Welcome to V. Press Poetry
“The Price of Ηappiness neither holds back nor wastes a word in its tale of a marriage from unsettling omens (‘Goodness, I’m weeping said Mum’) to full-blown violent coerciveness (‘the sore in the wall/where the dinner was thrown’) and out through the numbness and the decree absolute to the glimmers of a new life (‘it crackled like fireworks,/illegal for so long’). You barely take a breath before you’re holding it in shock at the damage we do each other in the altogether too close up of a dysfunctional relationship. It is a tribute to Nikki Robson’s skill that this is accomplished without sentiment, catching our attention and our compassion entirely through telling detail and command of phrasing – these poems are constantly quotable in their exactitude – ‘my label of a husband’; ‘my mummy-smile’; ‘this Vitruvian boy’ – and are nowhere more moving than in their grasp of the impact on the children: ‘[I] tried to describe the end of her world/as the beginning of another’.” W. N. Herbert
“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 bundle consists of two poetry collections: knots, tangles, fankles by Alex Reed and A Bluebottle in Late October by John Wheway.
“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
“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
“(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
Here you can find details of our poetry pamphlets/chapbooks and collections. To find pamphlets or books by a particular poet, please visit our Writers/Illustrators page, where authors are listed alphabetically according to their surname. Further information about selected individual titles may also be found in The Reading Room and on the Chez Nous page.
N.B. Any international customs/duty charges are the buyer's responsibility.
Our book bundles are primarily aimed at offering customers who are buying for UK delivery a cheaper alternative to purchasing these titles individually. Orders for overseas delivery are likely to still be cheaper when purchased individually.
THE PRICE OF HAPPINESS
“‘The divorced cannot/bury their dead.’ Nikki Robson scours that truth, asks where it leads. We are used to graphic detonations of trauma, but here, the poet, well able to apply her ‘mummy-smile’, layers words, finds metaphor, draws deeply on sources and places. Unfolding her narrative, she never neglects a poet's first responsibility: to language. These poems haunt as mere shock cannot.” Beth McDonough
The Price of Happiness is very visceral and very contemplative.
ISBN: 978-1-7394122-4-1
34 pages
R.R.R.P. £6.99
A sample poem from The Price of Happiness can be enjoyed here.
PRE-ORDER The Price of Happiness NOW using the paypal options below. [The Price of Happiness is out in February 2025; pre-orders are posted out in the week of publication.]
N.B. Any international customs/duty charges are the buyer's responsibility.
ROBINS, FEATHERS, PEARLS
“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
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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.
N.B. Any international customs/duty charges are the buyer's responsibility.
These book bundles are primarily aimed at offering customers who are buying for UK delivery a cheaper alternative to purchasing these titles individually. Orders for overseas delivery are likely to still be cheaper when purchased individually.
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.
N.B. Any international customs/duty charges are the buyer's responsibility.
These book bundles are primarily aimed at offering customers who are buying for UK delivery a cheaper alternative to purchasing these titles individually. Orders for overseas delivery are likely to still be cheaper when purchased individually.
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.
N.B. Any international customs/duty charges are the buyer's responsibility.
These book bundles are primarily aimed at offering customers who are buying for UK delivery a cheaper alternative to purchasing these titles individually. Orders for overseas delivery are likely to still be cheaper when purchased individually.
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.
N.B. Any international customs/duty charges are the buyer's responsibility.
These book bundles are primarily aimed at offering customers who are buying for UK delivery a cheaper alternative to purchasing these titles individually. Orders for overseas delivery are likely to still be cheaper when purchased individually.
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.
N.B. Any international customs/duty charges are the buyer's responsibility.
These book bundles are primarily aimed at offering customers who are buying for UK delivery a cheaper alternative to purchasing these titles individually. Orders for overseas delivery are likely to still be cheaper when purchased individually.
FIRE AND BEES
“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.
ISBN: 978-1-7394122-2-7
32 pages
R.R.P. £6.99
A sample poem can be enjoyed here.
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BROTHER
“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.
