Search results for ""Heaventree Press""

George Ttoouli is an Honorary Teaching Fellow for the Warwick Writing Programme. He co-founded the Heaventree Press in 2002 and has worked in the education team at the Poetry Society. He's now mostly skint, in Coventry. He co-edits poetry blogzine Gists & Piths. In 2004 he received a Jerwood-Arvon Young Writing Apprenticeship to work on a novel, which he still hasn't abandoned. Static Exile is his debut collection of poetry.

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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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In the shadows of war, loss and longing, a poet seeking his homeland finds his memories and dreams of its distinctive beauty refracted through a second language. These subtle, elusive and potent poems build bridges of imagery and language between the past and present, the lost and found."Here is a rich legacy bypassing Milorad's difficult final years. The poems seem driven, necessary; Croatia and its language call him back, his distinctively developed English finds image after pertinent image. The book is a bounty of metaphor as he is led by Moses and by delight and necessity of observation and discovery; the natural world seems to come to him to be named. I wonder if the frequent 'you' is himself or an other - or heightened to an Other - or these variously. I understand from this book that if we do not see, hear, experience in our own truthful way and make poems with the openness of these poems, then in some crucial sense many of the human world's possibilities cease to exist."David Hart."I can't stop reading these poems. This is work of atmosphere and tone first, narrative second, but it's a narrative that combines deep melancholy with a hard-won sense of joy in the slightest shaft of light, and the thought it provokes. At times it's like trying to recall a receding dream or encountering an oracle with an urgent, impossible message for you alone. It's difficult for me to separate the poems from Milorad's generosity, gentleness and intense imagination, and in a sense that doesn't matter as these are so clearly poems by a man who found beauty, saw mystery and took dignity even in confinement."Luke Kennard.Milorad Krystanovich was born in 1950 in Dalmatia, then part of the former Yugoslavia. After conflict engulfed the region, Milorad was sent to safety with relations in the UK in 1992. He learnt English and later joined The Cannon Poets, becoming a founder member of Writers Without Borders and an active and well-respected figure within Birmingham's poetry and writing community.Hailed by Jonathan Morley in 2007 as "Birmingham's finest émigré poet", Milorad's published work includes three volumes published by Writers Without Borders. Heaventree Press published the bilingual Four Horizons / Četiri Vidika (2005) and, in English, The Yasen Tree (2007). His penultimate volume, Improvising Memory, was published by Nine Arches Press in 2010. Milorad also taught Croatian, Bosnian and Serbian at the Brasshouse Language Centre in Birmingham and wrote numerous plays and novels for children and young people. Milorad Krystanovich was diagnosed with a brain tumour in 2009 and died in September 2011.

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