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POETRY
Darkness is where the stars are by Patrick Jones £8.99
Publication Date: November 2008
“strong stuff”
“…unflinching and uncompromising, provocative and highly- charged. Patrick is the voice of opposition for the 21 st Century. His work demands that his audience think, and think for themselves, about the injustices of the decision makers, of history, and of contemporary society, a rare quality in the art and literature of today. Much of his material is dark, and this collection is no exception, but it is also imbued with an eternal sense of hope.”
Rachel Trezise
publication date: March 2009
Mills is a poet preoccupied by language and the relation between language and reality. …He is an acute and at times playful ironist, but like the Metaphysical poets of an earlier age he is concerned with time and death and questions of ultimate meaning. …Thought-provoking time shifts and changes of perspective in the poems are combined with concentrated sensation-images that vividly evoke time and place. …What I was most aware of in Fool was the poet’s concentration of imagination. Kevin Mills is a poet with an original vision – intense, playful, ironic, deeply serious. Jeremy Hooker
The Ground beneath her feet ed: Jan Fortune-Wood £9.99
publication date: August 2008
Life lived on shifting ground, in the extraordinary moments when something cracks and something new happens is the underlying thread that unites the stories and poems in The Ground Beneath Her Feet. From Alice Keys award winning title story in which the cracks in the wall become the metaphor for both breaking and healing to beautifully crafted poems of Sue Wood, in which a comb burning foreshadows death with surprising grace and white becomes a metamorphosis; from Harrison Solow’s hypnotic, fable-like prose to Clare Jay’s precise, assured poetry the writing in this anthology engages and surprises, discomforts and delights.
Island, nameless rock: saari, nimetön luoto by Martti Hynynan translated by Mike Horewood £8.99
publication date: March 2009
Mike Horwood’s precise, lucid translations for Martti Hynynen’s poetry collection saari nimetön luoto (island, nameless rock) insinuate themselves quietly, but pervasively into the reader’s consciousness. Beautiful, spare, cool and with the slightly unnerving edge that comes from originality this fine collection is a treat for English readers, providing a window into the writing of one of Finland’s most talented poets.
Waiting for a Warm Body to Fill It, Kelly Moffett £8.99
With a cover featuring the renowned art work of international installation artists Lieve Van Stappen and some of the most lucid, skilful and affective poetry ever encountered this is a book that Cinnamon Press is justly proud of.
"This book is both an argument with time and a capitulation to sensation, and how strangely and wonderfully the two mirror each other. … Like Hopkins, Moffett knows we are most alive when fully within our bodies, that the only evidence of the eternal is in the sensory details of our day-to-day existence. And yet we yearn for transcendence. …a lovely, intelligent book."
James Harms
"A numinous quietude pervades the beautiful poems of Kelly Moffett. In subtle tones, she mines the complex regions of the self-all the while understanding that history is what we live in language."
Alan Michael Parker
"These are serious and lovely poems, woven from the shimmer and ache of the most essential questions."
Mary Ann Samyn
"Early on in this impressive debut, Kelly Moffett asks, "After all, how does this God think?" Her poems--these stunning, quixotic lyrics--attempt to answer this question by enacting the daredevil leaps between memory and observation, between the interior and the exterior, between the imagined and the perceived, between the ordinary and the sublime."
Gerry LaFemina
"Throughout …there's an undercurrent of ache and lament, qualities that she never sentimentalizes. Instead, with great precision, she gives us surfaces that both reveal and conceal: "No one knows how the spirits/got that way. How the wind moves. Why there are spells. Or why it grieved Him to his heart. Humankind." … I love how these poems resonate, and leave us with a fine aftertaste."