ISBN: 978-1-7398838-9-8
36 pages
R.R.P. £6.50
N.B. Any international customs/duty charges are the buyer's responsibility.
DANCING IN BABYLON
“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.
ISBN: 978-1-7394122-0-3
36 pages
R.R.P. £6.50
A sample poem can be enjoyed here.
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NOT ENOUGH RAGE
“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.
ISBN: 978-1-7398838-7-4
62 pages
R.R.P. £10.99
A sample poem can be enjoyed here.
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TURN AROUND WHEN POSSIBLE
“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.
ISBN: 978-1-7398838-8-1
74 pages
R.R.P. £10.99
A sample poem can be enjoyed here.
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(M)OTHER SONGS
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.
ISBN: 978-1-7398838-6-7
32 pages
RRP £6.50
A sample poem can be enjoyed here.
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BRAISED IN WINE
“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
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BED
“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.
ISBN: 978-1-7398838-4-3
36 pages
R.R.P. £6.50
Guest edited by Charlotte Gann
A sample extract from bed can be enjoyed here.
BED IS CURRENTLY OUT OF STOCK
THE HUMAN PORTION
“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.
ISBN: 978-1-7398838-2-9
36 pages
R.R.P. £6.50
Winner of the poetry category in the East Anglian Book Awards 2023!
A sample poem can be enjoyed here.
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N.B. Any international customs/duty charges are the buyer's responsibility.
POWERLESS RANGERS
Luke Kennard
“The poems in Powerless Rangers enchant through their spoken power. They are clear-eyed about what makes us who we are and show true strength through their openness, compassion, and self-knowledge. The humour, language, and energy will win over readers and audiences alike.”
David Morley
“McGowan’s poems are loud, with their energetic wit and playful meanderings, but they disguise a romantic, nostalgic centre and when it surfaces the audience or reader are encouraged to switch from one emotion to another in a second – which is a delight.”
Ruth Stacey
Powerless Rangers is very nostalgic, and very nineties.
ISBN: 978-1-7398838-3-6
34 pages
R.R.P. £6.50
A sample poem can be enjoyed here.
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THE BEAUTIFUL OPEN SKY
Tom Sastry
“Truths are slippery and sometimes sinister in this stunning exploration of familial relationships by Hannah Linden. It can be hard to know who to trust, or who is parenting whom. But there is beauty here too, and a positivity that shines through despite the odds. Self-reflective and superb, Linden’s use of language is playful and imaginative. I can’t wait to see what she does next.”
Julia Webb
The Beautiful Open Sky is very past and very present.
ISBN: 978-1-7398838-1-2
36 pages
R.R.P. £6.50
A sample poem can be enjoyed here.
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CREATURE WITHOUT BUILDING
Jack McGowan
“These poems speak for themselves: bold, bracing, and creating their own style and voice!”
Sarah Leavesley
Creature Without Building is very visceral and very captivating.
Winner of the V. Press Prize for Poetry 2021
ISBN: 978-1-8380488-9-1
36 pages
R.R.P. £6.50
TRIGGER WARNING: Some of the poems in this chapbook deal with traumatic experiences that readers may potentially find disturbing, including domestic abuse, bulimia, rape, racism and graphic violence.
A sample poem can be enjoyed here.
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BLOOD SUGAR, SEX, MAGIC
Blood Sugar, Sex, Magic is award-winning poet Sarah James’s exploration of 40 years living with type one diabetes, a life-threatening autoimmune condition that is now treatable, but remains incurable. The collection tracks her personal journey from diagnosis, age six, to adulthood, including the high and the low points, as well as the further long-term health risks lurking in the background. These are poems of pain, but also of love and beauty, taking in motherhood, aging and establishing self-identity in a constantly updating world. The route to some kind of acceptance and belonging may be troubled by ‘trying to escape’ but it also ‘holds / more light than your eye / will ever know’.
