuse and healing. Intensely imaginative, these incantatory poems rework fairy-tale and folklore and hold up enchanted mirrors to the everyday truths of being a working-class autistic woman, daring to become, claiming her own magnificent, unstoppable fluency and spell-making power.

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Cynthia Miller’s debut poetry collection, Honorifics, is an astonishing, adventurous, and innovative exploration of family, Malaysian-Chinese cultural identity, and immigration. From jellyfish blooms to glitch art and distant stars, taking in Greek gods, space shuttles and wedding china along the way, Miller’s mesmerizing approach is experimental, luscious, and expansive with longing - “My skin hunger could fill a galaxy”.Here, the poetry is interwoven with the words for all the things we honour – our loved ones and our ancestors, home and homecomings, and all that is precious and makes us feel that we belong and are beloved. It is also a book that examines contemporary issues of migration in sharp and enquiring relief. Language itself becomes a radical power for reimaging, challenging, and making change, and Miller’s distinctive and multifaceted poetry creates an extraordinary space for multiplicity and celebration.'This is language and detail, honed and luxurious. This is space and memory and migratory patterns and fable. An array of formal play and innovation. And everything finely weighted like a gift-box of intricate, interlocking mechanisms.' – Jacob Sam-La Rose'Honorifics is a dazzlingly inventive collection that circles around themes of love and yearning, family history and migration, with a sophisticated touch. Formally playful, these poems are alive with imagery and a restless intelligence'– Jane Yeh

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Dressing for the Afterlife is a diamond-tough and tender second collection of poems from British Cypriot poet Maria Taylor, which explores love, life, and how we adapt to the passage of time. From the steely glamour of silent film-star goddesses to moonlit seasons and the ghosts of other possible, parallel lives, these poems shimmy and glimmer bittersweet with humour and brio, as Taylor conjures afresh a world where Joan Crawford feistily simmers and James Bond’s modern incarnation is mistaken for an illicit lover. Consistently crisp and vivid, these poems examine motherhood, heritage and inheritance, finding stories woven in girlhood’s faltering dance-steps, the thrum of the sewing-machine at the end-days of the rag trade, or the fizz and bubble of a chip-shop fryer. And throughout, breaking through, is the sense of women finding their wings and taking flight - “and her wings, what wings she has” - as Taylor’s own poems soar and defiantly choose their own adventures.

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An outcast, an outsider, an oddball. With too much ambition and not enough talent, Saffron Jack has never fitted. Now, with the feeling that his time is running out, he needs to do something drastic to change his life. So what better idea than to run away to the nearest war zone and do the thing he’s always wanted to do: start his own country and declare himself king..."A bravura meditation on crown and country, borders, and what it means to belong." - Niven Govinden“It’s exciting to see what a poet already celebrated for their high-concept execution within individual poems can achieve when they have the courage to. The wide canvas of Saffron Jack allows Dastidar to untether his imagination and uses its permutational form to gather momentum and force as it zooms in and out on the titular antihero and his doomed and self-justified quest. Urgent, caustically funny and provocative – compulsory and deeply enjoyable reading.” – Luke Kennard

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"Examining regional accents and our attitudes to them are a way of peering into Britain's soul. I can't wait for this book" – Sathnam SangheraSpake: Dialect and Voices from the West Midlands with contributions from Steven Knight (Peaky Blinders), Julie Walters, Liz Berry and many of the regions best known writers.Spake is a love letter to the West Midlands voice and a challenge to the preconceptions and prejudices that abound about dialect and non-standard English. Much maligned, frequently overlooked or simply left out altogether: the English West Midlands has for decades been diminished in the national conversation - and with it, the rich dialects and voices of the region are often misunderstood, ignored or worse – ridiculed and mocked. But who’s to say that the way we ‘spake’ isn’t every bit as vital and precious a part of the landscape as other accents and dialects? This anthology features contemporary writing that draws upon dialect in ways that explore the potential of the narrative and poetic voice, bringing to life the silent histories and harsh realities of a vanishing working-class way of life in what was once Britain’s industrial heartland. From contemporary re-imaginings of the interwar decades in Steven Knight’s TV series Peaky Blinders to Liz Berry’s prize-winning poetry and up and coming new talent, this book celebrates and gives voice to experiences rooted in the region that have largely lain at the margins.