Stephen Dunn
Winter Lines - Daniel Healy £8.99
April 2008
In this debut collection Dan Healy, a young Welsh poet, displays the power of writing that is pared back to the essentials. The poems appear to be fragments, but they resonate long after the page is turned; cool, sharp language that stirs the depths. “When the need arises to excise the troubles of a day just gone, this is a book to be reached for and, as with lowering one's face to a bowl of chilled water, dipped into. Dan Healey's poems are quiet moments… be they of acutely observed park, roadside caff or river – they ask us to share in his sense of wonder at a moment's this-ness, '...a shiver of light...'” Sam Smith, The Journal
On the Back of the Wind Frank DUllaghan £8.99
Publication Date: June 2008
Frank Dullaghan's quietly spoken poems move between tenderness and terror with a humane warmth. They deal with the business of the world as experienced by a fully human being. The language follows and embraces a wide range of affairs, touching on loved, known and dangerous things - the texture of experience - lightly, unfussily, with a lovely ear for the plain cadence that is, for most of us, the sweet-sad music of being alive.'
George Szirtes
The Last Green Year by John Powell Ward £8.99
Publication Date: January 2009
John Powell Ward dazzles with the title-sequence, which lead us through a single year in twenty-five pages, ending with spring., before a sequence of poems connected to the long poem, all of which display the linguistic dexterity and poetic skill of this accomplished poet.“His purpose is nothing less than an attempt to make sense of the universe…”
Merryn Williams
Return to Bayou Lacombe by Jan Vilarrubia £8.99
Publication Date: November 2008
In this debut poetry collection Louisiana poet and playwright takes us on a journey through lives and places. Direct, lyrical, sharply observed.
Villarrubia offers us a natural world as threat and solace and finally as redemption through memory in these fine poems which play for high stakes in the affairs of the human heart.
Peter Cooley
This is a book of faith; each poem is a prayer hummed in images that startle. Villarrubia articulates the physical, the metaphysical, the supernatural with majesty, with divine insight. Hers is the work of the seer, the shower, the healer. If there is a poet who speaks from inside the soul of New Orleans, Jan Villarrubia is it.
Clare Potter
Publication Date: January 2009
Monkey is a journey through India with a poet from Wales whose senses are constantly open. Beautifully observed, lightly woven images and a sensitivity what should be left unsaid combine to make these crafted pieces charged and affective.
Missing the Eclipse by John Hewitt £8.99
Publication Date: May 2008
Joan Hewitt’s award winning poetry is subtle, deft, but always hits the spot. There is a sense here of the gaps in life, of words that frame the absences, the colouring around all that is missing, beautifully summed up in the title poem, but pervading the collection as it moves from Tyneside to Liverpool to Osterholz-Scharmbeck; from small domestic or intimate moments to understated, but none the less powerful, political observations. The language is sharp, layered with humour and intelligence.
Not from Books by Lee Grenfell £8.99
Publication Date: November 2008
In this debut poetry collection Lee Grenfell brings together his South Wales valleys background, scientific expertise and environmental concern to produce an innovative, accessible and humane range of poetry
Evening Land by Adam Chiles £8.99
Publication Date: July 2008
Widely published in journals in the US and UK, Adam Chiles, who is originally from the East Riding of Yorkshire and now lives and works in Virginia, has undertaken residencies at the Banff School of Fine Arts and been a recipient of bursaries from the Canada Council, Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference and The Gilman School. In these poems poetry focuses on landscape as the route into the human psyche, the nature of language, the role of memory and the metaphor for narrative meaning. Rich in imagery, Chiles’ poetry is at once dense and layered while remaining lucid and accessible.
Designs for Living by Estill Pollok £8.99
Publication Date: July 2008
In the third book in the Relic Environments series Estill Pollock continues his mastery of narrative poetry combined with an eye for unnerving precision. Intelligent, lucid language, the skill to make every word count, the courage to write poetry that is challenging, wide ranging, serious, but humane characterise Designs for Living just as much as Relic Environments and Available Light.
Hearing Voices by Ruth Bidgood £8.99
Publication Date: November 2008
Found poems are passages from letters, diaries, wills, deeds- in fact any prose source— which without their writers' knowledge or intention make themselves known as poems. Their form is free, but their rhythm (different from, stronger than, that of what we think of as prose): their unity: and often an intensity, an emotional charge encouraged the writer to 'lift' them from their setting and edit them into lines of verse which bring out their poetic qualities. Other poems in this collection are partly inventions, but make use of 'found' material (situations, speeches, phrases) from the original document, this material forming a key element in the poem. These elegant, poignant poems confirm Ruth Bidgood as one of the most talented poets writing in Wales today.
