2019 Titles — in alphabetical order

 Published June 2019. Chapbook, 36pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

 ISBN 9781848616851 [Download a sample PDF from this book  here .]

Imagems 2  contains six statements by a poet who continues to challenge modernism and post-modernism alike. This chapbook complements and elaborates Richard Berengarten’s  Imagems 1  (2013). In this sequel, the borders between poetic theory and practice blur, for some of these texts are prose-poems in themselves. While their themes are rooted in the here-now, their 12-point structures call to mind early 20th century manifestos and late 20th century memoranda. Themes include the birth of poetry in sound, breath, and inner speech; the interdependence of the universal and the particular; and language, light and vision.  Imagems 3  is on the way.

Published June 2019. Chapbook, 32pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848616837 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

The Franks Casket (or Auzon Casket) is an 8th century Anglo-Saxon treasure chest, donated to the British Museum by a private owner from Auzon, France. Made from whalebone, the front, back, sides and lid of this small chest are decorated with runic inscriptions, some Latin text and images from various religious and mythical traditions. Each rune has an equivalent letter in the Latin alphabet, allowing for Anglo-Saxon and modern English translations. Each rune also has a pictorial value: for example, in the runic ᚠᛁᛋᚳ(‘fisc’), f signifies ‘wealth’, i ‘ice’, s ‘sun’ and c ‘torch’, yielding a sequence of four images. To write the poems in this collection, I determined the sequence of images yielded by each runic word and then used these images, or variants of them, to write the poems. Using this multilevel technique of ‘translation’, the following poems are an attempt to capture something of the layered histories, from ancient times to present, of the place where I now live: the River Teign and its surrounding area. —Andy Brown

Poetry Book Society Special Commendation

Published September 2019. Paperback, 116pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848616738 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

“This selection of Carmen Bugan’s poems offers readers an experience with all the surprise and continuity of a long, complex novel. Childhood, youth, the move from a traditional rural world, dominated by lovingly described grandparents, to exile, urban life, parents ageing, children growing – all the private normalities which are so often the material of poetry are here. But, from the striking opening, where the poet’s parents work secretly on a typewriter, buried and dug up after the children are in bed, on Samizdat protests against the government of Romania, normality collides with history. A reality of state surveillance, abuse and incarceration fills the poems with urgency, even as memories are revisited and sometimes revised. 

       Carmen Bugan has written over twenty-five years in fluent, graceful English verse (Romanian, Latin and French words sometimes dazzling with multiple meanings); what marks this book is awareness of a sinister other language. With the poet, we realise that this is the record of a life already recorded, in the distorting staccato of the surveillance transcript, a distortion that leaks into the language of the later poems. Yet faith in the capacity of words to deliver truth survives, reflecting and recalling the exhuming of the typewriter, even if memory is vitiated and language is profaned.” 

—Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin

Published June 2019. Chapbook, 36pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848616844 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Below This Level recounts the experience of prostate cancer: diagnosis, treatment, and recovery. These poems of tender affirmation and discovery also face up to the hard facts. Their expansive lyricism is dedicated to a sustained recognition of the kindness and intelligence of others.

Published February 2019. Chapbook, 40pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848616349 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

The Red and Yellow Book was published by Textures in 1986, the imprint of Penny Bailey. My recollection is that little from the book had been published elsewhere previously. This was partly because it was written and published very quickly. Its writing was accelerated by the personal events which at first appeared to interrupt my initial ideas about what I thought I was doing. The interruption became the real subject in various guises and my first introduction to such parabasis. The Red and Yellow Book was my second book to be published but in one sense it was the first. It was the first I wrote as a book rather than as a collection of poems. —Kelvin Corcoran

 —Fiona Sampson

Published June 2019. Chapbook, 32pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848616875 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Throughout his career, Harry Guest has written occasional poems, haiku, squibs and jests, and this little collection brings together a range of them that will delight his readers.

Published June 2019. Paperback, 106pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848616370 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

For a brief period in the 1990s Khaled Hakim published sparingly and performed semi-improvisatory routines. This collection gathers all the work previously published. As the first—and for some time afterwards the only—black or Asian experimental poet in the UK, the work remains freakishly singular as he forged an occasional poetry that mixes narrative, theory, and stand-up.

‘Khaled Hakim is the great lost British experimental writer of the last quarter century. I believe that his importance … lies in the fact that he brings a powerful and original set of ingredients to the most important kind of contemporary poetry. His film-making background and engagement with the work of Stan Brakhage changed the speed and the angle of his L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E-polarized poetry. He was the only UK poet to work with David Antin’s conversational poetics. His Brummie-styled phonetic writing drew parallels with the similarly individual universes of Tom Leonard and bill bissett, and his class and colour were—and still are, of course—important. The conversations that his writing and being sparked in the 1990s have never really been followed through in British poetry.’ — Tim Atkins, from the Foreword to this volume

Published May 2019. Paperback, 194pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9781848616080 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Barry Hill’s tenth book of poetry selects from his Naked Clay: Drawing from Lucian Freud , which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize, 2013, and described by John Kinsella as a ‘masterpiece’; Grass Hut Work (2016), his excursion into Hiroshima and Japanese poetry, which Sam Hamill said was ‘beautiful and quietly powerful’; Lines for Birds (2009) his collaboration with the painter John Wolseley, was acclaimed by Nathaniel Tarn as ‘a miraculous gift of a book’; The Inland Sea (2001), which David Malouf described as ‘a mixture of intense contemplation and powerful eroticism’; Ghosting William Buckley (1993), deemed by Barrett Reid a ‘major work’ of ‘stories, thought and music’ from the encounter of a ‘wild white man’ and the indigenous people of the Australian frontier. This Selected also includes recent poetry—lyrical, political and in memoriam.