“Sarah James’s fine poems are wonderfully abundant in experiment, energy, and expression. She has a remarkable sense for how the self-discipline of illness—like art—can release and shape the language of wonder, wisdom, and love.” David Morley
“Sarah James’ Blood Sugar, Sex, Magic compellingly conveys the journey of a life pervaded by type one diabetes and the myriad struggles of that hidden disability. It’s a world of sunlit fields and night sweats, ‘doorstep birdsong’ and pricked fingertips, at once arduous and munificent. Always engaging and often moving, James’ poems deftly immerse as well as inform, urging a deep appreciation of life’s plenty, ‘breath[ing] in the sky’.” Carrie Etter
“These poems speak with such urgency and humanity that we take the deeply researched science (and magic) in our stride, then get pulled up short by its failure to ‘make sense of unfairness’. It’s an exhilarating, poignant collection combining raw honesty with impressive craft. The way ‘the world shrinks’ in personal hardship and the sheer and constant work it takes to open it up again. I feel more awake and alive for reading it.” Luke Kennard
WINNER OF THE CP AWARE AWARD PRIZE FOR POETRY 2021
YOU'LL NEED AN UMBRELLA FOR THIS
“In this gorgeous debut, Victoria Richards asks ‘What are girls made of?’ And the poems answer: cans of Strongbow; ballpoint tattoos; dirty jokes; ghost bikes tied to lampposts; Ingrid Bergman’s eyeballs. All of the above and so much more is contained in this collection. A world of mothers, journalists, children and girlhoods are all drowned or on fire in You’ll need an umbrella for this. Richards tells us these stories with love, humour, lyricism and the sort of eye for detail which leaves an impression on the heart. I will read these poems for years, pass them onto friends: part secret, part gossip, part gift.” Lewis Buxton
“Victoria Richards’s remarkable debut, You’ll need an umbrella for this, is more than a book of poems, it is a best friend. These poems will be there for you in the middle of the night when you are lovesick or broken hearted; they will glance you a knowing look when you need one most and make you laugh even when you think you’ve forgotten how. In these poems, without reserve, expectation or apology, Richards is offering us her heart. Accept it and she will make a fire out of beauty and pain, pour vodka on the flames and dance with you in the light.” Amelia Loulli
You’ll need an umbrella for this is very wild and very windswept.
ISBN: 978-1-8380488-8-4
74 pages
R.R.P. £10.99
A sample poem can be enjoyed here.
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WHAT LOVE WOULD SMELL LIKE
“In SK Grout's debut pamphlet, romantic love between women is both sensual and spiritual. These atmospheric, compelling poems evoke a richly felt and observed sensibility, an experience to relish again and again, ‘bright full of starwild’.”
Carrie Etter
“What love would smell like expertly zeroes in on the sensual and vibrant rhythms of the body. Porches, couches, cafés and twilit streets are reinvented as poignant sites of intimacy and want. Savouring colour, light, and the ‘sweet, blistered pleasure’ of scent, SK Grout has created an enchanting ‘poetry of simmering’.”
Natalie Linh Bolderston
What love would smell like is very beautiful and very beguiling.
ISBN: 978-1-8380488-7-7
34 pages
R.R.P. £6.50
A sample poem from What love would smell like can be enjoyed here.
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TO BOLDLY GO
“I was astonished by the versatility of these poems, the dizzying ride from early space exploration to a future of AI and artificial meat. Zarrop knows his stuff but wears his knowledge lightly. There is humour here among the surreal and the sci fi. I loved ‘A Quiet Drink’ which opens ‘In space, nobody can hear you fart’ and ‘Wasp–76b' which starts ‘Gene Kelly had it easy. You/ try dancing through liquid metal/ clad in a tank top’. His is a quirky, witty, unique voice and there is an underlying seriousness to these poems which reward reading and rereading.” Carole Bromley
“If you've ever wondered what happened to all the animals that we put into space, they live on and tell their stories in the corners of these poems. This pamphlet examines the tragedy and farce of our world from unusual perspectives and always at a slight distance, whether it’s through the first humans on Mars or a robotic home help. With a dry sense of humour and perfect observation these poems equip us for a future of lab-grown meat and space travel…I hope you’re ready To Boldly Go.” Suzannah Evans
To Boldly Go is very worried out there but very hopeful.
