10 Years of Publications -- 2024

2025 marks ten years of V. Press publishing solo-authored titles and, as part of our celebrations, we're sharing our year-by-year publications over that period.

The press was originally launched at Ledbury Poetry Festival in July 2013 with a one-off poetry chapbook anthology before moving on to solo-authored poetry pamphlets in 2015.

Our first solo-authored poetry collection and our first flash fiction pamphlet came out in 2016. There have been illustrated poetry pamphlets, a dual-authored poetry pamphlet and a full-length flash fiction title along the way.

Today, we highlight our 2024 titles!

Fire and Bees -- Bethan Rees -- 20 April 2024

“Fires both real and metaphorical crackle through this exciting new collection by Bethan Rees, and its pages hum and crawl with insect life. These poems are hard-hitting and poignant; exploring themes of class, loss, mental health and the way familial trauma is passed on from one generation to the next. Rees’ work is surreal and compelling – an exciting new voice in the poetry world.” Julia Webb

“Fire and Bees darts with unexpected twists and edges, projecting its imagination into past, present and future, with themes of family, relationship and corporeal sensitivity. Mirroring the very nature of poetry, thresholds between the interior and exterior of bodies feel permeable, with recurring images of stings and syringes pricking the skin. Rees’ work is quick-witted and blazing.” Claire Williamson

Fire and Bees is very intense and very reflective, like the burning memories we carry. 

A sample poem from the chapbook can be enjoyed below. More information and ordering for Fire and Bees can be found here.

Stitches

I need to let you know what

I’ve done in my life.

The journeys I’ve been on.

The people I have met

that you might have hated

or loved.

Sitting in the parlour, I take

thread from Gran’s biscuit tin

come sewing kit.

I’m telling you my story through

my skin. Stitching my narrative into

the body you gave me.

The thread slides through my palm

and the pull of the needle is guided

by your spirit.

I want to let you know what you want

to know. And hopefully you’ll feel this too.

I create an aeroplane with black cord

and flesh. But from your perspective it looks more

like a bird.

So, I start to stitch a bird, because I think

that’s what you want me to do.

The Love Trio (LT) Bundle

This bundle consists of one poetry collection, Like love by Brenda Read-Brown, and two pamphlets/chapbooks: A Z-hearted Guide to Heartache by Charley Barnes and Winter with Eva by Elaine Baker.

The Love Trio (LT) Bundle is £18 including postage and packing for UK delivery only. Bundle details and ordering can be found here.

 The Mothering Trio (MT) Bundle

The bundle consists of one poetry collection, Unable Mother by Helen Calcutt and two pamphlets/chapbooks: The Beautiful Open Sky by Hannah Linden and (m)othersongs by Sarah Doyle.

The titles in this bundle, which might equally be called Mothering or Not, include the points of views of being a mother, being a child, the difficulties of both and also the perspective of being unable to have children.

The Mothering Trio (MT) Bundle is £18 including postage and packing for UK delivery only. Bundle details and ordering can be found here.

The Narrative Poetry Duo (NPD) Bundle

This bundle consists of two poetry collections: knots, tangles, fankles by Alex Reed and A Bluebottle in Late October by John Wheway. 

The Narrative Poetry Duo NPD Bundle is £18 including postage and packing for UK delivery only. Bundle details and ordering can be found here.

The Narrative Poetry Trio (NPT) Bundle

This bundle consists of three poetry pamphlets/chapbooks chosen from the following four options: Checkout by Kathy Gee, art brut by David O'Hanlon, Winter with Eva by Elaine Baker or Dancing in Babylon by Elaine Baker. 

The Narrative Poetry Trio (NPT) Bundle is £15 including postage and packing for UK delivery only -- please remember to specify which 3 titles you would prefer, or V. Press will select 3 (out of the 4) titles for you. Bundle details and ordering can be found here.

The V. Press Prize for Poetry Trio (VPPPT) Bundle

This bundle consists of three poetry pamphlets/chapbooks chosen from the following four options: ynygordna by Kelly Williams, May We All Be Artefacts by Chloe Hanks, Creature Without Building by Ray Vincent-Mills or Braised in Wine by D.D. Holland.

The V. Press Prize for Poetry Trio (VPPPT) Bundle is £15 including p &p for UK delivery only -- please remember to specify which 3 titles you would prefer, or V. Press will select 3 (out of the 4) titles for you. Bundle details and ordering can be found here.

Robins, Feathers, Pearls -- Ella-Louise Fisher
-- 30 September 2024

“Robins, Feathers, Pearls takes us on a journey of what it means to lose but also what it means to have. These poems are proof that the greatest moments of sadness and despair can be written with beauty and light. You will get lost in these words, and you will be grateful for it.” Casey Bailey

“This remarkable debut publication from Ella-Louise Fisher is a powerful reminder of how bereavement can be more than an individual experience. Elegiac work is by nature difficult to write. It is often particularly difficult to communicate the balance between public and private grief which holds the elegy in place, but Fisher’s poems skilfully present personal moments from a rich life that frames the context of loss in beautiful, heartbreaking, and strikingly recognisable ways. More than this, Robins, Feathers, Pearls is a true commitment to honouring life as well as reflecting on death, and honesty, integrity, and deep love for family lives in every line.” Jack McGowan

Robins, Feathers, Pearls is very honest, and very moving. 