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What to do when everything goes up in flames? Summon up A Man’s House Catches Fire, Tom Sastry’s debut collection of poetry, with all its elegant, satirical and hurt-quenching power: here are nightmares and fairytales, museums full of regret, mis-enchantments and magic for dark times.Whilst the accelerants of complicity and violence seep from these exacting poems, Sastry’s wit and stoicism slake the bonfire of modern troubles. They defiantly ask us: why do “the great marquees of England” stand empty? How old is your heart? Why aren’t we listening to the sea, and what it has to say? Funny, marvellously frank and often courageous, A Man’s House Catches Fire urges us to take a long hard look into the flames and avert the disasters of the heart, home and nations that threaten to befall us all.“Tom Sastry is a magician of deadpan. He’s kind of like if the Atlantic Ocean had a laugh track. Terrifying and hypnotic, but also desperately funny. This collection is generous in both its clarity and mystery." — Hera Lindsay Bird“Tom Sastry’s poems stare down the ridiculousness of the world we live in, and offer us ways to carry on in spite of it. These are poems of bright wit and astonishing vulnerability, with one eye always on the future. A Man’s House Catches Fire gives us the simultaneous pain and joy of being a human being; reminds us it is marvellous / that it still hurts.” – Suzannah Evans

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Zebra is the debut collection from Hebden Bridge-based Ian Humphreys. These acutely-observed and joyful poems explore mixed identities, otherness, and coming-of-age as a gay man in 1980s Manchester. Humphreys is a fellow of The Complete Works programme (which aims to promote diversity and quality in British poetry) and was highly commended for his work at this year’s Forward Prizes.

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The poems in Threat, Julia Webb’s second collection, train their eagle-eyes on life at the margins, and on family, love, loss, belonging and not belonging. They are not afraid to visit the uncomfortable places where true humanity resides. Threat is an examination of self from multiple perspectives. Its narratives of both past and present tread a fine line between fantasy and reality – these are the lives we have led, the lives we could have led, or the lives we are leading still. Forensically detailed and disturbing, the dark and sometimes brutal undertow of small-town existence seeps to the surface of these unsettling poems.

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Roy McFarlane’s second poetry collection, The Healing Next Time, is a timely and unparalleled book of interwoven sequences on institutional racism, deaths in custody and of a life story set against the ever-changing backdrop of Birmingham at the turn of the millennium. Here forms a potent and resolute narrative in lyrical and multidimensional poems which refuse to look the other way or accept the whitewashed version of events. Courageous, rageful and mournful, these are poems of Black history and Black presence, poems of witness and poems of activism. McFarlane’s intricate lines make record of injustice and mark the names of those who have lost their lives and dignity to prejudice and hatred. The Healing Next Time also asks vital questions of the future, and of the reader – and reminds us where the power to change things lies. It is also a poetry of personal discovery, of revelation and resilience – where the influence of Jazz and of James Baldwin infuse and shape this unique, remarkable book.

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Abegail Morley’s The Skin Diary confronts loss in its many forms with unwavering and astonishing clarity, an incandescent thread running through every line that makes each alive with fierce and steely energy.Here are alert and lyrical poems that hunt out imperfect hiding places, conjure up imaginary sisters and try to contain near-impossible sorrows that spill out of carrier bags and fill up archives. New skins and old disguises are stitched together, the fabric of life tries to hold fast whilst all else unravels and comes apart at the seams. The Skin Diary documents the sometimes fragile and strange windfalls of our days and months; through hard times and thin ice, this journal is bleakly wry, brilliantly focused and brimming with uncanny and discomforting turns of event.'...ghostly, visceral, and unflinching poems.’ – Penelope Shuttle'The Skin Diary somehow finds words for the ineffable in its search for hope and understanding.’ – Martin Figura'...here is a poet who can hold her nerve and her entire psychological landscape within each multifariously conceived and consciously humane line.’ – Melissa Lee-Houghton

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In her fourth collection Isobel Dixon takes readers on a journey to far-flung and sometimes dark places in poems that are vivid forays of discovery and resistance, arrival and loss. Bearings sings of love too, and pays homage to lost friends and poets – the voices of John Berryman, Michael Donaghy, Robert Louis Stevenson and others echo here. And there is respite for the weary traveller – jazz in the shadows, an exuberant play of words between the fire and tremors.As Dixon explores form and subject, conflict and the self, she keeps a weather eye out for telling detail, with a sharp sense of the threat that these journeys, our wars and stories, and our very existence pose to the planet.