ISBN: 978-1-8380488-6-0
36 pages
R.R.P. £6.50
A sample poem from To Boldly Go can be enjoyed here.
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* SPECIAL OFFER *
While stocks last, pre-order To Boldly Go and Martin Zarrop's pamphlet Making Waves as a 'Zarrop 2-pamphet bundle' for delivery in the UK for just £12.50, including UK delivery.
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KNOTS, TANGLES, FANKLES
“Re-imagining the research of Laing and Esterson, Alex Reed’s multi-vocal knots, tangles, fankles asks important questions about sanity, madness and the family in a time before the digital became part of the story. This story revolves around Hazel, a young working class girl with the odds stacked against her, and it is both everyday and appalling. A shifting constellation of voices, overheard from behind closed doors, animates an insightful and sensitive collection of poems to think, learn and feel with. Carefully choreographed, all the protagonists earn our sympathy. They hold up a mirror to the human predicament – in black and white, compelling and filmic, concealing as much as they reveal, getting under your skin and staying with you long after reading the last page.” Linda France
“Alex Reed’s debut poetry collection knots, tangles, fankles tells the powerful, heart-breaking story of Hazel, sixteen years old and diagnosed as schizophrenic. Demonstrating a deft, versatile, and compassionate hand, Reed unveils Hazel’s true plight, not only through the surreal imagery of her thoughts, but also through the voices of those both hindering and healing her: from alarmed and hyper-protective parents, to institutionalised hospital staff, to the grounding, reassuring, real-life Dr Aaron Esterson, who along with R. D. Laing sought to uncover the source of mental illness in families using unconventional theories and methods. Though this is Hazel’s journey, each of Reed’s characters is undergoing their own personal struggle and anguish. In a setting similar to Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest and based on true cases, Esterson enables Hazel ‘but for the first time to hear [her] own voice’. It speaks to Reed’s ability as a poet that such a moment is so keenly felt and quietly celebrated by the reader, especially in the light of what follows.” Charles G Lauder Jr
Knots, tangles, fankles is a very poignant and very penetrating poetic sequence in multiple voices.
ISBN: 978-1-8380488-3-9
84 pages
R.R.P. £10.99
A sample poem from the collection can be found here.
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Also available from V. Press: These nights at home by Alex Reed, with photos by Keren Banning.
MAY WE ALL BE ARTEFACTS
“May We All Be Artefacts is an exciting and urgent new release, from a powerful and distinct voice. Hanks intermittently borrows from existing artwork, striking strong intertextual links with other artists, while also establishing her own perspectives. She borrows from magic, folklore and feminism to create fierce and sometimes disturbing narratives throughout. Neither trite nor forced, Hanks’ use of structure and imagery complement each other, further compounding the dark fairy-tale feel that is infused in these works. This is a debut pamphlet that shouts its arrival, to be consumed in one sitting – then read, and read again – May We All Be Artefacts showcases Hanks’ skillset and potential, marking her out as a compelling new poet.” Charley Barnes
May We All Be Artefacts is very candid, yet very contemplative.
Winner of the V. Press Prize for Poetry 2020
“This year’s winning portfolio for the V. Press Prize for Poetry is ‘May We All Be Artefacts’ – chosen from the University of Worcester’s shortlist of five for its striking and thought-provoking imagery, focal slants and choice of words. These are poems crafted with a painter’s eye for vivid details and a poet’s ear for language, its sounds and music. The scenes brought to life feel real, relevant and resonant.”
Sarah Leavesley, V. Press editor and prize judge
ISBN: 978-1-8380488-2-2
32 pages, perfect bound
RRP £6.50
A sample poem from May We All Be Artefacts can be found here.
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A WOVEN ROPE
“Grace and purpose distinguish this collection where poems trace the arc of parenting and explore the manifold challenges of being in the world. This collection also observes the natural world, its beauties, and its terrors, and is unafraid to confront violence and cruelty. The writing throughout is unforced, fine-drawn, lyrical, heart-felt.” Penelope Shuttle
A Woven Rope is very searching and very forgiving.
ISBN: 978-1-9161096-6-7
60 pages
R.R.P. £10.99
A sample poem can be enjoyed here.