An Elusive State by Steve Grifiths £8.99
Publication Date: October 2008
A man hits fifty. He grew up surrounded by a belief in progress. Now he, and the world around him, are not so sure. He creates a Utopia to comfort himself. Steve Griffiths's cycle of poems, Al-Chwm, tells the story of the life and death of an imaginary utopia. The cycle began with a vision in the province of Granada which merged a twilight in the hill town of Montefrio with one in Griffiths's home village in Anglesey, North Wales, as the lights came on one by one. Al-Chwm, first heard on Radio Three in 2006, is a parallel universe, a magical epic, a comfort, a mystery.
Flashes and Specks by Elizabeth Ashworth £8.99
Publication Date: October 2008
In her second full length collection Elizabeth Ashworth displays a carefully honed skill, acute powers of observation and an enviable range.
Simple Arithmetic - Lloyd Rees £8.99
April 2008
With Simple Arithmetic Rees revisits …themes with poems about memory, the changing seasons, the ephemerality of love – the need to struggle on despite the frailty and vulnerability of the human frame. The prevailing tone is Larkin-esque: ironic and self-mockingly poignant. In these new poems, he has moved on …to a greater honesty and depth.
There is typical, sardonic humour; …an insight into Lloyd Rees’s exceptional versatility as a poet, but also much more about Lloyd Rees himself and his attitude to life. …‘It comes to a bunch of stuff./About half a life, in truth,/but not, Lord, yet quite enough.’ (Simple Arithmetic)
Alan Perry
Beneath The Deluge - Catherine M Brennan £8.99
February 2008
Prize winning poet Catherine M Brennan was born in Dublin and now lives in London. In this, her debut collection, she brings together her finest work: fresh, distinctive and honed with an eye for form and an ear for exact language.
Hauled Headfirst into a Leviathan - Iain Britton £8.99
February 2008
This long awaited first collection from one of New Zealand’s finest writers reveals Iain Britton as a poet with a remarkable and distinctive voice. The observations are piercingly accurate, the images are visceral and lucid and the crafting impeccable. With a lightness of touch, ‘The air is packed with the stirred-up orbits of people’s faces’ (Ourselves in Wood) and we enter other lives not as mere voyeurs, but as participants.
Mint Sauce & Other Stories & Poems - Anthology Jan Fortune - Wood (Ed) £8.99
March 2008
This anthology of the best stories and poems from the Cinnamon Press Writing Awards showcases a range of talented voices, from the new to the more established. From Shelagh Weeks’ winning story to the visually precise poetry of Rhys Trimble, from Claire Jay’s surreal world to Jan Villarrubia’s lyrical evocations of picking up the threads of life after the devastation of hurricane Katrina, the anthology provides a feast of words crafted to allow the reader to engage with life more fully.
The finalists in the fourth Cinnamon Press poetry collection award offer shifting perspectives on life lived with all the senses open. These are poets who take seriously what it means to be alive and who take the time to communicate with lucid precision; finding patterns and shapes in what might otherwise be a chaotic jumble of sensory impressions and transitory experiences.
In these pages crows become punctuation, a woman faints at the sight of Matisse’s poppies, we learn the Urdu for fish, walk hospital corridors, search for an obituary, travel with survivors of a shipwreck who are kept alive by a breast-feeding mother and watch marriage bones being picked clean. Out of these riches of daily shapes, life is sifted clear.
Publication date: 15 January 2008
These poems are truly ‘made’ by the craftsman in the true meaning of the word - poet as ‘maker’. They display a remarkable range of tone and reference, tremendous verbal dexterity, strong, muscular, visceral use of language, yet, at the same time, a softness – a delicate, gossamer-like quality.
