Creative Prose

Published 2013. Paperback, 292pp, 9x6ins, £16.95 / $25

ISBN 9781848612914 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



The Hoplite Journals — first issued here in 3 volumes over a period of 7 years — is characterised by rapid temporal and spatial shifts amidst observed and imagined realities. It returns again and again, however, to meditate upon notions of identity and of memory, of time and of space. It evokes events and places largely in South East and South Asia as well as the West, exploring allegiances and identities within the troubled context of mostly colonial and ex-colonial possessions.

Published 2006. Paperback, 136pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95.

ISBN 9780907562818.  NOW WITHDRAWN. A FEW COPIES LEFT IN STOCK



Published 2010. Paperback, 114pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95

ISBN 9781848611146  NOW WITHDRAWN. A FEW COPIES LEFT IN STOCK

Published 2013. Paperback, 112pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95

ISBN 9781848612907  NOW WITHDRAWN. A FEW COPIES LEFT IN STOCK

Published 2011. Paperback, 80pp, 8x5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848611610 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



"This fascinating, intoxicating and often hallucinatory book ranks amongst the best prose poetry collections of the last half-century. Atkins is a Surrealist visionary whose prose creates a murmuring dream in every sentence, a visual universe in every paragraph. His Logic of the Stairwell takes you into a world of verbi-voco-visual intrigues that explore the mechanisms of perception and memory while blurring accepted boundaries between the narrative and the lyrical, the sensuous and the philosophical, the essential and the residual." —Michel Delville, author of The American Prose Poem

Published 2018. Paperback, 84pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848615700 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]



"I have been enjoying this new collection tremendously. Looking back on Atkins’ earlier collections, I was struck by a strange mixture of continuity and rupture. Some of the pieces are more radically disjunctive than before, which, to me, gives them a sense of immediacy and makes them more 'performative'. I also feel the influence of Beckett’s later work (in pieces like 'Fourth Night'). As always I appreciated the clarity and visuality of his prose and its capacity to engage with aesthetic and philosophical issues while generating powerful images, whether they are flamboyant or quietly meditative or somewhere in between. Another fine book of 'irresponsible texts'." —Michel Delville

Published 2013. Chapbook, 32pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848613126 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

"In this courageous book, Richard Berengarten calls on us to recognize—to know again—the archaic responsibilities of the poet, heir of Orpheus, singer of the kosmos, heir of the shamans, healers of the soul. Berengarten's subject is glory, not the glory we associate with kings or prelates, but the glory of the poet, who, in the poem, briefly catches the fleeting, evanescent experience that is simultaneously an experience of fulfillment, of being filled with an awe that only the weavings of language can express. In working out the propositions that pertain to this experience of magnanimity , Berengarten demonstrates his own magnanimous nature, the one always so evident in his own poems." —Norman Finkelstein

2nd Edition. Published 2025. Paperback, 160pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848619555

Ebook edition ISBN 9781848619586, available from the usual online retailers, £4.95 / $7.50

Deserted by her mother as a baby, Emily lives with her father in Mexico City, working in the local orphanage. When a mysterious cousin, Santi, appears on the doorstep, he brings with him family secrets, and soon Emily finds desire and temptation have overturned her straightforward life forever. The Poison That Fascinates is an alluring fable forged in astonishing, sensuous prose. Jennifer Clement conjures a world heavy with the weight of Mexican superstition, mythology and faith, where saintliness and mortal sin sit side by side. The author's second novel, out of print for a little while now, offers another glimpse of Jennifer Clement's continuing growth as a literary novelist.

2nd Edition. Published 2025. Paperback, 120pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848619548

Ebook edition ISBN 9781848619579, available from the usual online retailers, £4.95 / $7.50

A True Story Based on Lies is a remarkable and original novel that addresses the universal issues of class discrimination, male oppression and female servitude through dual narratives of spellbinding power. Set in contemporary Mexico, the book charts the consequences of a sexual relationship between Leonora, a servant in the wealthy O'Connor home, and her master. When a child, Aura Olivia, is born from this union she is brought up as the daughter of the house. As the novel unfolds, the "true" story gradually emerges. First published over 20 years ago, but out of print for some time, we are delighted to reissue this early example of the author's fiction.

Published 2010. Paperback, 144pp, 8.5x5.5ins. Out of print.

