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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.

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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

Beneath The Deluge Catherine M Brennan £7.99 UK delivery, £8.99 elsewhere

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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.

Close Distances Marilyn Jenkins £7.99 UK delivery, £8.99 elsewhere

Publication date: October 2009

Superb new collection from Daphne Gloag

Daphne Gloag’s poetry has an extraordinary range of reference: to books, artists, architecture, place and the physical universe. What is remarkable about her writing is the way in which she investigates these interests and uses them to illuminate human experience, in particular her close relationship with the you the poems often address. Here is a distinctive voice, both enquiring and lyrical, which affirms life and celebrates love.

Myra Schneider

Her poems are remarkable, especially in the way she has successfully taken complex concepts in modern science – particularly cosmology – and integrated them successfully and seamlessly into poems which speak of the human condition in an effective and moving manner. Her treatment of the scientific components of her writing is both authoritative and poetic. These features are best seen in the sections presented of a long poem, “Beginnings”, which reveal great humanity and strong but quiet passion: and running delicately through which is subtle and beautifully wrought description of a love relationship. An example of the interweaving of cosmology and human life are the following simple yet wonderfully powerful three lines: “They played Bach and Twinkle twinkle little star / not knowing what a star is / or the violence of stars. This is, without question, an important collection.”

John Latham

Long awaited debut collection

Cuba in the Blood is the long awaited first collection from US poet and long-term British resident, Wendy Klein. Travelling from the Cuba of her grandfather to modern Cuba in honed, lyrical poetry and moving from childhood to motherhood and beyond, all the while protesting the race with time, this is an accomplished and deeply satisfying collection. Accessible and humane; observed with the story-tellers keenness and warmth, this is poetry to go back to again and again.

Wendy Klein's poetry has appeared in anthologies and poetry magazines.  A retired family psychotherapist, she is a regular reader at the Troubadour and Poets' Cafe in Reading.  She enjoys belly-dancing and the curative company of dogs. 

for further information about this publication look here

“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

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.

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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.

Award winning US poet launching debut collection in New Zealand

Etymology is a dazzling first collection from award winning US poet, and New Zealand resident and lecturer, Bryan Walpert. Winner of the 2007 New Zealand Poetry Society International Poetry Competition, Walpert uses language with the dexterity of a verbal magician, pushing at the boundaries of perception and meaning to take risks, tell stories or smuggle in jokes. Moving deftly between touching, but never sentimental, observations of human relationships and luminous accounts of objects, natural phenomena that take on meaning, Etymology is an intelligent, innovative lyric inquiry into discourse and sense.

Walpert’s poems have appeared in such publications as AGNI, Crab Orchard Review, Gulf Coast, New Zealand Listener, Poet Lore, and Tar River Poetry. He has an MFA from University of Maryland-College Park, a PhD from University of Denver and won the 2007 James Wright Poetry Award from the Mid-American Review. He won the 2007 New Zealand Poetry Society International Poetry Competition, is poetry editor of Bravado and winner of a National Tertiary Teaching Excellence Award for teaching creative writing in New Zealand. He is a senior lecturer in the School of English and Media Studies at Massey University in Palmerston North.

In her second full length collection Elizabeth Ashworth displays a carefully honed skill, acute powers of observation and an enviable range.

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

Publication Date march 2010

New Collection from John Barnie

Praise for previous collections

"…He is a poet honest enough to confront head-on the implications of the scientific world-picture and refuses to seek false comfort in discarded verities. ...he is a poet too of vision, a vision which finds all-but-flawless, if miniature, form in a number of these poems…"

Roger Caldwell on Heroes in Poetry Wales  

"…John Barnie’s gloriously unclassifiable There’s an oscillation between the particularised diurnal reality and the larger perspectives of nature and eternity and death. Altogether an intriguing and enjoyable read…"

Nicholas Murray in Poetry Wales

Praise for The Forest Under the Sea

Characterized by a probing seriousness, the volume is also energized by Barnie’s trademark ironies – a wryness he sees operating in the structures of the universe. His vision is best described as teasingly dark. Longlisted for the 2007 Book of the Year award for his previous collection, Trouble in Heaven, John Barnie proves with The Forest Under the Sea that he is unquestionably one of our most urgent contemporary voices.