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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 book brings together the 52 prompts written by poet Jo Bell and by guest poets ranging from David Morley to Rachael Boast, so that you can pick up the challenge yourself. With contemporary poems to illustrate each prompt, it s a fine anthology as well as a book of lively and engaging exercises for poets, whether beginner or well established.

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Alistair Noon’s new collection of poems, The Kerosene Singing, roams the borders and places on the edge of many things, whether that’s on the edge of nations and continents, of history or of the realms of possibility. A dynamic lyric energy enlivens everything it comes into contact with in these poems; where history, landscape and language loom large, Noon’s attentive rhythms and wit bring out the most subtle detail. These quicksilver poems invite the reader out and beyond, into new uncertain territories, subject to change without further notice.

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Robert Peake's incredible eye for detail illuminates a collection of stirring and delicately attuned poems that not only roam but actively seek – travelling far and wide to all manner of places but also moving through time, taking leaps of faith or journeys into memory and sensation.From postcards to portraits, from ancient and modern wars to cosmopolitan cities, wildlife, and even a tiny ornamental skeleton, Robert Peake finds a sharp focus for the bigger picture both far and wide and closer to home. These carefully-controlled and eloquent poems know the subtle and deep consequences from each small gesture; the ripple-effect across each story, the altering of lives and history; the still, quiet centre from which it all begins.Robert Peake is a British-American poet living near London. His newest short collection is The Silence Teacher (Poetry Salzburg, 2013). His previous short collection was Human Shade (Lost Horse Press, 2011).

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The Midlands by is the second collection by Tony Williams, following his much-acclaimed debut The Corner of Arundel Lane and Charles Street in inimitable and lyrical style. Beginning in the Midlands themselves, with the 'unfound grave of a Mercian king under wurzels, new housing and out-of-town Asdas', his poems compose a tragi-comic paean to vanishing hinterlands and fine-tuned weirdness, to domestic relics, to dog walks, dust and phantoms.Williams' absolute delight in word play and tomfoolery belies a darker, stranger undertow between rhyme and reasoning. Strange forces are at work in the heartlands, where we find ourselves travellers in perpetual motion, stopping only to gather our disappointment at the OK Café on the A1 and wonder if our 'boots might rise from the earth and pursue' us.Tony Williams is a poet and short-story writer based in North-East England. His first full collection, The Corner of Arundel Lane and Charles Street, was published by Salt in 2009 and was shortlisted for the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and the Portico Prize for Literature. He teaches creative writing at Northumbria University

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The thirty-nine poems of anima bring a distinctive, archetypal potency to the closing stages of Mario Petrucci's larger i tulips project, the 1111-strong sequence in which this sub-sequence crucially sits.Arising organically from prior modernist experiment, Petrucci's style nevertheless remains utterly contemporary. His mastery of the shape and sound of each poem makes for an intense and all-consuming experience, refocusing an array of influences through an acute lyrical sensibility. By yielding so completely to the power of linguistic transformation, these searing, necessary poems capture both the crisis and the beauty of the heart's innermost voyage."Mario Petrucci's anima is a revelation of the underside of a human heart submitting to the contradictions of love, doubt and mortality. This remarkable work reconfigures the soul as well as the mind, through language that shapes the ineffable into a visceral, triumphant poetry." Alexandra Burack, American poet and educator"The tensile delicacy of Petrucci's lines springs back with a very English baroque, Miltonic surprise: sense-ambush occurs in the next line, skewering what's gone before. Between these line-breaks rests a declamatory silence tested to snapping. This is major work to cast shadows." Álvaro de Campos [tr. Simon Jenner]"With a brio and tenderness all of their own, these new lyric poems are modernist marvels, word sculptures pared to their very essence… Petrucci's tulips promise to grow into a truly ambitious landmark body of work."Poetry Book Society Bulletin"Reminiscent of ee cummings at his best... vivid, generous and life-affirming." EnvoiMario Petrucci aspires to "Poetry on a geological scale" (Verse), whether exploring the tragedies of Chernobyl (Heavy Water, 2004) or immersing himself in heart-rending invention (i tulips, 2010).