Published July 2019. Paperback, 88pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848616721 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Word and Stone is questioning poetry, which explores the ground between language that seeks meaning, and the obduracy of matter, and between life and what seems dead. Its concern is with a sense of the sacred, and the possibility of renewing words such as ‘spirit’ and ‘soul’ in a materialist culture. But it celebrates the material world too, drawing upon nature and history in Hooker’s native Hampshire and his adoptive South Wales. It contains a number of elegies, paying tribute to friends, and to poets such as T. S. Eliot, David Gascoyne, and Christopher Middleton, and the Americans James Schuyler and Charles Reznikoff. Word and Stone is concerned overall with ‘quickness’: how words may animate stone, and intimate the life of the dead.

Translated from Spanish & French by Eliot Weinberger. Bilingual volume.

Published April 2019. Paperback, 90pp, 9 x 6ins

ISBN 9781848616523. NOW WITHDRAWN IN FAVOUR OF THE EXPANDED SECOND EDITION (2024)

This volume presents the 4 chapbooks published by Huidobro in 1917-18 and offers, at first glance, an odd mixture. Chronologically, we have El espejo de agua , written in Spanish in 1914-16, first published in 1916, but, to all intents and purposes not distributed until 1918;  Ecuatorial (written in Spanish, although the author also made a French version, Equatoriale , which is believed to be later), Hallali and Tour Eiffel , the last two being composed in French. The last two publications from this period, Hallali and Tour Eiffel— both marked by textual experimentation—were important for the rising wave of the new Spanish avant-garde. The 4 chapbooks were bookended, so to speak, by the French-language volume Horizon carré and the Spanish-language collection, Poemas árticos (both already issued in this series— see above).

Published April 2019. Paperback, 70pp, 8 x 8ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848616493 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

João is a book of sixty-two sonnets recounting twelve years of the life of a poet who travels widely, encountering friends and loves, translators and, sometimes, famous authors. Its protagonist is João of eGoli; his christian name is Portuguese for “John” and his epithet – “Place of Gold” – is that of his birthplace, Johannesburg, in Zulu. The linked poems reveal João not only as a cosmopolitan traveller, but also as someone sensative to others preconceptions to how they are also haunted by history. The book's concluding poems evoke a geneology for João's restlessness: Cape Town-born parents, Cape Malay friends, a Brazilian uncle, and the great-grandmother from an island, Tristan da Cunha, in the middle of the Atlantic. In this book of richly dense sonnets John Mateer presents us with the experiences of someone who travels the world, like so many of us, to understand himself and his place in a shared, global history.

Published May 2019. Paperback, 132pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848616363 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

Acoustic shadows—sound suppressed in such a way that even General Grant was deceived by one at the Battle of Iuka in the American Civil War—complicate the lives of many figures appearing in these poems, including that of the young John Matthias at his grandfather’s house on Iuka Drive in Columbus, Ohio in the 1950s. This book, Matthias’s first volume of entirely new poems since Complayntes for Doctor Neuro (Shearsman, 2016), includes a group of short lyrics followed by an essay called “Some Zones” (about places in which a kind of imaginative clarity becomes possible) and two longish sequences, “Prynne and a Petoskey Stone” and “First and Last Opinions,” dealing with the American Midwest from the perspective of an English poet’s Cambridge, and the Ohio Supreme Court opinions written by Matthias’s father and grandfather. The title poem concludes the volume by bringing together memories and documents relating to the poet’s great-grandfather, especially those pertaining to Civil War battles in which he fought alongside the famous and mysterious Ambrose Bierce, author of The Devil’s Dictionary , who disappeared in Mexico in 1913.

Published May 2019. Paperback, 396pp, 9 x 6ins, £19.95 / $30

ISBN 9781848616646 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

A Life in a Poem is, as the subtitle says, "a memoir of a rebellious Bible translator". For David Rosenberg is that strange combination: an avant poet as well as being a Biblical scholar, and translator of parts of the Bible, coming at it as a poet. In addition he is a biographer: of Abraham and Moses. As Rosenberg says, "Recently, as a visiting professor of creative writing at Princeton, I came to know a young English professor interested in my youthful editorship of The Ant's Forefoot , a periodical of avant-garde poetry. I attempted to explain how I, a translator of Rimbaud and student of the Blues, turned into a biblical scholar. Rimbaud stopped writing poetry, moved to a country along the Red Sea, and studied science, just as I moved from Manhattan to Israel and pursued the origins of Hebrew authorship. That is, how one becomes a writer for a tiny, ancient readership in Jerusalem that wants history delivered with the truth test of great poetry."

Published February 2019. Chapbook, 32pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848616530 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Maldon is a version of the Anglo-Saxon epic fragment usually known as The Battle of Maldon , which tells the tale of a battle between the Anglo-Saxons and the invading Vikings which took place ca. 991 AD on the shores of the River Blackwater, almost certainly opposite Northey Island.

"Smith’s version [of Maldon ] preserves nicely a ghost of the alliterative pattern that rumbles through the original, without trying to reproduce it fully in a clog-dance of consonants. It is recognisably the same poem as the original: it has its linguistic density and compelling narrative pull, but it is free from the mildewed quaintness that sometimes hangs around translation from Old English.” 

—Dr. Alex Davis, U.C. Cork

Best read by candlelight.

Poetry Book Society Recommendation

Published January 2019. Paperback, 86pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848616332 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Your Relationship to Motion Has Changed , Amish Trivedi’s second book, is an exploration through a wandering mind in the middle of external chaos. The poems trace private and public histories, from Lincoln mythos to serial killers, tied together through contorted bodies, whipped lungs, one eye firmly on the abyss, and one hand reaching back from it. “One more nightmare and I’m out,” but what are we waking into?