ISBN 9781848610989.

Now available from Canongate in the UK and Random House in the USA.

Widow Basquiat explores the love story between Jean-Michel Basquiat and Suzanne, his muse and lover. It is also a profound portrait of New York City during the early 1980s' art scene and the striking cast of characters from that time: Andy Warhol, Madonna, Keith Haring, Debbie Harry, Julian Schnabel and William Burroughs, among others.

Published 2009. Paperback, 144pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 978184860330 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



Ananios of Kleitor introduces to the revolving stage of world literature the work of an ancient Greek poet largely unknown and hitherto unread outside of a small circle of cognoscenti. The poet's extant poems and fragments, as well as the record of their reception and preservation, are presented in this one-of-a-kind book of the sort that would have appealed to Menippus of Gadara and his followers, a medley of verse and prose and a diversity of genres, ranging from the epistolary novel to scholarly annotations and an Index Nominum . Ananios and his scholars and commentators perform their work at the edge of the real world and the margins of a thoroughly historicized and critically acute context.

Published 2018. Paperback, 104pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848616189 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

“Few men know death: we do not usually undergo it deliberately, but unthinkingly and out of habit and most men die because men cannot help dying” —François de La Rochefoucauld

“And we open our eyes and feel our way in the dark.” —William Bronk 

“The changes that have occurred in places you return to, the demise of attitudes that once seemed ‘inevitable’, show not so much how things change with time, but how transitory they always were. The fundamental truth is not that things change, but that they have hardly ever existed.”

“All my friends, dead for so many years – even their ghosts are dying.”

“The moon at last quarter sliding out of black cloud, giving body to darkness.” —Clive Faust

Edited by Peter Robinson

Published 2014. Paperback, 198pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9781848613003 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



An Easily Bewildered Child : Occasional Prose 1963–2013 brings together all his rare autobiographical sketches, the memoirs of his life as a jazz pianist, his tributes to musicians, writers, and painters of various kinds, a number of his book reviews, and comments on classic forebears such as John Cowper Powys, Ezra Pound, the Black Mountain poets, and Basil Bunting. All of these writings, as Fisher notes, ‘owe their origins to commissions, suggestions or various forms of pressure from friends’. 

Published 2025. Paperback, 208pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9781848619715

"I have no record of the date when I first met Lee Grandjean but I remember the occasion well. It was towards the beginning of my period as creative writing fellow at Winchester School of Art and I had introduced myself to the students by giving a reading of my poetry. At the end of the reading, to my astonishment, a man in a white boiler suit stood up and clapped. Nervous on this occasion, my first thought was that this was intended as satire. It was, in fact, appreciation, and this was my first encounter with Lee Grandjean, who, at that time, held a sculpture fellowship at the School of Art. We talked after the reading and it wasn’t long before he was showing me the sculpture he was at work on. Thus began a creative relationship that has been, and continues to be, immensely important to both of us." —Jeremy Hooker

Published 2024. Paperback, 244pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9781848619456

Addiction is the story of a double struggle. It is about the effort of Jeremy Hooker and his wife, Mieke, to combat the alcoholism that eventually contributed to her death. Based largely on the poet's journal, it contains poems written as acts of survival. The book concludes with a sequence of elegiac poems.

Published 2016. Paperback, 190pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9781848615090 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Diary of a Stroke is a poet’s journal with a difference. After suffering a stroke in July 1999, Jeremy Hooker kept a diary of his experience in hospital and of the subsequent period of recuperation at home, which ended with his return to work shortly after January 1, 2000. As in his other published journals, he observed the life around him, with notations of the living moment giving rise to reflection. Closeness to death gave his thinking about questions of ultimate meaning a special urgency. As time passed, he found the diary becoming a memoir of his early years. The past was coming back to him in ‘scenes’, which were ‘quick with sensation and laden with memory’. As a consequence, he was able to write about people dear to him – especially his parents and brothers – who had played a formative part in his life. At the same time as he was learning to walk again, and describing his immediate Somerset environment, he was remembering and vividly describing growing up in rural southern England during and after the Second World War.

Published 2014. Paperback, 292pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9781848613041 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Openings is a sequel to Jeremy Hooker's earlier Welsh Journal and Upstate : A North American Journal , permitting us a peak over the shoulder of a fine English poet at work, and on the move.