Winner of the V. Press Prize for Poetry 2023

A sample poem from the chapbook can be enjoyed below. More information and ordering for Robins, Feathers, Pearls can be found here.

The Aisle of Urns in Charity Shops

I might donate your ashes to a charity shop. 

When I think of you, 

I picture you stroking the sleeves of jumpers 

in the aisles of Oxfam, 

holding teddies, and a book,

and dolls and wool, 

ready to give to me. 

I picture you grasping bin bags 

of knitted blankets and cardigans 

ready to donate, 

and, after promising not to take too long,

you’d spend hours browsing the 

fine china and teacup sets. 

You came home one day with a necklace, 

a small statue of a dog’s head for your fireplace, 

and a jewellery box, slightly chipped. 

Carrying a box of Beano comics on your hip. 

It might be worth something one day,

you said, 

as I raised my eyebrows. 

Now I walk in and find your pearls 

and your picture frames 

and your tea pot 

in the aisles of Oxfam

and, even though I donated them myself, 

I take them all in my arms and buy them again. 

A change of heart, 

I’ll wear you around my neck instead.

The Trajectory of Ghosts -- Tom Vowler -- 14 October 2024

“Tom Vowler takes us into the thick of the moment with slow confident detail that makes us poise within time, where actions have distinct consequences and there is a path taken through havoc. He captures what happens at the intersection of human fragility and the might of nature, using language that caresses and haunts.”

Catherine McNamara

“Beautifully written bite-sized stories, exploring ghosts and hauntings and loss. Stimulating and satisfying – a splendid collection.”
Alison Moore

The Trajectory of Ghosts is very ethereal and very necessary. 

A sample flash fiction from this chapbook can be enjoyed below. More information and ordering for The Trajectory of Ghosts can be found here.

Ghost Rock

We’re losing the moon, you say. It’s past midnight and we are sitting in the rubble of our eight-year coupling, sipping cheap red wine in a pool of moonlight on the kitchen floor. You’ve told me this before, but I indulge you as you articulate this little-known quirk of astrophysics, how our ghost rock is gradually slipping its orbit, an inch or so a year, the rate a fingernail grows. You are wearing the burgundy jumper we fought for custody of, its scent now a blend of our odours. I consider the division of other nouns we’ve accumulated: CDs, furniture, friends. The tidal bulge caused by the moon always sits just ahead of it, you continue, the force slinging the moon outwards, like being on a roundabout. I have to teach a writing class in the morning and, for a second, I marshal sufficient pragmatism to note this phenomenon as a potential prompt. Lunar poetry can occupy them while I try to buttress myself. You announce that days will lengthen as the Earth’s rotation slows and, like a spinning plate losing its centrifugal force, the planet will become unstable. Eventually, it will cease turning altogether. From nothing, a car alarm mauls the air, violating the stillness. You wait for it to discontinue, then offer me a seductive smile. It’s possible we may yet converge in the bedroom, a final plundering of one another, rhapsodic and ferocious, an act guillotining past and future. You know the Americans were going to detonate a nuclear bomb on its surface, you say. In the 1950s. Just to flaunt it at the Soviets. Despite the wine harshening with every sip, I realise I could listen to you all night.

Launching Rust Canyon

V. Press is very very excited to announce the publication of Rust Canyon by Lauren Mason.

“In Rust Canyon the Big Sky blazes as bright as ever, but in the hands of Lauren Mason the light is also a thing of terror, an agent of neglect and even violence, as the powerful compaction of the style makes it at once a vast landscape and a trembling domestic space. Force and fragility battle in this realm – how should I call for love? is the cry from its soul – as humans, animals, plants and stones share their common losses and desires and despairing thirst, and ‘All the ways I couldn’t leave/led here…’ This is a powerful, plangent and deeply moving collection.”

Glyn Maxwell

“Like the painter Georgia O’Keeffe (a presiding spirit in these poems), Lauren Mason tracks beauty and peril in the vast landscapes of canyon, desert, river, and transposes these terrains to the contour of bodies in passion, in rest, in (re)birth. Such locations – actual and known, but also taken from the world of dream – are vividly rendered in Mason’s assured voice. These poems are diamond-like in their brilliance and multifaceted reflections, but they are also sharp and tough. It is always exciting to encounter a debut pamphlet, but this is one I am particularly excited to see in the world.”

Tamar Yoseloff

Rust Canyon is very ecological and very unflinching.

ISBN: 978-1-7394122-9-6
36 pages

R.R.P. £7.50

A sample poem may be enjoyed below.

BUY Rust Canyon NOW using the paypal options below.