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Read three sample poems for free - just click the Extracts tab above.In Improvising Memory, Milorad Krystanovich releases the characters trapped in the tableaux of negatives, and breathes into them a remarkable life of their own. Portraits step down from their frames and exist amongst us; before our eyes they age and alter, ponder their own flaws, confines and mysteries. Krystanovich's beautifully-detailed series of poems explore the spaces between images and populate them with a patient and delicately-balanced language that moves in circles and echoes, creating a lyrical resonance in the act of both observing and being observed. Freeze-frame fragments become striking and graceful poem-scenes, alive with moments tangible and fleeting, just out of reach or coming into focus at the edge of sight."You don't need to imagine me – a man with his photo camera hanging from its strap on his shoulder. For you, I would describe myself as a photographer whose hobby was not a simple black and white technique of evidencing the elements of everyday life… Later on, instead of developing films in a dark-room, I used my notebook and pen and exposed my hands to the lamplight."Milorad KrystanovichMilorad Krystanovich was born in Croatia and has lived in Birmingham since 1992. He has studied Creative Writing at the University of Birmingham and is a member of Writers Without Borders, Cannon Poets and the Society of Children's Book Writers & Illustrators. Milorad works as a language teacher at the Brasshouse Centre in Birmingham. Improvising Memory is his sixth poetry collection, and follows on from The Yasen Tree (Heaventree Press, 2007).

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A Fold in the Map charts two very different voyages: a tracing of the dislocations of leaving one’s native country, and a searching exploration of grief at a father’s final painful journey. In the first part of the collection, Plenty — “before the fold” — the poems deal with family, and longing for home from a new country, with all the ambiguity and doubleness this perspective entails. In the book’s second half, Meet My Father, the poems recount events more life-changing than merely moving abroad — a father’s illness and death, the loss of some of the plenty of the earlier poems.

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‘I can’t face the big stuff so I comb the moors for a tiny yellow flower’ – so begins Tormentil, the second poetry collection by Ian Humphreys. Set largely in the starkly beautiful West Yorkshire moorlands, these poems creep and bloom across geographies and time. Isolated by grief in the first months of the pandemic, Humphreys goes in search of hope and blessings among the burnt heather, tumbledown mills and canal locks near his home in the Calder Valley. He unearths a landscape of wildflowers and wildlife, a soundscape of rain and birdsong, at once healing, threatening and under threat. These are richly textured poems of living and resisting, anchored by connections to family, food, community – and an acknowledgement of the precarious root-holds of hard-won freedoms. A soaring, defiant hymn to recovery, this vital book contemplates migration, otherness, and all the internal and external elements that bind us, make us unique.

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Small Moon Curve is an intimate poetry memoir exploring what it means to ease open to the restorative powers of love, faith and beauty following diagnosis and treatment for breast cancer. In this compelling testimony, the narrator discovers a surprising, powerful affinity with Tess of the D'Urbervilles.

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The poems in Tamar Yoseloff's Belief Systems act as a call to make something worthwhile from the wreckage of our world, in the spirit of the radical artists she evokes, such as John Latham, John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg visionaries who located power and beauty in what is forgotten.

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Greekling,the much-anticipated debut poetry collection by Kostya Tsolakis, celebrates and commemorates damaged and rejected Greek bodies, be they of flesh and blood, made of marble, or natural bodies. In intertwining Greek culture, history and poetic influences with the contemporary queer experience, this collection is perceptive, lyrical, and deeply evocative of time and place. From an Athenian childhood to a closeted adolescence in the shadow of the AIDS epidemic, towards sexual self-discovery, maturity and freedom – Tsolakis charts the pursuit of unconditional happiness.These poems explore queer joy on dance floors, darkrooms and bedsits, but also the risks of crossing strangers’ thresholds or in encountering the violent machismo and hypermasculine expectations of the society you grow up in. And ever-present through the collection is Athens – the city the poet once turned his back on at eighteen but has come to love again. Moving between lament and celebration, Greekling reflects on a changing and often misrepresented country, the nature of motherlands and mother tongues; it is a voyage out – and a return.

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The Field in Winter, the third collection of poetry by David Clarke, winner of the Michael Marks Award, elegantly reflects on memory, time, and the very particular landscape of loss, in a calendar of poems, a 'charm of words' that track and loop through seasons of nature and living. The relationship between the environment, the human body and the self takes centre stage here in poetry that is concerned with being in the world - senses alive to the detail of things, the trunk of a linden tree , the shock of cold water, the frenzy of bees and blossom. But these remarkable poems also write towards the intangible in the late summer's dusk - an empty cage, a bird flown; history's slow grind and echo. Clarke's elegies reach out to touch what passes us fleetingly in a moment of time - 'before the tongue can catch them' - held for that second, precious, in his poised and finely weighted poetry.