Published 2007. Paperback, 148pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781905700226 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



An American journal — recorded while on an academic exchange in the North-East of the USA — by a leading English poet, whose collected poems, The Cut of the Light: Poems 1965–2005 appeared from Enitharmon in 2006. Something of a companion volume to the same author's Welsh Journal (2001), which is still available from Seren.

Translated from Spanish by W.B. Wells

Published 2019. Paperback, 240pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9781848616288 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



In 1928, shortly after his marriage to Ximena Amunátegui, and after meeting the actor Douglas Fairbanks, Huidobro began writing his version of the Cid legend as a novel. The result is a very readable, if slightly arch, version of the story, at times looking back to 19th-century romantic historical fiction, while at other times nodding towards more modern approaches. Style aside, the book can be read a straightforward tale of derring-do that sits happily alongside the 1961 epic movie that starred Heston and Loren and had thousands of extras. More than one line of the script for that movie sounds like something from Huidobro’s novel. The translation by Wells appeared quickly, in 1931, in both London and New York, and this reprint offers the original version with only some minor edits, together with an afterword and an extensive glossary to aid with figures, both legendary and genuine from Old Spain.

Translated from Spanish by Warre Bradley Wells (1931). Second edition.

Published 2019. Paperback, 104pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848616585 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



In the 1920s, Huidobro — always fascinated by the new medium of film — apparently wrote a film script on the subject of Cagliostro, a treatment very much in tune with the German expressionist cinema of the early 20s. Huidobro claimed that the film was made in 1923 by the Romanian director Mime Mizu but that this had been scrapped due to dissatisfaction over the editing. No trace of the film survives, although three pages of a script do survive in the author's papers. A revised version was submitted to The League for Better Motion Pictures in New York and won a $10,000 prize as the best candidate for filming — just at the point when the "talkies" arrived and this style of film was rendered immediately out of date. Making the best of the situation, Huidobro converted the script into a novella, with many cinematic elements, and it was published in translation in 1931 in both London and New York, to positive reviews. It appeared in the original Spanish only in 1934, in Santiago, and had no impact at all. This edition reproduces the text of the 1931 translation.

Translated from Spanish by Tony Frazer. Bilingual edition.

Published 2020. Paperback, 94pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848617247 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]



In 1931, while on holiday in Arcachon, France, Huidobro and the Franco-German artist and writer, Hans (Jean) Arp together wrote Tres novelas exemplares (Three Exemplary Novels — no doubt a reference to the Exemplary Novels by Cervantes, to which of course they bear no resemblance at all), a set of wild quasi-surrealist "stories". In 1935, Huidobro — once again living in Chile — offered the set to a publisher in Santiago, but was told that the book was too short. Accordingly he wrote two further stories on his own, and the whole volume was titled Tres inmensas novelas . Which are therefore, not three, not huge and not novels. This volume offers all five stories in a bilingual format, and the cover is almost a copy of the one used in the first edition. The translation of the texts is from Huidobro's own Spanish version, the French originals having been lost.

Published 2006. 9x6ins, 144pp. £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781905700004 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



R.F. Langley's Collected Poems (Carcanet Press, 2000) was one of the poetic highlights of recent times, showing a sometimes sceptical public that a contemporary poet could still engage with the shades of Modernism and produce fascinating and original work. Throughout his life, the author has been maintaining a journal, which is part diary, part autobiography and part commonplace book; some extracts from these fascinating volumes have been appearing in P N Review since 2002. This book offers a number of selections, ranging in time from 1970 to 2005, which will give admirers of his poetry a clearer idea of the author's other writings, which run in parallel with his poetry and sometimes provide the underpinnings for it.

Published 2015. Paperback, 132pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20 

ISBN 9781848614352 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

With photographs by Morven Gregor.



Deliberately and quietly, Gerry Loose has spent years walking the woodlands to observe the poetry of clouds and winds; to cheer the dance of gnats and moths, to listen intently to the musical compositions of wrens and ravens.

       An Almanac of two different woodlands, one in the Scottish west Highlands and one on Finland’s Baltic coast, it celebrates those woodlands and their human lives. With shipping and fishing reports of monks and witches landed, sea eagles and night walking, the voice of the stars and weather forecasts: the beauty and profundity of oakwoods are revealed in a shifting, precise prose.