Rust Canyon (with p&p options)

Rust Canyon (with p&p for UK delivery) £9.49 GBP Rust Canyon (with p&p for non-EU Rest of World delivery) £23.50 GBP

N.B. We can no longer sell to the EU. Any other international customs/duty charges are the buyer's responsibility.

Vacation

we drove the desert for ten days

through monsoon season 

the canyons smelt of ozone  

roadside deer were pixellations

my mother bought pottery 

painted the colour of bruises

in pastel motels we watched true-crime shows 

where men stalked women with buck knives 

all those wives’ and daughters’

voices distorting into white noise

down the emergency line and we did not 

look at each other          often I wouldn’t sleep 

the lightning quick and expected as a fist 

splitting the already swollen sky 

Lots of news!

A big post today including Substack and editor news, and a round-up of this year's V. Press Prize for Poetry, reviews, new releases, events and coming soon...

V. Press Editor Sarah James/Leavesley has a new collection, Darling Blue, out with Indigo Dreams Publishing later this month. More info is below and you can also find details and a link in the V. Press bookshop. Historically, Sarah hasn't shared much about her own work through V. Press, but with the increasing time, energy and financial demands of running a small press in the current climate, it's becoming hard to do both without sometimes combining the two.. .

DARLING BLUE

 Joint Winner Geoff Stevens Memorial Poetry Prize 2024

Darling Blue interweaves ekphrastic poems with a book-length fictional poetry narrative of love, lust and letting go. The poems inspired by Pre-Raphaelite artworks include QR codes, which readers can scan to view the pieces after or alongside their reading. Blue here is more than a colour or inspiration; it is desire, secrecy and sorrow – the essence of ‘feeling / really alive’, yet ‘distance’s illusion’.

“A fascinating creative hybrid weaving ekphrasis and cohesive narrative, Darling Blue deftly balances its fictional speaker’s personal response to various Pre-Raphaelite artworks, with rich descriptive hints that resonate way beyond the mere visual. Exploring the complex tensions between the public sphere and private activities, this collection is a gallery tour of the narrator’s unfulfilling relationship with an unattainable partner, through to the ultimate redemption of self-worth and new love. James’s finely crafted and intelligently controlled poems brim with vivid imagery and lush sensory detail, reminding the reader ‘how brightly sunlight shines through // when freed from a cracked mirror’.” Sarah Doyle, Pre-Raphaelite Society Poet-in-Residence

“James uses the lyric and ekphrasis to create a profound and moving collection on the cost of love; what endures and how we survive its wake. As vivid and emotive as its pre-Raphaelite sources, Darling Blue is also startlingly direct, eloquent and consoling on the things we find hardest to put into words. An unmissable collection.” Luke Kennard

ISBN: 978-1-912876-97-6                                                                   
58 pages
R.R.P. £9.50

The collection is available to pre-order from Indigo Dreams here, with more information available on Sarah's personal website here or through her new Substack.

New Substack

Sarah has recently set up a Substack, reedlike: whispering through wind & water. This is very much in its early stages and is likely to develop and change as she sees what is and isn't possible and what readers want from it.

At the moment, this is very much a space she's using as a writer herself with content aimed primarily at other readers/writers, along with some pieces that may be of interest to walkers, nature-lovers, photographers and artists.

This already includes experience-led writer-life posts and prompts but will hopefully develop to also encompass how-to pieces, reader discussion and poem analysis pieces and more academic style articles.

This is a work-in-progress and not one that she can also do separately for V. Press, as it's becoming increasingly difficult to maintain multiple personal and V. Press accounts on different platforms. (Sarah and V. Press's current social media accounts on Bluesky, Instagram, Facebook, Threads and X, amongst others will remain separate, for the time being at least.) 

With Substack, if this 'trial' proves productive, goes well and subscriber numbers grow, she may then extend this profile to share more about V. Press's work and publications too.

If you're already on Substack, Sarah's handle there is @moresarah and you can view the page here.

You can also subscribe to it by filling in the form below.

2025-26 V. Press Prize for Poetry

V. Press is very very delighted to share that the winner of this year's V. Press Prize for Poetry is Eleni Brooks! 

This year's V. Press Prize for Poetry shortlist of three manuscripts picked by the University of Worcester was wide-ranging in terms of contents, form, language awareness and experimentation.

V. Press editor Sarah Leavesley enjoyed the poems, which effectively encompassed themes of coming of age, modern life, love, trauma, self-discovery, politics and more. The three shortlisted selections also successfully maintained a distinctive style and approach across the experiences, shapes on the page and/or uses of form contained within each manuscript.

In the end, she chose ‘grown girl’ as the winner of this year’s prize for its confident voice, striking lines, unusual images and light touch, all working together to create an interesting and insightful read.

Sarah is already working with Eleni on the chapbook and looking forward to publishing grown girl in 2026.