Damian Walford Davies

John Barnie is a p oet and essayist from Abergavenny, Gwent. Lived in Denmark from 1969-1982. Editor of Planet, The Welsh Internationalist from 1990-2006. Has published several collections of poems, mixed poems and fiction, and two collections of essays, one of which, The King of Ashes, won a Welsh Arts Council Prize for Literature in 1990. His collection  Trouble in Heaven (Gomer, 2007) was on the Wales Book of the Year 2008 Long List. John Barnie plays guitar in the bilingual blues and poetry group Llaeth Mwnci Madoc/Madoc’s Moonshine. He is a Fellow of Academi.

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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.

A selection of 10 poems by the poet Richard Marggraf Turley to especially composed music by Sid THomas

Both the Fossil box collection and CD for only £13.99

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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.

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.

How to Pour Madness into a Teacup is a compelling first collection from a poet whose exploration of mental illness is acutely observed, wry, poignant, dark and humane. Deceptively simple poems are layered with precise observations and meaning that resonates long after reading. Lucid and accessible, this is poetry that takes risk with stunning results.

Abegail Morley was the winner of the 2008 poetry collection award and has been widely published in small press magazines.

‘It has fallen to Abegail Morley to draw aside the veil suspended between the world we know and the unholy of unholies that lies beyond. We are shown the painted veil of everyday life only to have it slashed with a knife before our eyes, allowing us to glimpse the horror that lies within, sometimes frightening but always lit with a strange visionary beauty. Morley’s poems are daredevil ambassadors to a savage place.’

Hugo Williams

'...moving, sensitively written, compelling, ...well worth a read.'

Sophie Hannah

Award Winning Poet launches debut collection

The debut collection from the winner of the Cinnamon Press Poetry Collection Award is a mixture of innovative, but understated language, precise observation and simple twists of perspective, it is the kind of poetry that lodges itself in the consciousness and resonates long after reading. Long sequences take us into life of Saint Cuthbert, Emily Dickenson and Emily Bronte combine visceral, muscular details with honed language and exquisite poignancy, while elsewhere the language is swift and playful. A strong sense of place presides throughout – “ North remembers smoke, the taste of it/ the curd of it, raising a welt on stone”

An extraordinarily accomplished and mature debut.

Sue Wood lives in West Yorkshire. She is a recent winner of the Cinnamon Press Poetry Award and has also been placed in many other national poetry competitions.

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.

Publication date September 2009

Innovative collaboration between poet and photographer – I Spy Pinhole Eye

What Denison presents - the dark rootings of steel and concrete in a flashlit night; the feeling of something slamming into the earth, establishing its narrow vocabulary of grass, stone, mould, leaf, strut, and the strange, focused moony chill that freezes everything - moves through the clarity, steadiness and humaneness of Philip Gross’s verbal imagination to create something new. And that, after all, is the idea: the making new, the exploration, or apprehension of the way things are too much and terrible, as O’Hara saw, there always being something else under and beyond the changing names of things.

George Szirtes

Philip Gross is an award winning poet, fiction writer, dramatist and creative writing lecturer. His last poetry collection was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and the one before that a PBS Special Recommendation, whilst The Wasting Game was not only a PBS Recommendation, but also shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize and the Airlines of Mistila was a PBS Choice. Of his twelve poetry collections, two have been limited editions including wood engravings and artist illustrations and two others have been collaborations with artists.

Simon Denison’s documentary and conceptual landscape photography has been exhibited both nationally and internationally. He is the author of two photographic books, The Human Landscape (Greyscale 2002) and Quarry Land (Greyscale 2005). His work has been reviewed widely including in The Times, The Guardian and on BBC Radio 4. He is a lecturer in the history and interpretation of photography at Birmingham City University's Institute of Art & Design, and he reviews books and exhibitions for the Photography magazine.

Long awaited debut collection from award winning poet  

Junction Road is a finely crafted, mature debut from an experienced poet. Layered with humane observations and incisive imagery this is lyric poetry at its best – crafted, authentic and original.

Jean Harrison is retired, writing steadily and has poetry published in a number of magazines. Her poem ‘Woman on the Moon’ was short-listed for the Forward Prize for best single poem in 2004.

