Angela Gardner: Views of the Hudson Click on cover images for more information
Published
July 2009. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610804
Views of the Hudson, written during a visit to New York in 2008, explores ideas of belonging and displacement. In a flood of images from this overcrowded information-rich city it weaves a narrative that suggests both the intoxication and dangers of believing in Promised Lands. Views of the Hudson shows the life of a city that is complicated and enriched for being at once both sacred and profane. Read more here.
Giles Goodland: What the Things Sang
Published
May 2009. Paperback, 112pp, 9x6ins, £8.95 / $16
ISBN 9781848610545
If Johnson believed that objects held primacy over language, why did he compose his dictionary following the arbitrary rule of alphabetical order? If (to contradict Wiitgenstein) poems are engaged in the language-game of giving information, how should that information be arranged? If Blake had, when he heard ringing in the trees, picked up the phone, what information would the things have sung to him? If Heraclitus had not been struck with his own lightning, would he be less fragmented to us now? This sequence of poems presents a number of possible and less possibleanswers to these questions. But more questions arise on the way.
David H.W. Grubb: The Man Who Spoke to Owls
Published
April 2009. Paperback, 112pp, 9x6ins, £8.95 / $16
ISBN 9781848610477
This new collection brings together three elements central to the poetry and prose of David Grubb. There is the world of surreal identities, of wonders, disturbances, angels, fire sermons and celebrations where animals and people speak with both words and silences. There is the unfinished business of growing up in a strict religious household and seeking meanings beyond rituals and texts. In the third section of the book Albania, Bosnia and other locations create a world where nothing is certain, the past provides constant challenges and distant voices call. The darkness is broken by stars.
Harry Guest: Comparisons & Conversions
Published
January 2009. Paperback, 88pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610194
Comparisons considers the disparities between memory and expectation as well as the alteration in events separated by the gap of years—since, sometimes when we journey, we are "hoping by space to leave / the faults of time behind".
Conversions contains the poetry translated since Versions appeared from Odyssey in 1999. Harry Guest regards the effort of translation as a vital complement to creative writing, providing not only a technical challenge but also the strange effect of inhabiting another's consciousness for a while.
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Ralph Hawkins: Gone to Marzipan
Published
January 2009. Paperback, 120pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781848610217
"Ralph Hawkins' poems always give the impression of turning up late and being drunk when they do arrive. [...] He does not bother with stage-setting. Each poem launches us into a series of 'direct experiences' from whose course we could work out the shape of the self experiencing them. We could either take the individual events and fit them into our own self-experience, or we could take each book as constructing a new 'shell self', a role we can both play for a while. Hawkins is not asking how experience happens, but by describing the course of a self he answers the question anyway. The course is one of attention, constantly switching on and off, jumping between planes; Hawkins' method is to eliminate whatever is not interesting, and his poetic line is as rapid, sporadic, shifting, polyvalent, slight and self-reversing as consciousness itself. We could describe his work as anarchistic, because it does not confirm any of the classificatory and causal judgments of our law-abiding society, and experiences absolutely no urge to replace these with a new set of rules and values." —Andrew Duncan
Janet Holmes: The ms of m y kin
Published
February 2009. Paperback, 180pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18.50
ISBN 9781848610354
If you write out "The Poems of Emily Dickinson" and erase some of the letters very neatly and precisely, you can get to The ms of m y kin — the manuscript of my kin, as it were; the manuscript of my family. It might also be said to be the manuscript of my kind. (Janet Holmes)
Peter Hughes: The Summer of Agios Dimitrios
Published
July 2009. Paperback, 88pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610644
The Summer of Agios Dimitrios started out as a poetical journal kept on the west coast of the Mani peninsula in Greece as the summer of 2007 turned into its autumn.
W.D. Jackson: Boccaccio in Florence and other poems
Published
October 2009. Paperback, 140pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781848610682
In 2002 and 2005, Menard Press published Then and Now – Words in the Dark and From Now to Then, as the first two books of a three-part work-in-progress. Boccaccio in Florence and Other Poems is a selection from the on-going third instalment, Opus 3. It is also intended as a book in itself with a structure differing from Opus 3 as a whole. Whereas the latter, when completed, will be arranged thematically in three parts, dealing with the emotional/physical, ethical and spiritual life respectively, the order of the poems in the selection is more or less chronological—from Boccaccio and the Dance of Death to the present day. This arrangement offers the reader a historical pre-view of the three fundamental components or concerns of human life on which Opus 3 is based, while exemplifying the various sorts of poetry and prose to be found in it.
David Jaffin: Wind phrasings
Published
January 2009. Paperback, 352pp, A5 format, £12.50 / $20
ISBN 9781848610316
Wind phrasings is David Jaffin's annual collection of poems for 2009, and will not disappoint those who admire his terse, short-breathed lyrics.
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Alice Kavounas: Ornament of Asia
Published
September 2009. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610613
In Ornament of Asia, Alice Kavounas engages us with daring personal stories, as well as quotidian moments, expressed in vivid, precise language.