OUT NOW

Palmer

“These poems offer what feels like a privileged insight into the poet's intense and sensitive spirituality, and his view of the world around him. Personal yet ambitious in its spiritual reach, this poetry captivates the reader with its close attention to detail and language. It reminds us of the natural relationship between religion and poetry, and is a compelling poetic experience.” Sally Read

“R. M. Francis’ Palmer is a vestry where the choral chanting of sainthood echoes off the walls. His poems are burning votive candles to sacred spaces and experiences while wearing the vestments of humanity; the body, attention, parenthood. These poems are lovingly put together and are ultimately ‘kissing in the presence of’ the divine, saints and being human.” Roy McFarlane

Palmer is very wandering and very wondering.

ISBN: 978-1-0682701-0-9                

36 pages

R.R.P. £7.50

A sample poem from Palmer may be enjoyed below. More information and ordering for Palmer can be found here.

Epitaphios

Mother cradles head in the laying down
and salted drops of sorrow slip across skin.
The others hold back with pensive frown –
the night is dark; the air is thin.

Salted drops of sorrow slipping over skin,
Joseph lifts lifeless hand to lips.
The night is dark; the air is thin.
Not just a kiss but a pleading,

Joseph lifts lifeless hand. We’re lipped
in the presence of beings in portal.
Not just a kiss but a pleading
in John’s placing of hollowed feet.

We’re present here, amongst portals,
that bridge terra with firmament.
John lowers those hallowed feet,
covers them in linen –

another bridge between earth and air,
another sail, another astrolabe
covers us in the linen
of slave, bride and king.

Another sail, another astrolabe
returned to soil. We rerun too.
And learn to step as slave, bride, king.
That pieta marks each seer.

Return to soil, and rerun too.
I sit still, even as palmer,
as pieta’s mark widens eyes
with salted drops of sorrow.

REVIEW NEWS

The Price of Happiness

“The pamphlet moves, with a discerning grip on implication, from dating, marriage and divorce to the eventual reclamation of her life in a straightforward tone. […] she evidently has an attuned sense of the symbolic: ‘packets of Vesta’ reveal a lie, divorce proceedings are a ‘game of chess’. In the same way, Robson returns to the violence of a previous image and reclaims it: ‘the hammer’ of her abuser’s ‘voice’ reappears as a symbol of empowerment as in ‘Forging’ a jeweller friend hands over ‘a hammer’ to let her ‘forge curves in [the] beaten metal’ of her wedding rings.”

Godelieve de Bree, The Poetry Review, Autumn 2025.

"Nikki Robson’s debut pamphlet charts the journey of a failed marriage. [..] Memory cannot recreate past emotions once they’re reframed by history, and it can take years to leave an abusive relationship*, but perhaps the line that sums up the price of happiness for the speaker is when her husband leaves: ‘all sounds of you dissolved and/ the vacuum, finally, was wonderful.’ (‘sequence’)." 

*https://www.womensaid.org.uk/information-support/what-is-domestic-abuse/myths/

Mary Mulholland, The Alchemy Spoon, full review in issue 16.

More information, a sample and ordering for The Price of Happiness can 

be found here.

sum of her PARTS

"In sum of her PARTS, Laura Besley provides us with a beautiful series of briefly illuminated windows - vignettes that offer glimpses into the moments of intimacy that make up a life. [...]

"In just thirty-four pages, Besley draws us into a network of bodies, thoughts, and conversations, always, as flash necessitates, with scant context. Yet the brief nature of each piece illuminates just how interconnected we all are, each jagged edge implicating a matching edge that may yet lie beside it. The sum of the collection's parts is a moving and sharply observed portrayal of the complexities of embodied life, where one must place gentle intimacies right alongside painful metamorphosis and absurd possibilities." 

Nina Walker, Everybody's Reviewing, full review here.

"“Sum of her PARTS” is a hybrid collection of flash fiction and poems that explore the intimacies of girl and womanhood in a series of small, momentary stories that work like Sylvia Plath’s assertion that “poems are moments’ monuments” (from her journals). Brevity does not equate to a lack of depth and, at times, one image can represent a whole relationship. [..]

"In “Sum of her PARTS” Besley successfully uses the brevity of form, whether poetry or flash fiction, to create images and guide the reader into scenarios of unintended consequences and inadvertent harm from those, partners, mothers or friends, whom the narrators would normally expect to love and trust."

Emma Lee, full review here.

More information, a sample and ordering for sum of her PARTS can 

be found here.

Dreaming Backward

"In Dreaming Backward, Reed both alleviates and anguishes his readers with casually devastating bouts of nostalgia, cemented by the use of almost melancholic monochrome photographs of Reed in his youth. He longs for the tender, mellow Newcastle he once knew, and resents ageing, yearning for dodgems and “faraway places” that now seem out of reach. Reed expertly replicates the feeling of child-like wonder through harmless astonishment and innocent memories which seamlessly blend into unfamiliarity."

Isobel Dillon, Poetry Book Society Autumn Bulletin 2025, copies here.

More information, a sample and ordering for Dreaming Backward can 

be found here and see below for a live-event launch.