One true test of great poems is that they meld form and content, cause and effect, to a point where you can’t see the joins, and in this collection Beagrie does it time and time again. Ranging from seemingly rough-hewn dialect chat, to the myths and folklore of the Celts, the Native Americans or the Finns, these poems hit the spot. They raise a tingle on the back of the neck, light a bulb in the brain, more often than any recent collection I have seen. Beagrie’s handling of different forms and registers, his sheer variety of approach, is stunning.
David Woolley
Alphabets of Elsewhere - Tim Keane £8.99
The poems in Alphabets of Elsewhere are richly colored dispatches from places of transformation: from artist lofts and suburban train lines to the painted walls of Florentine chapels and the top of the Twin Towers. Set around the troubled dawn of the new millennium, these poems blend music with image, loud song with quiet prayer, charting relationships lost and found and mapping wildly unexpected routes to all those elsewheres we can find in the very language that we live.
‘Tim Keane's poems move with impetuous energy, fired by a centrifugal and neo-Romantic enthusiasm. His appetite for texture, color, sound, culture, and sensation is inspiring.’
Wayne Koestenbaum, author of Hotel Theory and Jackie Under My Skin: Interpreting an Icon.
‘With a subtle, economic music that retains the strength of fiction, Tim Keane surveys the world -- through desire's fancy and memories of the real -- with the accuracy of a cartographer.’
Ammiel Alcalay, author of From the Warring Factions
‘Tim Keane paints daybreaks, loves, losses, and longing in poems that are "fish-rich and streaming." His is a passionate voice that does not compromise its craft, a voice free of chic ironies, engaged with its times, politics, places beyond its borders, a voice that assures us American poetry is in good hands.’
Naveed Alam, author of A Queen of No Ordinary Realms
The Bus Stop Scheharazade £8.99
The first Cinnamon Press short story anthology.
The writers in The Bus Stop Scheherazade & other stories use language in such a way that the everyday becomes the extra-ordinary. For a few pages we see more keenly and breathe more deeply.
Drawing From Memory - Hazel Frankel £8.99
Drawing from Memory weaves a rich tapestry of word images inspired both by visual art and a life lived with all the senses open. The language is lucid, the metaphors vivid, but controlled, and the simplicity of structure presides over a ‘tornado of possibility’. The poems in Drawing from Memory reveal a mature voice with a deft touch; an impressive debut from an accomplished South African poet.
Hazel Frankel lives in Johannesburg, South Africa, the city where she was born. She is an art teacher and calligrapher, holds an MA both in Fine Arts and in Creative Writing and is currently working on a new series of poems as well as on a novel, Counting Sleeping Beauties.
The Fossil-Box - Richard Marggraf Turley £8.99
Publication date: 1 November 2007
Preserved traces of things – forms, language, memory – are what inform many of the poems in The Fossil-box. The volume is fascinated by the urgency of ground and belonging. Several pieces focus on the land- and seascapes around the author’s home in Wales. At other places in the collection the ‘abundant centre’ of rediscovery is the Forest of Dean, a prolific site of formation and recollection, the ‘slow lens’ between childhood and adulthood, the source of the ‘impending past’.
There's a rare and intense musicality in 'The Fossil-Box'. Richard Marggraf Turley demonstrates a real appreciation of the sonic possibilities of English, and the delicious rolling cadences, reflecting 'the Severn's soluble tithes', of this book are to be relished.
Here indeed is writing that deserves to be read aloud, springing from an acute awareness of history and what the poet owes to it. 'The Fossil-Box' is a marvellous exploration of roots and our inescapable ancestries.
Robert Minhinnick
CD: Songs from The Fossil-Box £10.99
A selection of 10 poems by the poet Richard Marggraf Turley to especially composed music by Sid THomas
Jason Smith’s Nocturnal Opera Nick Malone £8.99
Publication date: 10 November 2007
In Jason Smith’s Nocturnal Opera Nick Malone’s mastery of form and lyricism reaches new heights to achieve that most difficult and rewarding of poetry genres, the long narrative poem, here combined with lucid passages of prose and Malone’s own mesmerising art work. The combination is at once sumptuous and spell-binding. We enter Jason’s home for the course of one night and travel with him room by room on a journey of metamorphosis and discovery in which the boundaries of identity are challenged and re-defined. Intelligent, layered imagery; precise, visceral language and the hypnotic, slightly surreal story, make this an innovative and brilliant poetry collection.