N.B. Any international customs/duty charges are the buyer's responsibility.
SOMETHING SO WILD AND NEW IN THIS FEELING
“In these inventive and adventurous collage poems, Sarah Doyle presents Dorothy Wordsworth’s exuberant feeling for life and language in a fresh fabric of her own making. Sympathetic and insightful, tactful, and imaginative, Doyle’s compositions refract the energies of Dorothy’s writings through the subtle medium of her own sensibility, and the result is at once daring and illuminating.”
BLUE DOT AUBADE
“I don’t think poems need to teach anything but nevertheless there's much to learn about the cosmos, the spirit, matter, and what matters here. The best part is that the lessons are delivered by a high-energy beam of surprising, hyper-attentive language. I'm obsessed with light, as are these poems. Ultimately, the language is the lesson – it's how the poems see and they may affect your vision afterwards.
MAKING TRACKS
“From the very first page of this pamphlet, the reader encounters a voice which is entirely new. Within this pamphlet we find interrogations of masculinity, class, manual labour, what is and isn’t inherited through different generations and, most excitingly, see how these different preoccupations can be refracted and reflected through language and the line.
"As there should be when searching for new ways to contemplate tradition, a fresh type of experimentation with language, its spacial arrangement and its breath, is given to the reader, but always with a solid and concrete centre of people and place. A balance is struck between the heart, and the search for a language, scientific or natural, which might be able to fully represent it. Poems such as ‘You and Him: A Venn Diagram’ give us a visual language for exploring the pamphlet’s themes, and the pamphlet as a whole brings together the insertion of the urban and natural, the historical and the contemporary. An exciting new pamphlet from a poet doing important new things with the art.”
Andrew McMillan
“Making Tracks uses the texture of language and collaged fragments to celebrate those people who worked at the now defunct Longbridge car factory. Wareham Morris’s father is the beating heart at the centre of these poems, it’s whose voice we hear, entrusted to her tender keeping. There is the melancholy of a way of life gone here, but also the love of a day’s work and the satisfaction of a job well done.”
Helen Ivory
By design, Making Tracks is very dutiful, yet very fallible.
ISBN: 978-1-8380488-0-8
36 pages
R.R.P. £6.50
A sample poem from the pamphlet can be found here.
BUY MAKING TRACKS NOW using the paypal options below.
I, URSULA
“Ruth Stacey's new collection revels in the frank and often stark geographies of mental health and the playful and often political complexities of the muse. By creating a sweeping panorama of the blindingly-bright – and occasionally dangerous – contexts in which the muse inspires, cajoles, and deceives, I, Ursula animates the raw truths of emotional fragility and various forms of haunting through a staggering range of voices and ghostly imaginings. This inventive tour of connection and disconnection, observing and being observed, leaves the reader contemplating power dynamics in both relationships and the creation (and consumption) of art in chilling new ways.” Carolyn Jess-Cooke
“Stricken and painfully well-observed, Ruth Stacey’s new collection is replete with our magical excuses, boundless infatuations, loyalties and sanctuaries. Her work is particularly poignant on the porousness between our inner and outer lives. To enter the poems is to feel another consciousness pressing against your own through a boundary that seems, for a moment, not to exist.” Luke Kennard
I, Ursula is very haunting and very enigmatic.
ISBN: 978-1-9165052-7-8
72 pages
R.R.P. £10.99
ABOUT LEAVING
“Ian Glass writes compellingly and beautifully about real life, with all its knots and twists and unexpected turns. He has an instinctive feel for a poem’s texture, its grain and the planed faces as well at what lies beneath the veneer, and has the measure of how the ordinary transforms itself through finding shape in language. These poems are clear, tender, often moving – but do not assume that they lack heft in their gentleness of approach. As Glass himself notes in the closing poem, ‘all that will remain is light’ – these poems are not afraid to throw their beam of searchlight clarity and bring intense experiences of loss and recovery into focus.”
Jane Commane
“I found these remarkable poems intensely moving. They chart a process of huge loss and the road to recovery. Each individual poem is a small gem and the writing is so beautifully controlled that what I took from the collection in the end was a sense of hope. A really strong first collection. I loved it.”