DREAMING BACKWARD AUTUMN BOOK LAUNCH

Alex Reed will be having a Book Launch for Dreaming Backward, with Keren Banning & Steve Nash, in Newcastle on Thursday, 16 October 2025.

Venue: Gallowgate Room (Top Floor), Tyneside Irish Centre, Newcastle NE1 4SG (Bar on Ground Floor)

Time: 7-30pm.

COMING SOON

Rust Canyon

“In Rust Canyon the Big Sky blazes as bright as ever, but in the hands of Lauren Mason the light is also a thing of terror, an agent of neglect and even violence, as the powerful compaction of the style makes it at once a vast landscape and a trembling domestic space. Force and fragility battle in this realm – how should I call for love? is the cry from its soul – as humans, animals, plants and stones share their common losses and desires and despairing thirst, and ‘All the ways I couldn’t leave/led here…’ This is a powerful, plangent and deeply moving collection.”

Glyn Maxwell

“Like the painter Georgia O’Keeffe (a presiding spirit in these poems), Lauren Mason tracks beauty and peril in the vast landscapes of canyon, desert, river, and transposes these terrains to the contour of bodies in passion, in rest, in (re)birth. Such locations – actual and known, but also taken from the world of dream – are vividly rendered in Mason’s assured voice. These poems are diamond-like in their brilliance and multifaceted reflections, but they are also sharp and tough. It is always exciting to encounter a debut pamphlet, but this is one I am particularly excited to see in the world.”

Tamar Yoseloff

Rust Canyon is very ecological and very unflinching.

ISBN: 978-1-7394122-9-6
36 pages

R.R.P. £7.50

A sample poem from Rust Canyon may be enjoyed below. More information and ordering for Rust Canyon can be found here.

Vacation

we drove the desert for ten days

through monsoon season 

the canyons smelt of ozone  

roadside deer were pixellations

my mother bought pottery 

painted the colour of bruises

in pastel motels we watched true-crime shows 

where men stalked women with buck knives 

all those wives’ and daughters’

voices distorting into white noise

down the emergency line and we did not 

look at each other           often I wouldn’t sleep 

the lightning quick and expected as a fist 

splitting the already swollen sky 

10 Years of Publications -- 2023

2025 marks ten years of V. Press publishing solo-authored titles and, as part of our celebrations, we're sharing our year-by-year publications over that period.

The press was originally launched at Ledbury Poetry Festival in July 2013 with a one-off poetry chapbook anthology before moving on to solo-authored poetry pamphlets in 2015.

Our first solo-authored poetry collection and our first flash fiction pamphlet came out in 2016. There have been illustrated poetry pamphlets, a dual-authored poetry pamphlet and a full-length flash fiction title along the way.

Today, we highlight our 2023 titles and some extra delights from that year!

The Human Portion by Nicola Warwick winner of the poetry category of East Anglian Book Awards 2023

The Beautiful Open Sky by Hannah Linden shortlisted for Saboteur Awards 2023 Best Poetry Pamphlet

This post comes just ahead of National Poetry Day next Thursday (2 Oct). 

V. Press editor Sarah Leavesley/James will be in the New Brighton area next week and enjoying the Wirral Poetry Festival that weekend. You can find out more about what's on offer at the festival here. If you're there and spot Sarah -- most likely at the poetryfilm screening, Five New Books event or Where Once the Tide poetry walk -- do say hello!

The Human Portion -- Nicola Warwick -- 1 March 2023

“Nicola Warwick’s poems take place in entrancing, liminal territory in which the human sensibility encounters the natural world. Deep kinship, mystery and otherness are conveyed through acute observation and transformative imagination. The language is precise and often surprises. Take, for instance ‘the sky, red as a swallow's throat’ (‘Late high summer’), or ‘roots easing through earth / were a voice making itself unheard’ (‘And the trees (said)’). These poems reveal a special sensitivity and to read them is to feel our ‘Human Portion’ enlarged. Highly recommended.” Moniza Alvi

“‘How to speak of this’ Warwick asks in these nuanced, thoughtful poems concerning landscape, seascape and wildlife. Encompassing intimate losses of family and nature, the collection delicately explores our ‘egg-tight grief’ in distilled moments of striking imagery and accomplishment. Ultimately, these poems hope that we may find in nature, as  ‘The Courteous Farmer’ does, a ‘second heart’.” Heidi Williamson

The Human Portion is very liminal and very grounded.

A sample poem from the chapbook can be enjoyed below. More information and ordering for The Human Portion can be found here.

The Chitterings

Night by night, I listen
for the soft scrape of their claws
as they slip out from under the eaves.

You doze beside me, unaware 
of the little interlopers who stir only 
as we are readying ourselves for sleep.

I wait for the dusky light to fade, 
for their ragged shapes to take to the air, 
for them to stutter like ticker-tape into the dark.

My ears are tuned like a child’s for their speech,
their squeals and calls, a quiet chit-chittering
as they gather for the off.