Following on from The Invited (Sinclair-Stevenson), with its "brilliant lyrical style" (Alan Brownjohn), Alice Kavounas has deepened and widened her range. She writes from an unusual perspective: a New Yorker whose father escaped from his idyllic birthplace in the dying days of the Ottoman Empire to build a new life in America.
Kenny Knight: The Honicknowle Book of the Dead
Published
April 2009. Paperback, 108pp, 9x6ins, £8.95 / $16
ISBN 9781848610170
Connoisseurs of the arcane will no doubt wonder what it is about Plymouth and Buddhism: first Lobsang Rampa, a.k.a. Cyril Henry Hoskins, self-styled bodily host to a reincarnated Tibetan lama, and now Kenny Knight's frequent invocations of the Dalai Lama—occasionally accompanied by Ruth Padel—in a new Book of the Dead. While Nirvana might be hard to reach in this suburban district of Plymouth, the highlight of which is a misplaced 19th century fort, Honicknowle nonetheless reaches the status of myth in this debut collection of poems. The Honicknowle Book of the Dead is where memory, movies, television and 1960s' rock bands merge into a surreal narrative; it is where Lorna Doone and Louis Aragon share pages with Hank Marvin and Elvis Presley, where the local poetry scene announces its presence, and where—in an alternate universe—Ted Heath led Britain into the Common Market, Ted Heath, the band-leader, that is. For memory is confusion, and being young is confusing, and poetry is rarely anything but confusion. Welcome to extraordinary world of Kenny Knight.
philip kuhn: at maimonides table
Published
February 2009. Paperback, 148pp, 9x6ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781848610200
at maimonides table is constructed out of a complex
series of unstable texts woven through four inter-locking books. Although there
is no easily defined path through this work there is perhaps a half-remembered
clew, in book two, which takes as its starting point the well known Talmudic
story of the four who entered the "garden"—a parable which
can also be read for the dangers confronting those who seek PaRaDiSe. Here
is an exploration of an im/possible ethics of messianic faith promising earthly
redemption through those four exegetical portals of Talmudic reading. But such
messianic longing also sits uneasily when cast in the shadows of a history
steeped in so much pain & suffering.
Whilst this long book-length poem appears to confront specifically Jewish themes
it can also be read and thought-through in non-denominational ways, not least
because at its core lie questions concerning how we (individually and collectively)
might still learn to become ourselves in peaceful relationship with others.
Sarah Law: Ascension Notes
Published
November 2009. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610781
This collection makes a place for space and light. Language ascends and reflects back on itself in short lyrical poems and longer fragmented sequences. A woman, at a table, writing; Woolf's phrase echoes through these lines. Meditations on creativity and spirituality are as open-ended as the forms they take: the conclusion reached is one of the necessity of 'making the sign of the poet' in an always shifting and strangely illuminated human world.
Gerry Loose: that person himself
Published
May 2009. Paperback, 112pp, 9x6ins, £8.95 / $16
ISBN 9781848610385
A fox hears voices. A dogfox of indeterminate gender careers round desert USA, Hiroshima & Nagasaki in stolen cars & on foot. A barkingdog talks out loud & sings. A demotic fox listens & listens. A coyotefox lies. A coyote speaks truth. A kitfox reads the signs & tunes the car radio. Kitsune eats & drinks. They are all that person himself, who is also summoner of kingfishers, bringer of acorns, old compound eye, the one geese kiss & the drinker of aftershock. that person himself wanders in atom-bomb test sites, mooches in nuclear weapon fallout, from bar to deer park, from festival to razed landscape.
Helen Lopez: Shift Perception
Published
September 2009. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610736
Helen Lopez is a painter and poet who lives in Anglesey. This collection is her first book, but she has a long track-record as a painter with one-person exhibitions in England and Wales, and representation in a number of group exhibitions in Ireland, Belgium and the USA.
"Shift Perception dares you to do precisely that: to change perceptual and linguistic gear. But you'll find you know more about its processes than you expect. And you won't have read anything like it before. This collection relentlessly reminds us exactly how powerful a tool language can be, in any number of different hands; I haven't read poetry as provocative or as exciting as this in a long while." —Alice Entwistle
Tom Lowenstein: Conversation with Murasaki
Published
October 2009. Paperback, 116pp, 9x6ins, £8.95 / $16
ISBN 9781848610651
In contrast to the long, trans-cultural narratives of Ancestors and Species, Tom Lowenstein's new poetry is pared down in this volume to the briefest of utterances.
A long expensive journey. The landscape
grown stranger. A space at the end
where there's no more to interpret.
Rupert Loydell: Boombox
Published
September 2009. Paperback, 112pp, 9x6ins, £8.95 / $16
ISBN 9781848610583
"There's something about [these] poems ... that I find fascinating. His style is laconic, undemonstrative, but under the style is an enquiring mind and a sense of the strangeness of language. [H]e can be as plain as a pikestaff, deeply personal, and move into the mysterious use of technical language, culled from his own enormous reading. His use of collage to create many of his texts never seems forced or clever in any way; it somehow seems to flow together into a poem that investigates, subtly and without you noticing mostly, what the possibilities of language are in describing, or rather connoting, the world of phenomena."—Brando's Hat