Praise for Nick Malone’s previous work:
“Verse of the highest quality … Vivid, thoughtful and unusual.” - Agenda
“…unself-centred … lyrical passages” - William Empson
No Laughing matter Roger Elkin £8.99
linguistic flair, originality and attention to crafting that we have come to expect from a mature and committed poet. No Laughing Matter displays the transformative skill of one who can take the ordinary and reveal the extra-ordinary.
Praise for Previous Collections by Roger Elkin:
‘Sharp, physical realisation of places and people… and a sense of balance realised in a range of humour… The poems habitually transform the ordinary into the memorable.’
Eddie Waiwnright on Points of Reference
‘A collection… where the subject matter is hard and strong and where there is vigour, originality and a strong pulse in the words.’
W.H. Petty in Acumen on Home Ground
‘There’s never any sense of staleness or repetition… so that reading the poems is a continual discovery of treasures. …Of course I’m just simply envious. And impressed.’
R.V. Bailey on Rites of Passing
Publication date: 1 December 2007
In a fast paced world it is all too easy for life to become fragmented and compartmentalised. This anthology, however, celebrates an alternative vision that can exist alongside or even between the cracks, a vision that emerges whenever we take time or are arrested by particular moments that help weave
a narrative through the fragments so that we connect, ‘only connect’.
Ready Made Bouquets - Robin Londsay Wilson £7.99
These lucid pieces range across wide subjects – sometimes dark, sometimes poignant, sometimes brutally realistic, sometimes achingly tender, but always united by an unmistakable voice and distinctive style. From the pared down punctuation to the crafted syntax and careful placing of every word, this is poetry that takes ready made language and makes it an art form that is bound to create a response.
Robin Lindsay Wilson was born in Australia of Scottish parents. He has worked as writer in residence on creative writing projects and as a theatre director. He currently works as Head of Acting at Queen Margaret University College in Edinburgh. He is a playwright and poet. In the last three years he has had over one hundred poems accepted for publication and, in 2005, he received a commendation in the National Poetry Competition.
The Oricle Room - Fred johnston £8.99
In this gracefully written book, Fred Johnston reminds us of an Ireland "Before the coming of the condom" where abuse was kept silent. It is no wonder, then, that he is scathing about poets and poetry whose "middle name is Silence", where "No poet worth a travel-grant/ Dare sound the warning bells".
Fred Johnston is not such a poet. He makes his choice "in the uttered word" and writes formally and "prayerfully" of a world he has created in "The sound of the miraculous/ Break[ing] like a wave over the ordinary". In a world whose poetry is largely forgettable, this volume stands as a reminder of what poetry can be.
Gabriel Fitzmaurice
Black Elk Dances for Queen Victoria - Dana Littlepage Smith £8.99
n Black Elk Dances for Queen Victoria Dana Littlepage Smith writes poetry that ‘can fill a belly like a piece of bread’. These are honest poems, sharply observed and beautifully crafted. The voices that speak from the pages are authentic, sometimes dark, always full of passion, but never over-stated. This is
poetry that works both in performance and on the page.
"These are poems full of verve and colour, speaking with many tongues from many horizons – a generous brave poetry, unfailingly informed by the heart!"
Pauline Stainer
Catch a Falling Tortoise - Paul McDonald £8.99
“The thing with Paul McDonald’s poems is that he’s actually been to the places he writes about and provides vivid description...one cannot say that a pose is just a pose for the poet has a way of rearranging things with skill.”
Poetry Quarterly Review
“Paul McDonald has a real talent for reproducing conversational everyday speech and impassioned monologues…[his] poems linger in the mind.”
New Hope International Review
Praise for Catch a Falling Tortoise:
“For some time I've been inwardly bemoaning the fact that Paul McDonald had abandoned the excellent poetry of his First Communion and The Right Suggestion collections for fame as a highly successful comic novelist, while all the time he was collecting poetic gems for this volume. There's a kid playing hide and no one playing seek and there are pointers to having your back stroked with a slug, where to see Liberace's truss on display, and a note that toupees don't grow. And if that's not enough there are some even more serious poems in this more than welcome return to the noble art.