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Ramona Herdman’s Glut is a lush, entertaining, and bittersweet collection of poems about how we live together and find meaning through rules and rituals around food, family, alcohol, work, nature, sex and love. These vividly-realised, nimble poems probe at the delicate balancing acts we – our bodies and our minds – perform in life: between power and trust, between convention and rebellion, and between what is enough and what is too much. All the time, Herdman’s spry poetry keeps a gimlet eye on our impulse to make sense of it all – of how we live and work together, and what strategies will help us to navigate our way through the tangled undergrowth of negotiation and misunderstanding. Glut is a lustrous, darkly funny, open-hearted book on the distance between people, on satisfying appetites, and on seeking both pleasure and consolation.

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In Gregory Leadbetter’s second poetry collection, Maskwork, mystery, theatre and ritual combine to reveal rather than to disguise. The mask, in these resonant poems, acts as a way of becoming, seeing, and knowing – granting access to altered states and otherworlds hidden within and beyond ourselves. Here, language itself becomes an animating magic, connecting humans to our ecological roots.The spirit of revival, renaissance, new birth and rebirth haunts this book: and at its core, the idea of poetry itself as a form of learning – an art and a mystery – runs like a quicksilver thread throughout, between the elusive and the certain. Leadbetter’s meticulously attuned lyrical poetry tells of the transformative experience of knowing, a dynamic state of being that forever alters both the knower and the known.

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"why don’t you write about yourself ever people used to ask / and I didn’t know why / either in Chinese one word can lead you out of the dark / then back into it / in a single breath" Magnolia is the debut poetry collection by poet, essayist and non-fiction writer Nina Mingya Powles, one of contemporary poetry's most exciting new international voices and the winner of the inaugural Nan Shepherd Prize for Nature Writing. These vivid, luscious poems move between journal and biography, place and belonging, all the time exploring the multitudinous facets of language and culture that make up our identity, from the sense of longing that a delicious bowl of food conjures up to the inviting glow of paper lanterns that illuminate memory and travel. Formally rich, these unique poems skilfully broaden the perspective of all a poem can hold can contain through their daring, joyful and expansive approach.

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Letters Home, Jennifer Wong’s remarkable and vivid third collection of poems, unravels the complexities of being between nations, languages and cultures. Travelling across multiple borders of history and place, these poems examine what it means to be returning home, and whether it is a return to a location, a country or to a shared dream or language.“There are poems of homesickness, nostalgia, but also humour, hope and optimism - all depicted in Wong's distinctive, intelligent style... This is a remarkable collection, which makes a new and bold contribution to the genre of diaspora literature.” – Hannah Lowe"Jennifer Wong’s voice is captivating, compassionate, her poems full of insight, as she questions the complex relationship between culture and identity and what it means to leave a place to become defined by another." - Rebecca Goss

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David Clarke, winner of the Michael Marks Poetry Award 2013, returns with his second collection, The Europeans. Simultaneously close to home and looking outward beyond these shores, these wry and perceptive poems revel with form and encompass journeys, ideas of nationhood and national identity, and the optimism of a time when Europe and the UK enjoyed a quite different entente cordiale. They are a warning against nostalgia, a lucid and prescient exploration of how we see ourselves and how we are seen."A document for our times. A protest against bigotry and smuggery. A thesis for open borders and equality. In its cumulative effect, The Europeans is a comparative cultural analysis, a social satire and political commentary, a portrait of us and them, here and there, home and away." Paul Stephenson "Clarke’s authoritative new collection offers profound pleasures, and deepening regrets, in a poetic continent where every reader must confront ‘your own untruth’. The Europeans is certainly a book for the present. It is also a book for our uncertain future." - Alison Brackenbury"It includes the best gathering of found Brexit similes I expect to see in my lifetime, and a poem on stately homes that needs to be broadcast before every re-run of Downton Abbey. With targeted humour, an eye for the mobile and the sedentary, repurposing the mundane, David Clarke takes us to estates of all kinds, to both Leeds Central and Milano Centrale."– Alistair Noon

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Theresa Lola’s debut poetry collection In Search of Equilibrium is an extraordinary and exacting study of death and grieving. Where the algorithms of the body and the memory fail, Lola finds the words that will piece together the binary code of family and restart the recovery program. In doing so, these unflinching poems work towards the hard-wired truths of life itself - finding hope in survival, lines of rescue in faith, a stubborn equilibrium in the equations of loss and renewal. “Theresa Lola’s poems never fail to surprise with her breath-taking ability to create unexpected imagery; they never fail to move as she laments the last years of a loved one; and they never fail to delight with the transformative and healing power of poetry to create beauty.” - Bernardine Evaristo