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

 

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Another original collection from poetry editor, Bob Mee

Bob Mee’s first collection was described in Raw Edge magazine as “...a wry conversational style that reminded me of Billy Collins. But as with Collins, the apparent simplicity can be deceptive.” In The Maker of Glass Eyes Mee confirms himself as a raconteur, both on and off the page. An experienced performer, Mee’s work is “unpretentious, unaffected, pared to the bone - Skipping with ease between minimalist free verse and driving-on beat, he provides many sympathetic chuckles.” (The Journal)

From dark stories to irony, Mee is accomplished at telling tales with assured lyricism.

Bob Mee lives in Warwickshire and writes non-fiction books about boxing. He has been editor of the poetry journal iota for several years and also edits poetry for Ragged Raven Press.

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.

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.

In this fine and beautifully judged collection Barbara Dordi shows us that she stands lightly on the soft and fragile ground between visual art and the written word, holding the moving world still (as in The Weald in Winter) or taking the frozen moment and calling it into life (as in Miss Jekyll’s gardening boots). She shows us the art in Eden Revisited and the artist in Le Flâneur de Montmartre, and now and then uses a separate voice to bridge the space between the two, as when Little Marie Cleans Cézanne’s Atelier.

Barbara Dordi edits the long-established magazine Equinox and the more recently became editor of French Literary Review. She lives in France.

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.

Published in January 2010

Third collection from widely published Isle of Wight poet

On the Brink is remarkable collection from a mature and deeply humane voice. Ranging in sections from surviving mental illness to the particularities of island life, the landscape merging with emotions, via a sequence on Faustus that fizzes with humour, delightfully twisting language and astute observations of human psychology, this is a noteworthy collection from a superb voice.

Robin Ford started writing poetry in his mid-fifties after several too close encounters with the Asyla that form the subject in this volume.  He worked teaching teenagers for many years and is from and of the Isle of Wight.  Though keen on travelling he is very rooted to his Island and finds familiarity only deepens these roots.  He has been published in a wide range of magazine including Envoi, Ambit, Magma, Tears In The Fence, Poetry Review, The Interpreter's House, The Wolf and a wide range of others.  This is his third collection, the previous two, After The Wound and Never Quite Prepared For Light being published by Arrowhead Press.  Robin runs the group 'High Tide Poets' for people recovering from and/or with continuing mental illness and also runs an Open Mic for poetry and music at Quay Arts in Newport, Isle of Wight. He lives in Ventnor with his partner of over twenty years, James.

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

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

Pieces John Tanner £7.99 UK delivery, £8.99 elsewhere

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Fifth collection from acclaimed poet, non-fiction writer and journalist

Winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize

Winner of Poetry Digest’s Bard of the Year Award

Second prize winner in 2001 National Poetry Competition  

Characterised by wry wit, delightful humour and an extraordinary grasp of the intricacies of language, the fifth poetry collection from acclaimed poet, biographer and journalist, Ann Drysdale, displays all the skills of an assured and deeply humane writer. Her ability to handle poignant subjects with emotional acuity, but not a trace of sentimentality, is matched by her astute intelligence and sharp eye; her feeling for form is matched by the precision and dexterity with which she uses language whether to entertain, delight or move her readers. Varied, immediate and accomplished, this is poetry that speaks to a wide audience.

Ann Drysdale is an acclaimed poet, non fiction writer and journalist. She was born near Manchester, brought up in London, married in Birmingham, ran a small holding and raised three children on the North York Moors and lives half way up a mountain in South Wales. She was a journalist for many years writing, among other things, the longest-running by-line column for the Yorkshire Evening Post. She has won many prizes for her writing and written several poetry collections and non-fiction books, including the two-part memoir Three-three, two-two, five-six and Discussing Wittgenstein, described by Professor Raymond Tallis as a ‘masterpiece’.

Return to Bayou Lacombe Jan Villarrubia £7.99 UK delivery, £8.99 elsewhere

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.

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Praise for previous books

‘In terms of scope and ambition, it must be amongst the most impressive poetry I’ve encountered.’

The Journal

‘If the overriding task of poetry is the ability of a poem to shift slightly on every reading, the beauty of rhythm, the authority and weight given to language, then... here is a collection powerful enough to be read time and time again.’