Geoff Stevens
The Drier the Brighter - Judy Kendall £8.99
In this delightful, precise and carefully observed collection, Judy Kendall shows her enviable qualities of clear perception, scrupulous self-awareness and the knack for the mot juste. You can hear a pin drop in the silence and tension between the lines.
David Morley
Judy Kendall's poems… demand that we make connections. …they invite both sensual associations and the enquiring mind. …what is left unsaid is rich with sharply-cut details… Like Edward Thomas, a presiding spirit in this book, she has the grounded sensibility of one who sees the world by walking.
Philip Gross
…a poet who is not afraid to experiment with form; she knows intuitively when to end a line – where to place a word on the page for maximum effect. … This is an intelligent, astute, refreshing collection of scintillating clarity. I look forward to seeing more from this highly original poet.
Barbara Dordi
Morocco Rococo - Jane McKie £8.99
Jane McKie won the Cinnamon Press poetry collection award with this beautifully crafted debut collection.
Delicate, layered images distilled to their visceral essentials characterise Jane McKie's award winning poetry. McKie takes her readers on journeys - to the desert in the footsteps of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, to magical places from Scotland to Sussex or to the heart of the myth. Whatever the landscape we are let into a world where the senses are alive, where the same vivid acuity pulses on the page delivering sounds, smells, tastes and sights as we have never known them. This is poetry to delight in.
Available Light - Estill Pollock £8.99
The second in the Relic Environments trilogy of poetry collections and Pollock's tenth full length collection. Available Light journeys from war zones to mythology, from Grafton Street to 1940s Florida before culminating in 'Resurrection Suite' an interpretative translation of Lyubov Sirota's poetry and diary extracts recounting, first hand, the events at Chernobyl on 26th April 1986.
This is poetry writing at its best - confident, original, perfectly chosen language used to maximum effect. These are poems that will carry on resonating long after you have read them.
Relatively Unscathed- Idris Caffrey £8.99
Idris Caffrey's sixth collection displays not only maturity of craft, but a lyrical poise that breathes life into these simple, poignant and profound pieces. Here you will find sharp observation, lucid images, but above all the grace to leave those essential spaces where the reader too can ponder what has gone before and what still lies ahead.
A honed and satisfying collection from one of the favourite poetry writers in small press magazines.
anthology
The Peacock Room - Ruth Leader
In her debut collection Ruth Leader questions our relationship with the stranger. The Peacock Room confronts displacement, isolation and alienation yet remains open to the myriad possibilities of connection and transformation. These intimate, sensuous, whimsical and surreal poems both grieve a lost world and evoke a present. They take us on a lyrical journey, inviting us to honour and welcome the strangeness of this world.
Salt-sweat & Tears - Louisa Adjoa Parker £8.99
Of Ghanaian-British descent louisa adjoa parker explores issues of identity, belonging, family and relationships in raw, honest, but crafted pieces.
The poems bounce off the page like diamonds - hard, bright and lethal. Louisa Adjoa Parker writes like a fire blazes…- I envy her! …brutal and cool; sparks fly. Her world explodes in your face. She insists you listen. Her language is spot-on. She writes like a dream, but a dream that will not let you go; that's ruthless and painful and crystal clear: … She shares her pain with a lightness of touch that makes it all the more heart-breaking.
Selima Hill
The poetry here takes me backwards to a childhood full of stress, then forwards to the glorious abandonment of oneself to beauty, countryside and nature writ large - its the beauty of the West Country - the light, the space that puts all those ugly people in their place. Sometimes it's like listening to a sister who understands our West Country world in the round. I'm jealous!
Joanna Traynor
salt-sweat & tears is an extraordinary collection. These searingly honest autobiographical poems both confront and celebrate the realities of multi-ethnic family life in Britain today.