You say it’s all in my head, these creatures
that will not silence, suggest I still them 
with something like mindfulness.

On those nights when sleep won’t come, 
I watch from the window for their exodus,
count them out, count them all back in.
 

bed -- Georgia Gildea -- 17 March 2023

“bed takes us on a heart-wrenching journey through hospital admission and discharge, opening doors inward and outward as it explores the divides of self and space and asks: ‘where do I belong’? This astounding collection locates the ‘I’ in innovative form as much as in content: the ‘empty / stem’ of the ‘I’ is evoked in poems that run narrow – yet stand tall – on the page, stanzas re-assemble into ‘I’ shapes and, achingly, the ‘I’ is an ideogram for ‘a goodbye / hug’. Amid disappearances, erasures and elisions, bed is a collection that recovers the ‘I’ from an overwhelming ‘landscape of white static / white and muted’. These pages crackle with inventiveness; here is an electrifying new voice.” Sarah Barnsley

“I love bed most for its clarity and depth. Its language, imagery, use of form, and framing, are all wonderfully delicate. From its diminutive, lower-case title on, bed invites its readers straight inside to experience ‘a life pared down to a spoon’. These poems are like tiny islands – boats – beds – drifting and bumping on their sea – ward – of white space and grief. It’s stunningly generous, as these seemingly small pieces offer up huge insights, both compassionate and enlightening. They draw a self struggling to navigate a bruising landscape. This is work that is both refreshingly direct and beautifully crafted.” V. Press Guest Editor Charlotte Gann

bed is very raw and very real. 

This title is out of stock but more information about bed can be found here.

 

Braised in Wine -- D.D. Holland -- 28 April 2023

“Braised in Wine is a striking debut from D.D. Holland. There is a veritable smorgasbord of ways (case in point) in which food can make its way into common parlance, but Holland breathes new life into her subject matter, exploring the familiar and at times painful emotions that eating can elicit. The poems contained within Braised in Wine unpick how food can fashion the self through memory and relationships, using taste as a way to express a deeper well of feeling. Through small and large acts of confession, Holland conjures powerful and poignant images that bury themselves in the mind. I can’t wait to see what’s next.” Dr Jack McGowan 

“A book about eating disorders and abuse might sound like a tough read – but, although these poems teeter on the edge of an abyss, they are written with healthy doses of warmth and humour, and an appetite for life that proves moving and uplifting.” Dr David Swann

“Braised in Wine’s evocative, compelling and moving poems whet the appetite, while also exploring how what we eat and drink may feed into other aspects of life – body image, self-worth, relationships and more.” Sarah Leavesley, V. Press prize judge

Braised in Wine is very amusing and very genuine.

Winner of the V. Press Prize for Poetry 2022

A sample poem from the chapbook can be enjoyed below. More information and ordering for Braised in Wine can be found here.

Life Advice

Lick the custard jug.

Take eight canapes the first time around.

Double, triple and quadruple dip your crackers;

turn out the crisp packet and suck off the salt.

Dip your spoon directly into the jar,

eat the grapes from the cheese board

and chew on the garnish.

Slurp your soup,

take seven sugars in your tea

and drink your coke full-fat.

Gnaw on chicken bones, then

suck your fingers clean.

Always ensure you are first in line

for birthday cake.

Belch appreciatively,

use your sleeve as a napkin,

dig your elbows into the table,

seize the wrong cutlery

in the wrong hands and

refuse to leave without seconds.

Force meteor showers,

cure existence,

evade the certainty of death.

Lick the custard jug.

Dancing in Babylon -- Elaine Baker -- 17 July 2023

“Situated in the city of the apocalypse, and arranged as a play, this is a gentle and haunting sequence of poems. Within an anxiety-infused landscape of constant peril, Baker’s skillful narrator offers a counterbalance to the darkness of uncertainty. What ultimately triumphs here is the light, joy and beauty of what it is to love and be loved. These graceful, musical and emotionally resonant poems beautifully unfold their story of hope.” 
Vanessa Lampert

“These poems are startling in their emotional clarity. They capture the surreal disconnection of lockdown as well as celebrating what a joy it is to be together once more. They are filled with a quietly powerful sense of wonder that is both passionate and melancholy. From tango dancers to taxi cab drivers, they draw us into a world that is heart-breaking in its beauty.” 
Aoife Mannix 

Dancing in Babylon is very elegiac and very cathartic.

A sample poem from the chapbook can be enjoyed below. More information and ordering for Dancing in Babylon can be found here.

The cabbie (1)

He works nights, passing blue lights. Silence. Blue lights. But the streets are magic after dark.

He doesn’t need Satnav or stars. He knows Babylon’s backstreets like his daughters and sons, like their voices in the morning, their feet on the carpeted stairs.

While she cooks, nags, worries, gets them to bed, pours a drink, watches the news, he criss-crosses the city, office blocks to station forecourt to banks to city outskirts. Fare after fare, the night goes. He doesn’t miss conversation much. He’s learned to read his fares behind the glass like texts – it’s all in the eyes, above the mask. He observes the way they watch empty pavements, traffic lights, like they’re adverts.