Poetry Book Society Bulletin

Published in March 2010

Seeing Birds in Church is a Kind of Adieu is concerned with images and perception; the intricacies and strangeness of human relationships. Her language, sometimes surreal, challenges expectations. Always sensual and inventive, this is poetry that surprises; poetry with a rapid heartbeat that demands the reader responds. Ang deploys sharp crafting and a unique voice.

rlene Ang is the author of four previous poetry collections, the most recent being a collaborative work with Valerie Fox, Bundles of Letters Including A, V and Epsilon (Texture Press, 2008). She lives in Spinea, Italy where she serves as staff editor for The Pedestal Magazine and Press 1. More of her work may be viewed at www.leafscape.org.

The Shadow House Kathy Miles £7.99 UK delivery, £8.99 elsewhere

Publication date November 2009

“Kathy Miles is a poet with a unique voice. Her poems are dense and subtle but always accessible. Whatever the subject of the poem you can be sure that Kathy Miles will come at it from a totally original angle. There is almost always an intake of surprise. Many of her poems reveal something dark and elusive at their heart: She is particularly good at hinting at an unsettling undercurrent in relationships,

The list of her successes is impressive. As well as her two books The Rocking Stone and The Third Day: Landscape and the Word she has been published in the most prestigious literary magazines and anthologies, most notably The Forward Book of Poetry 2008, as well as winning prizes in many competitions.”

Anne Grimes  

" These rich, imaginative new poems from Kathy Miles are well worth the wait since her last collection. Many were written at that time in a poet’s life when parents age and die, and recalled and present things are caught the more sweetly and intensely because of it. Her poems are layered with myth, history, personal experience. They are full of fine observation, whether of love and loss, weather, a walk in low sunlight, a boy fetching the mares home, or Anthony Gormley’s iron men striding the sea edge near Liverpool. It is a lovely collection, human, humorous, sensuous, the real enriched by myth, and myth deepened by the essential realism of the poet’s vision.”

Gillian Clarke

Kathy Miles is a poet, playwright and short-story writer, Kathy also writes children’s stories and monologues. She was born in Liverpool and moved to Wales in 1972. Educated at University of Wales, Lampeter, Kathy now works in the College library. She has been published in numerous magazines and anthologies and successful in several major competitions including winning the One Voice Monologue Competition twice. She is a founder-member of the Lampeter Writers’ Workshop.

These poems tug at the heart and reverberate as they soar and dive into our psyche. And, as Miles rightly proclaims, ‘sometimes we get what we wish for’ — poems sharply-observed which makes us linger long at her poetic table.

Menna Elfyn

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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

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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

Publication date October 2009

This is the woman who is a remarkable first collection from a poet whose senses are clearly open to the tiniest nuances of life lived in everyday objects and routines. Deceptively simple the fine observation and careful recounting in these poems gives them a depth that can at times take on the mesmerising pulse of litany. The poetry is lucid, precise and accessible, but awakens layers of meaning articulated in the spaces between words. This is poetry at its finest.

Claudia Jessop has published poems in several magazines and been a runner-up in the Mslexia Women’s Poetry Competition 2007, and shortlisted in the Second Light Network Poetry Competition, 2008.

There is a precise attention to detail in these poems: an exactness in the choice of words and a desire to push language to its limits… a very definite and intriguing narrative in which a woman escapes from an abusive relationships in Tokyo and returns to her Anglesey home to rediscover herself through her relationship with landscape and language. The familiarity of the North Wales countryside and the echoes of an inherited idiom resonate throughout. The poems capture, with concrete imagery and intense lyricism, the unique atmosphere of the various locations in which the poet has lived; the ever observant writer distils the experience of Japan, Canada and Wales with consummate skill.

Nessa O’Mahony

Marianne Jones was born shortly before the end of World War 2 and grew up on Ynys Môn/Anglesey, where she now lives with her husband, an environmental campaigner. After completing a first degree and qualifying as a teacher, she lived and worked abroad for several years: in Kyushu, Tokyo, Vancouver and Montreal. When she arrived back in Britain, she worked as a lecturer/teacher of English as a second language and later as co-ordinator of Japanese educational projects. She completed a second MA (the first was in Montreal) and a postgraduate diploma in multicultural education.

She started writing short stories at the age of eight, and poetry at the age of ten, and won a camera and some useful pocket money in competitions. A few years ago, an opportunity to take voluntary early retirement from running an educational centre enabled her to focus on writing again.

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

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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

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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

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