Steve Martin
Louisa Adjoa Parker will be appearing with Thai-born poet, Ruth Leader and Welsh poet Marilyn Jenkins at a Cinnamon Press event at the Dylan Thomas centre on April 12th "Near & Far - Strange & Familiar" - poetry exploring identity and memory across international boundaries.
Close Distances -Marilyn Jenkins £8.99
This thoughtful and intriguing collection raises questions of what it means to remember and to belong. The answers are oblique and subtle; there is no didacticism here, only precise details in controlled and lucid work that is both accessible and deep.
Vivid, lucid and delicate meditations … the poems in Close Distances are never monotonous. Like prisms, many cast light on other subjects. The details convince because they are carefully distilled. There are very few wasted words in this crafted collection. Chris Kinsey
Wrestling In Mud: New & Selected - Herbert Williams £8.99
"These vulnerable, indeed transparent poems, like those of Idris and W.H. Davies which also eschew the veneer of sophistication, seek an instant response from the reader. Some are meant more for the platform than for the page, but the best of the latter, such as ‘The Old Tongue’, ‘Jones the Grocer’, ‘Out of Darkness’ and ‘Scum’ are likely to make that response a pleasurable ‘Yes’."Dannie Abse
"Herbert Williams’ ‘New and Selected’ has a wide range of subject and an engaging style. Sometimes he jokes with us, but it is the joking of a poet not blind to the pain of being human, and never free from the need to fight for answers to the puzzles of our existence. There’s a sense of history here – a favourite poem of mine is ‘Hill Fort’, where the watchful inhabitants espy everything except what the poet himself sees, today’s rooftops and wind-farms and inescapable dangers. Character poems introduce us to people like servile Jones the Grocer in his ‘fog / Of self-effacement’.
Personal poems include loving tributes to his wife. Often Wales is the subject – a lost Wales in ‘Ghost Country’, an unpredictable ‘mess of institutions’ at the end of ‘Owain Glyndwr’. The spice of anger and tang of bitterness in some political poems coexist with lyrical moments when we feel the pathos of innocence; while the ‘Countdown to the Gulf’ went on, ‘The careless children played their airy games… their hands skittering like kites’.
Some of Williams’ best poems use, tellingly, such devices as repetition, as in ‘Black Harvest’ with its rollicking metre and serious message, or the poignant lyrics of ‘A Thing of Human Interest’ and ‘You Simply Went Away’. These are honest, accessible and often moving poems that do indeed ‘sing a greeting’ to the future." Ruth Bidgood
"For anyone in Wales with the slightest interest in who we are and how we manage our rain-driven lives this is essential reading. Ifor Thomas In Wrestling in Mud we encounter Herb Williams at the peak of his powers, a wise, reflective, mature poet who at the same time delights in being as scurrilous and acerbic as a thwarted teenager. Williams tackles the big themes – love, death, illness and trauma with a clarity and understanding that can make the hairs stand up on the back of your neck, tears well up in your eyes and then, with a magician’s dexterity he changes the mood, yanks the rug of predictability and the next poem will turn those tears to laughter. There’s long lasting monogamous love sitting next to cider-sweet temptation; tragic illness juxtaposed with tragi-comedy. His technical skill as a poet is wide ranging, embracing rap and traditional forms will equal facility. In reading this book you will get to know Herb Williams very well. In the power of his art however, you will get to know yourself even better." Peter Finch
Dreadging the Delta - Christopher Kelen £8.99
‘typically innovative and intellectually sharp’ The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature
Christopher Kelen is a well known Australian poet making his UK debut with Dredging the Delta, a beautifully crafted series of poems exploring life in Macao, where Kelen works in the university’s English Department. These evocative, lucid pieces are interspersed with the author’s highly acclaimed art work to produce a collection that sparkles with linguistic flair and artistic brilliance.
Kelen has won a number of prestigious poetry prizes, published seven previous collections, as well as works in other genres and has exhibited his art work widely.
Creatures of the Intertidal Zone - Susan Richardson £8.99
Susan Richardson beautifully marries the landscape of the polar regions with their - and her own - emotional topography. I particularly admire her spirited recreation of Gudrid, that enchanting eleventh-century Viking heroine. Creatures of the Intertidal Zone is a thought-provoking collection and very well worth reading.