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From politics to pop, from the UK to California, wherever digital heartbeats flutter and stutter, Ticker-tape is a maximalist take on 21st century living. Rishi Dastidar’s first full collection showcases one of contemporary poetry’s most distinctive voices, delivering effervescence with equal servings of panache and whiplash-quick wit.Here is sheer madcap ingenuity and also impressive breadth; ranging from odes of love to deconstructed diversity campaigns and detonations of banter’s worst excesses, plus appearances from ex-SugaBabes, a shark who comes to tea, to the matters of matchstick empires and national identity. Ticker-tape is bold, adventuresome and wry – an unmissable and irrepressible debut.

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How to be a Poet is the brainchild of poet Jo Bell and editor Jane Commane. As a natural follow-on to the 52 Project of 2014, this book aims to help poets taking the next step in developing, working and participating in the wider creative community as a writer.How to be a Poet combines practical advice and topical mini-essays that examine both the technical and creative dimensions of being a poet. It’s a no-nonsense manual where we’ve replaced the spanners with lots of ink, elbow grease and edits. At each step, we ask plenty of questions: what makes a poem tick over perfectly, how do we get it started when it stalls, and which warning lights should you never ignore?

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This debut collection of poems by former Birmingham Poet Laureate Roy McFarlane explores love, loss, adoption and identity in powerful, precise and emotionally-charged poetry. From bereavement comes forth a life story in poems; the journey of sons, friends, lovers and parents, and all the moments of growing-up, discovery, falling in and out of love and learning to say goodbye that come along the way.Themes of place, identity, history, and race interweave personal narratives, with and poems that touch on everything from the ‘Tebbitt Test’ and Marvin Gaye to the Black Country, that 'place just off the M6'. Distinct and memorable, McFarlane’s poems are beautifully focused, moving their readers between both the spiritual and the sensual worlds with graceful, rapturous hymns to the transformative power of love.

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‘Bird Sisters exerts a powerful hold, as if to read it is to be haunted by things one half-remembers.’ – Moniza Alvi‘All is strange or estranged in fact, but it is articulated in poems of supple inventive concentration. In that sense Bird Sisters is a book that casts deep shadows.’ – George SzirtesJulia Webb’s Bird Sisters is a surreal journey through sisterhood and the world of the family via the natural world. Fascinated by the ‘otherness’ of things, her poems expose places and relationships that are not always entirely comfortable places to exist. Many of them feature transformations of some kind – both real and metaphorical: a woman wears a dress of live bees or becomes a bird and family members turn into owls and sparrows.In exploring the ways in which both adults and children are casually cruel to one another, often within a mythological framework, Julia Webb blurs the boundaries between fairy tale and reality. These families are terrifying in their complexity and dysfunction, yet utterly compelling and convincing and with dark undercurrents of humour that ensure the poems are never bleak.

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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 here in the windswept landscape of coastal Mid Wales. As the figure of the Library Inspector struggles to keep up with disappearing librarians, tiny libraries with perplexing opening hours and a prized stock of just a few books, the landscape is altering and memories and books alike are carried off on the breeze and swallowed by the sea. Dreamlike and darkly-humoured, the Library Inspector's journey reveals a vanishing world with long shadows on the horizon. The narrator might be decidedly unreliable, and the fables fabulous, but at this poem's heart is a solemn melancholy in the face of a reality of library closures and fleeting time, for memory, for love and for the sake of words.

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Love, sex, boats and friendship. And yet Jo Bell's second poetry collection, Kith, is about so much more, as these bold and generous poems interweave bigger questions of place, identity and community and what these mean to us, here and now.Delighting in the belting, beautiful turn-of-phrase, Jo Bell's poems are lyrical and joyous, but always precise and clear as birdsong. They take us the long way home, plot histories along the route of backwaters, and are occasionally diverted for a roll in the hay; hearts are broken and boats are dry-docked. There will be tears, but there will also be love, safe harbours, and the company of wise and faithful kith.Jo Bell - archaeologist, boat dweller and erstwhile director of National Poetry Day - is a poetry pundit and deviser of online poetry community 52. Winner in 2014 of the Charles Causley prize and Manchester Cathedral prize, and placed in the Bridport, Wigtown, and Ballymaloe international competitions, she has had a fortunate year. She is currently building new projects with the writer Tania Hershman and poet Michael Symmons Roberts. Kith is her second collection of poems.

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