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  NOW WITHDRAWN.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, £10.95

ISBN 9781848611146  NOW WITHDRAWN. A FEW COPIES LEFT IN STOCK



Published 2013. Paperback, 112pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95

ISBN 9781848612907  NOW WITHDRAWN. A FEW COPIES LEFT IN STOCK

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 January 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 January 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 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 April 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 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.

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 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 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 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)