Sara Wheeler
Susan Richardson's journey to the ice, a voyage of personal discovery, has yielded an intriguing harvest Trevor Fishlock
Here is poetry …driven from within into the shape best suited to its purpose. Internal rhyme and assonance, not obvious on the page, sing out when the poems are read aloud. This is free verse at its finest. …Poems in this collection fly without difficulty and I admire them from the ground, but a few of them of them landed especially heavily and I can still feel their impact on my heart.
Ann Drysdale
& the concept of zero - christopher brooke £8.99
The debut collection from Cardiff performance poet christopher brooke. Launched to critical acclaim this is poetry on the margins that ranges from the bleak to the tender, from documentary realism to dark humour and always with the story-teller's eye for precise detail.
"brooke enthralls, extends and entertains… a poetry of velocity…" Peter Finch
"the best new writing to come out of Wales in 2006. It's funny, sad, exasperating... Those of you who think you don't like poetry, you might, very much, like this collection. Buy it. Take it to a pub. Read it. You'll be happy." Niall Griffiths, Red-Handed
The genius of technique is there… five-sense reality has been scientifically questioned… ironic pessimism lit by humour. There is much to admire." New Hope International Review
Pieces - John Tanner £8.99
John Tanner's debut poetry collection of astute, detailed pieces with a strong sense of place -whether reading the prose poems about a South Wales valleys childhood or poetry on the road in the USA or poems crafted in the contradictions of contemporary North Wales there is the same insight and intelligence at work throughout.
"A world in which the landscape becomes language and the language becomes landscape." Ian Davidson
Spilling Histories - clare e. potter £8.99
The first poetry collection from South Wales poet, clare e. potter, who lived and taught in New Orleans for many years and has won both the John Tripp award for spoken poetry and a Focus on the Future of Arts award. In evocative, deceptively simple word pictures clare conjures sensuous reflections. An assured first collection.
"It's the unuttered in Potter's poetry that whispers in your bones. …as if she holds each sensation in her hands and turns it round and round until it begins to breathe." Jan Villarrubia
Relic Environments - Estill Pollock £8.99
February 2006
This is Estill Pollock's eighth collection and the accomplishment of the work is evident in every beautifully crafted piece. The first section, Mystery Tramp Eclogues, features poems of scope and ambition that reveal kaleidoscopic layer after layer of nuances. The language has the ability to be both precise, yet shifting and is always engaging, inviting the reader to become immersed in the rhythm as well as the multiple meanings. The second section of the collection, Revelations of a Lesser Wife, re-constructs poetry from fragments left by Yu Xuanji, a ninth century Chinese courtesan. The poems are exquisite: lucid, evocative and deeply humane.
Impossible Objects - Bill Greenwell £8.99
April 2006
Bill Greenwell's first collection invites us to see the world from a new perspective. With a background in helping others to learn writing skills and having been New Statesman's poet in residence for several years, Bill's poetry marries accessibility with a satirical humour that often bubbles away just beneath the surface. These are poems to savour: structural simplicity, moments of insight and above all the impossibility, but vital urgency of being alive. Short-listed for the Forward Prize.
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The Lie of the Land - Anthology £9.99
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Anthology of poetry from Wales. Shaping up to be the best poetry anthology of 2006 - this wide ranging anthology of both new voices and the best known names in Welsh writing in English launched at the Guardian Hay on Wye Festival on May 30th and sold in aid of the Meningitis Trust. With a foreword by Peter Finch and sixty diverse and talented contributors this is a fantastic showcase of the riches of poetry form Wales.
Sound of Mountain - Bruce Ackerley £8.99
This début poetry collection from Bruce Ackerley, winner of the first Cinnamon Press poetry collection award is a delight from start to finish. The poems are finely crafted, uncluttered and full of resonances that always leave the reader with more to discover on re-reading. The themes are those that recur again and again: love, life, nature, relationships, loss… but the ways of framing the themes are always refreshing, full of depth: words replete with their own music.