        Rooted in place through habitation and close observation; an exploration of Sunart and Saari through its languages: Gaelic, Finnish, English, birdsong and world news; heaping language onto landscape and excavating what’s been before, An Oakwoods Almanac reinvents a classic form.

Published 2013. Paperback, 238pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9781848612297 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



In the voice of an eighteenth century poet who the previous afternoon had written 'Kubla Khan', this long prose meditation takes the reader through an English pastoral landscape to the Central Asian steppe, the palaces and gardens of the Khan who ruled north China in the 13th century, and then back to rural Somerset. While Coleridge is implied, the garrulous and solipsistic persona who talks through these journals, essays and fantasias is an a-historical figure who lives largely in, and for imagination.

"A major work of the imagination. In no previous genre. Creates its own genre." —R.F. Langley

Published 2021. Paperback, 340pp, 9 x 6ins, £16.95 / $25

ISBN 9781848617681 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Tom Lowenstein taught English in London and at Northwestern University between 1965 and 1974 . He first went to Tikigaq in 1973 and returned there to work with Asatchaq and other elders from 1975 to 1980. He studied Sanskrit at the University of Washington in the 1980s and now lives in London. He works part time online as an English tutor and continues to write poetry.

       This book, written over a number of years, offers an account of work in 20th century Tikigaq, focusing on issues of culture change and the lives of both old and young Native American people. It is the fourth in a series of books about this part of Alaska following The Things that were Said of Them (University of California Press 1992), Ancient Land: Sacred Whale (Bloomsbury 1993) and Ultimate Americans (University of Alaska Press 2008).

Published 2014. Paperback, 188pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9781848613706 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Different Kinds of Music follows Timothy “Westy” Westmont through six episodes from his childhood and youth, through his experiences as an archivist and a thief, to encounters with William Faulkner’s bear in St. Louis, Hemingway’s lingering ghost at Walloon Lake in Michigan, and Phillip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus in Columbus, Ohio itself. The narrative is sometimes funny, sometimes sad; and it progresses in an order more interesting than the merely chronological. Between the episodes appears a sequence of interchapters about music, the different kinds of which define Westmont’s experience from the 1940s to the turn of the 21st century in an idiom different from that of the narrative parts of the book. Different, too, is the final long chapter, “Westmont as Talbot Eastmore,” in which the author of the previous five episodes tells his own story in terms of a miniature bildungsroman which is also an elegy for an old friend.

Published 2005. Paperback, 113pp, 8.5x 5.5ins. £12.95. 

ISBN 9780907562665. Not for sale in North America.



The Waters of Marah brings together the best of David Miller's non-poetic output. The prose here however does include work that would be classified as prose-poetry in most quarters, as well as the longer work Tesserae which could be better described as experimental fiction. These pieces tend also to have verse interludes, which further confuses the definition of what category they actually belong to. In the end however, categories are irrelevant, and the work can be read on its own terms, be it prose, be it prose-poetry, be it fiction, be it poetry. This is musical work that explores the para-meters of the sayable in a manner that does not repel the reader but rather draws him/her in as a participant in a remarkable enterprise.

Published 2010. Paperback, 296pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9781848611016 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



Tony Guest is welcome wherever he goes—a motorcycle courier on a big bike, picking up and dropping all manner of urgent parcels, letters, and duly getting his dockets signed. In July he rides in a sweat bath, in February the rain is freezing needles, the roads of the West End are greasy with spilt diesel, glistening tracks of motorcyclists weaving through them like slug trails. But where is Tony going? What is contained in his ultimate mystery packet? What becomes of lost friendships? He chases his shadow-man through an illusory maze of skid pans, trick exits—the answer to every question he can frame seems to lie behind every locked door in London town. Set in the 1980s, London Brakes shows us an England of conflicting loyalties and low impostures—a city divided by inequality and opportunism: a place where forgetting is compulsory and paranoia is the outcome. Tony is determined to cut through it all to the truths of his life.

Published 2012. Paperback, 228pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £14.95 / $23.

ISBN 9781848612167 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



There wasn't much to do in the battered, half-forgotten seaside resort of Jaywick Sands, Essex—nothing really, except to listen to the North Sea pound against the sea-defences and wait for the next run-down holiday shack to go up like a barbeque torch. Lee and Will were an odd pair, deeply eccentric kids, living alone with their mothers and struggling through resit classes in college. But all that was to change on the day they kidnapped Charley Price in an old motor they'd just stolen, and made a heroic run with her for the ferry to the far land where the tulips grow.