He curses the gulls –

fucking birds.

He takes this city, while it’s sleeping, while no one else is looking, slipping lane to lane like he’s a king, and in between, he sings, picturing her warm and safe in his bed, breathing.

He doesn’t know when it will end. He thanks God he is working.

(m)othersongs -- Sarah Doyle -- 11 September 2023

 “(m)othersongs is a moving, visceral exploration of the othering nature of un-motherhood. Body-shame, medical misogyny and grief are exorcised in shape-shifting forms with veins of pain running through them, in which everything from cloud formations to sea gooseberries on a shoreline speak of the changing seasons of the human body. This is a world where ‘wooden babies’ and rag dolls are born in place of children, and the womb – a ‘special bedroom’ haunted by endometriosis, fibroids and myths of creation – is surrendered with the mantra – ‘it’s only a pocket, and one you’re not using’. Both heartbreaking and strangely transporting, these are powerful and necessary poems.”
Polly Atkin

 “(m)othersongs is one of those rare examples of a collection of poetry that is both moving in content and accomplished in form. Each poem is expertly crafted, with a skilled use of structured form alongside beautifully crafted free verse. This textured and vibrant collection does not hold back, it faces the pain of endometriosis and infertility and holds that pain up to the light as valid experience of womanhood. The poetry world is enriched by this collection, and I shall return to it.”
Wendy Pratt

(m)othersongs is very meteorological and very moonlit.

 A sample poem from the chapbook can be enjoyed below. More information and ordering for (m)othersongs can be found here.

This has been the sunniest May since records began*

said the weatherman and every day my skin

absorbed the air’s hot butter; every day

through May, a barometric melt and swelter

until I was slick with sunshine. My eyes

ripened from green to gold, and freckles

swarmed my arms like fire ants. Helium

trailed in my wake, a shimmer of heat-haze

to burn out the dazzled retinas, as mercury

rose from toes to thighs to breasts. I blazed

with the fizz and pop of hydrogen,

a meteorological Midas making a yellow 

mess of everything I touched, spilling

from room to room like steam, hissing

and flexing on limbs of plasma. I was fat

with photons, my mouth a glary corona

flaring electricity wrought from a heaving

belly. Month long, I radiated, basking

in the glow of my own brilliance, alive

with convection and luminous to the core.

But May broke like an egg, the sun’s

ruined yolk puddling round my feet,

as I succumbed to clammy blue in the rains

and the hail and the thunder of June.

First published in Finished Creatures 

Not Enough Rage -- Gram Joel Davies -- 16 October 2023

“It’s rare for me to recognise, and feel kinship for, a lot of contemporary poetry. I recognise and feel kinship with this. Not Enough Rage is like a series of controlled explosions. Trembling houses. A burning voice. Experience dismantled and sewn back together with glowing needles and a mouth full of stars.”

Bobby Parker

“Like a Dylan Thomas of the age of mental illness, Gram Joel Davies leaps and flies through the world with dark exuberance. These are speakable poems, full of love for unlovable places and impossible people. In touch with but not tied to rap's rhymes and rhythms, this collection, for me, shifts the modern world into the painful focus of real poetry.” 
Peter Oswald

Not Enough Rage is very heady and very gutsy.

A sample poem from this full-length collection can be enjoyed below. More information and ordering for Not Enough Rage can be found here.

Tourist in My Own Town

Nobody chooses which home to grow up in.

I’ve become like gapers or beachcombers,

where the houses overlook a tar-stained groyne.

Our terrace, filled by other lives,

a street that centres on the eye

like sea horizon. There, a door

I stood one time.

In the form of flip-flopper or pebble-hoarder,

I’ve imagined ways it could have been

– no polished bone – another middle house.

No mother who ate mussels closed or talked

towards her children as if ready-grown.

In the home I didn’t choose. On the step 

I stood alone. Out along the sound:

three doors down.

Now I’ve turned to paddler, dipper dabbling

in rockpool life. Beyond the briny walls

in which a father may have pinched himself

and woken up a hermit, crabshelled,

sunken with a chest of gold

tobacco and green wine. Not the home

I wanted then – out along the prom

some length – three before the end.

I’ve taken on the faces of the flingers

and the fetchers, reckoning the lookout hut,

whose windows ring its stippled sections,

was the place a sister (last who fled)

once pierced her lips and other places,

painted all points red. Not a home selected,

on the edge of land. Sleeves rolled downward,

three along the strand.

From deck chairs by the channels, curved

through sandbanks, where I’ve consumed

the views of masted roofs, and thought about

a brother who took every brunt and buffet.

How, perhaps, he caught a wave.

This isn’t where I meant to be, three

before the end, out from the mainland.

Bucking on the trend.

Turn Around When Possible -- Martin Zarrop -- 6 November 2023

“Combining a scientific eye with a poetic sensibility (and a sharp sense of humour), Martin Zarrop’s work is thought-provoking and wry. These poems take the long view and they never shy away from difficulty, each expertly using form to amplify content. Turn Around When Possible is an enlightening, enjoyable read.” Helen Mort

“Whether he is looking back fondly on the seemingly mundane details of a working-class childhood or exploring the vastness of interstellar space, Martin Zarrop’s poems are distinguished by their metaphysical wit, humour, and sheer accessibility. There is a mathematical precision to every poem in this collection, a focus on details, that leads inevitably and, with a minimum of fuss, to memorable insights into love, affection, the ineluctable passage of time, and humanity’s place in the universe. Turn Around When Possible is a delight from start to finish and shows Zarrop writing at the height of his very considerable powers.” David Cooke

Turn Around When Possible is very uncertain and very quirky.

A sample poem from this full-length collection can be enjoyed below. More information and ordering for Turn Around When Possible can be found here.

Achievement

Grumbling thunder gently shakes
the grimy windows, as he takes
his medication. Breakfast news 
depresses. He sips coffee, guesses
it will rain, decides he must abort
the routine of his daily walk.

The clock is striking eight, then ten.
He’ll find some other way (again!)
to pass the time. Another cryptic?
Out of sight the slow tick-tick 
of something drip drip dripping
from behind the bathroom light.

The phone is shrill. Is someone dead? 
Hello, Sir – sorry – my name’s Smith.
A class parades inside his head.
You used to teach me in the sixth…
Oh, I recall – it’s thirty years
and I’m still here, but my dear wife…

I only rang to thank you, Sir,
for making such a difference to my life.
 

Brother -- Sheila Lockhart -- 24 November 2023

“Sheila Lockhart has created something special with this pamphlet. Brother is a poignant study of remembrance but one that manages to be almost joyful in its close observation of this lost life and the still-living world that goes on without it. It is special writing – clear, brightly configured, riven by pain, and perfectly formed.”
Niall Campbell

“These calm and clear-eyed poems are remarkable in their refusal to be afraid. Holding darkness and light in delicate balance, they move from suffering and loss into what comes afterwards and later, finding consolation in the dogged aliveness of the natural world and, no less importantly, in the patterns and shapes of language itself.  Sheila Lockhart has written a bold and beautiful book.”
Katharine Towers

The poems in Brother are a very heart-felt and very unflinching consideration of grief and healing after suicide.

A sample poem from the chapbook can be enjoyed below. More information and ordering for Brother can be found here.

Gaia

In my arms you hardly weighed a thing,

the day I returned you to our Mother. 

She spread herself wide to receive you. 

Then locked her doors forever. 

The adamantine scythe left so little

when it cut you. 

Yes, there was plenty of blood, 

but where was all the rest? A seed 

forced into my heart, tangled roots. 

I remember how thirsty you were, 

how your dust soaked up the rain. 

How the roses blossomed. 

 

Launching Palmer

V. Press is very very delighted to share the publication of Palmer by R.M. Francis.

“These poems offer what feels like a privileged insight into the poet's intense and sensitive spirituality, and his view of the world around him. Personal yet ambitious in its spiritual reach, this poetry captivates the reader with its close attention to detail and language. It reminds us of the natural relationship between religion and poetry, and is a compelling poetic experience.” Sally Read

“R. M. Francis’ Palmer is a vestry where the choral chanting of sainthood echoes off the walls. His poems are burning votive candles to sacred spaces and experiences while wearing the vestments of humanity; the body, attention, parenthood. These poems are lovingly put together and are ultimately ‘kissing in the presence of’ the divine, saints and being human.” Roy McFarlane

Palmer is very wandering and very wondering.

ISBN: 978-1-0682701-0-9               

36 pages

R.R.P. £7.50

A sample poem may be enjoyed below.

BUY Palmer NOW using the paypal options below.

Palmer (with p&p options)

Palmer (with p&p for UK delivery) £9.49 GBP Palmer (with p&p for non-EU Rest of World delivery) £23.50 GBP

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Epitaphios

Mother cradles head in the laying down
and salted drops of sorrow slip across skin.
The others hold back with pensive frown –
the night is dark; the air is thin.

Salted drops of sorrow slipping over skin,
Joseph lifts lifeless hand to lips.
The night is dark; the air is thin.
Not just a kiss but a pleading,

Joseph lifts lifeless hand. We’re lipped
in the presence of beings in portal.
Not just a kiss but a pleading
in John’s placing of hollowed feet.

We’re present here, amongst portals,
that bridge terra with firmament.
John lowers those hallowed feet,
covers them in linen –

another bridge between earth and air,
another sail, another astrolabe
covers us in the linen
of slave, bride and king.

Another sail, another astrolabe
returned to soil. We rerun too.
And learn to step as slave, bride, king.
That pieta marks each seer.

Return to soil, and rerun too.
I sit still, even as palmer,
as pieta’s mark widens eyes
with salted drops of sorrow.