      My Pale Tulip takes a scenic route across low countries to the beautiful cities of Delft and Utrecht—where darkness lies in ambush. It is a classic tale of flight and crash-landing: poignant, sharp-witted, with a voice all its own.

Published 2017. Paperback, 232pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9781848615359 [Download a sample PDF from this book .]



Graham Bartlett is a private English tutor. He lives in North London and travels to meet numerous teenage clients. He is a lonely person, unable to find steady work, but does his best to survive and deliver sound lessons to a large number of youngsters, diving in and out of their homes with a battered satchel on his shoulder, glimpsing their families and backgrounds. Browsing the internet he discovers an unpleasant murder has occurred in the quiet suburban avenue where he grew up. The horrific discovery of a woman’s callously disposed-of body half-interests him whilst seeming to have little to do with his own life, apart from accidents of place and memory. Intertwined with his peripatetic journeys across a cityscape marked by recent riots are the stories of people he has known, or imagines, or has actual dealings with in the present. 

      Falling Through is a novel of encounters and evasions: north of the Thames, south of hell.

Published 2020. Paperback, 180pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848617308 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



Pauline is at the end of her life, wool-gathering in a chair, but simultaneously in her prime, driving between dress shops in her blue Opel Kadett; Eileen Platt, an American nurse, is stationed on a remote airfield – known as Mudville – in the Blackdown Hills, Devon, her duties to patch up returning aircrew of Liberator bombers. She doesn’t want to go home to Des Moines after the war. She wants to stay in England. 

          Near the old airfield a family play out their last moves in a place superficially unchanged, in a country whose old order is breaking up, slipping past proper recall. Richie’s rotting Jags and Daimlers no longer run; women still care for men, sometimes may be cared for in turn – but sometimes the cars may change without warning, and wasps swarm madly out of the jar.

          In stories varying in size and manner from a funeral eulogy to a compelling wartime romance, Late Driver tells of a number of surprising lives imagined in out of the way places; the mood is restless, probing, suffused with memories and loss – although some rivet-hole stars still let in the light of the young women who first punched them into an empty sky.

Published 2015. Paperback, 78pp, 8 x 5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848614277 [Download a PDF of the introduction to this book here .]



In 2014, Toby Olson's wife Miriam died at the age 80, and after nearly 50 years of marriage. She has suffered from Alzheimer's for some years before her death and Toby became her principal carer. This is a memoir of that period, a story of love and frustration, remembering and forgetting. Miriam is also The Other Woman of the title – a woman other than the one she once was. 

"With each seemingly tiny insignificant detail (his wife’s chant “little little little little little little”) Olson lets us in to the unfathomable reverberations of his feeling, and I will not soon forget the constellations he has unfolded." — Meredith Quartermain

2nd, expanded edition. Published 2014. Paperback, 144pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848613867 [Download a sample PDF from this book here. ]



The Dance at Mociu brings together some thirty 'stories' of Transylvania, a part of the world that has fascinated the author for many years, and which he and his wife have visited annually since 1998. These pieces are not stories in the conventional sense, but range from meditation to epiphany, from observation to recordings of an old world that seems threatened — the world of 'Old Europe', that Central Europe whose borders were flexible in the extreme, whose populations found themselves changing nationalities with alarming frequency in the 20th century, and whose cultures survived all the vicissitudes of war and rampant nationalisms only to face an uncertain future in the post-communist present. Expanded version of the 2003 edition, in a larger format.

Published 2017. Paperback, 196pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9781848615458 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



" Dawn Songs consists of three essays on music. A short one on Derek Bailey as heard in 1970; a moderate-size one on surviving west gallery choral pieces performed in pubs of the Sheffield Moorlands area at Christmas, called ‘Mass Lyric’; and ‘Dawn Songs’ itself, which concerns a lamentational genre of Transylvanian village music and forms the bulk of the book. So if ever there was a book discussing musical practices which very few people outside the area know about or want to, this is it." —Peter Riley

Published 2009. Paperback, 148pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848610620 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



When Peter Robinson published Untitled Deeds in 2004, a number of his readers expressed surprise that the writer who, as early as 1983, had been described as 'the finest poet of his generation' in PN Review and, two decades later in The Reader , 'the finest poet alive', should suddenly emerge from his exile in Japan as an aphorist. What had happened? While the Western world was declaring war on an abstraction, Robinson had been drawing up peace terms with a host of them. Finding weapons of mass destruction in the speechifying of politicians, and the toxicity of pension plan promises, feeling chilled by global warming, and hot under the collar, the poet found no other respite than to reach for his notebooks. What came from them were wrung-out dishcloths and acupuncturists' needles, sound bites that chew on what they eschew, salves for old saws, and less-is-more morsels which were promptly anthologized in The Boodaxe Book of Poetry Quotations (2006) and Geary's Guide to the World's Great Aphorists (2007). Now, five years further, in this volume Robinson's enlarged and extended reflections look out on the world and see a wounded head bandaged in clouds. These words that didn't come to mind when occasion demanded, words that were the right thing to say when the moment had passed, now reach us with a timely lateness that appears, for all that, to be just what we were waiting for.

Published 2015. Paperback, 72pp, 8x5ins, £10.95 / $18 

ISBN9781848614345 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



Shortly before her death, philosopher Gillian Rose began work on a new book—her Paradiso —thus fulfilling her promise at the end of Love’s Work to ‘stay in the fray, in the revel of ideas and risk’. Confident even only a week before her death that she could complete the work, all that remains are these fragments. In them, Rose combines the detached insight of one who is taking leave, or who has almost left, with a desire to participate in the joys of life until the last. Exceeding the injunction to ‘keep your mind in hell and despair not’, Paradiso sketches a movement through the hell and despair of terminal illness to an affirmation of the joys of companionship and memory. Paradiso contains some of Rose’s most serene and affirmatory writing, and in that light completes one of the most remarkable philosophical oeuvres of the late twentieth century.

Published 2019. Paperback, 396pp, 9 x 6ins, £16.95 / $25

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 2013. Paperback, 112pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848612921 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

A Vanished Hand: My Autograph Album is a postscript to Anthony Rudolf's memoir of childhood, The Arithmetic of Memory (1999) and accompanies Silent Conversations : A Reader's Life , shortly to appear from Seagull Books. The autograph album, testimony to Rudolf's teenage years, was presumed lost for thirty years until it emerged, energies intact, beneath a pile of books in the author's loft. Describing the circumstances of each autograph, he is led down unexpected trails, such as a visit to Bushey Jewish Cemetery, where he explores the wording on Alma Cogan's tombstone, only a few yards from that of the author's parents.

Published 2015. Paperback, 114pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848613638 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

In Spite of All is a memoir by a Portuguese poet, of another Portuguese poet: Alberto de Lacerda, an almost legendary figure in expatriate circles. Lacerda lived for many years in London, with sojourns also in Boston and in Austin, Texas, when lectureships took him away, but he always returned to his adopted city. A fine poet, Lacerda also had a talent for friendship, which is amply borne out by Luis Amorim de Sousa's touching memoir of his friend.

Published 2008. Paperback, 236pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9781905700561 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here .]

Circumventing conventional narratives of trauma and recovery, Dreaming Arrival presents a series of very personal reflections on the writing life set in the context of John Welch's experience of psychoanalysis. Intensely felt, but always retaining a significant degree of scepticism, the book's starting-point was in a journal the writer kept when in analysis and it refers back to an experience of breakdown and hospitalisation thirty years previously. Calling easy notions of creativity into question Dreaming Arrival looks not only at the way 'therapy' affects writing, but also at how the writing may affect the process of the therapy itself.

Published 2024. Paperback, 118pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848619432 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

Colours Nailed to the Mast is not so much a memoir as an immemoir, fretting at traces, gaps and losses that start to expose absence as the productive heart of my poetic life; for with poetry I have needed to fill in the absence, not by attempted retrievals as in some of these essays, but by linguistic analogues that aspire to life, golems if you like. The unexpected absence of the final step. At best the poems emerge from my immemory into independence, even if their familial resemblance may be obvious. More so than some of what I seem to recall here, sharing the dream quality that has most intrigued me – a conviction my dreams have been annexed by another consciousness with a history and range of knowledge I cannot claim.  (John Wilkinson)