Carole Bromley
About Leaving is very quiet and very precise.
ISBN: 978-1-9161096-1-2
36 pages
R.R.P. £6.50
A sample poem from About Leaving may be found here.
BUY About Leaving NOW using the paypal buttons (with delivery options) below.
PATIENCE
“Patience opens with a watch being dissected, laid bare on a table with the delicacy and patience of a dedicated craftsman. This collection is a reverence to time and where memories lie in places, objects, a lover’s touch, shipping forecast or in a mother counting for days. Nina Lewis is deft and sensitive in speaking of grief and loss, of love and desire, of caring for the elderly. Her words and phrases are weighted with a lightness of touch, capturing golden moments with a watchmaker’s accuracy. She is determined to create a living record, to have the last say in the presence of illness and death, leaving us with codes for the broken and an encouragement ‘to learn the art of waiting’.” Roy McFarlane
“The poems in Patience address problems of the human condition with a subtleness in technique, a gentleness in approach and a fresh outlook that avoids the cliché or overstatement such poetic themes can sometimes acquire; these poems are beautifully balanced, carefully crafted and the emotional content is all the more powerful because it is so well weighed. Some of these poems subtly convey the sense of a physical loss, others explore the trials of separation and the difficult adjustment in relationships. Grief is expressed but they also remind us of the power of human connection. Joy is held in our memories; in ‘Signs’, there is ‘the glow of orange even in dark beginnings’. These poems touch deeply and yet maintain a calm and measured face. Nina Lewis holds in her hands cogs of isolation, grief and loss moving along the wheels of love, of hope and of patience.” Julie Boden
Patience is very intimate and very fond.
ISBN: 978-1-9165052-9-2
32 pages
R.R.P. £6.50
A sample poem from Patience can be enjoyed here.
BUY Patience NOW using the paypal buttons (with delivery options) below.
CUCKOO
“Nichola Deane’s rich and sensuous poems may open with a plainspoken line or a recognisable surface, but they dwell only briefly in the familiar actual. Her syntax and image-making – both equally bold – bring the world to us in new and compelling guises. These are poems of darkness and delight – alive to sensation and feeling, and open to the urgency of beauty.” Katharine Towers
“Nichola Deane’s imagination has a long reach that pulls the unexpected into line after line. The language, clear yet idiosyncratic, and Deane’s deft touch give these poems ease, lightness and confidence.” Fiona Moore
Cuckoo is very sensory and very spacious.
ISBN: 978-1-9165052-4-7
68 pages
R.R.P. £10.99
A sample poem from Cuckoo can be enjoyed here.
BUY Cuckoo NOW using the paypal buttons (with delivery options) below.
THE AESTHETICS OF BREATH
“There’s an enviable gusto and assurance about this debut, the confident voicing of a distinctive sensibility that deserves our attention. Lauder has a keen ear for the musical and metrical possibilities of the well-wrought line which well serves his deftly rendered lyric style. Particularly impressive are the domestic sequences and longer poems which hold both interest and momentum throughout: an achievement of poetic coherence and craft that can only be accomplished by a poet more than ready to stake a claim for his place on the contemporary scene.” Martin Malone
“In his debut collection, Charles G. Lauder is not afraid to delve beneath the surface of white masculinites, unearthing violence and toughness but vulnerability and tenderness also. This means examining his own past in the US; what he has inherited, what he brings to his life in England, and what he finds there. Again and again, poems reveal that his family is his lodestone: ‘We are our elements. I would be lost/without them.’ The Aesthetics of Breath is a rich and varied collection which has love and social justice at its heart but does not turn aside from uncomfortable truths.” Pam Thompson
“The Aesthetics of Breath is NOT a breath of fresh air – it is a deep breathing-in of a gas called ‘history’, so that it hurts in the lungs. Be they personal myths or legends of entire nations’ violence, here the vapours of various histories sublimate into Lauder’s vivid solidifications – poems that render the distance and otherness of places and times as touchable and smelt. Some of these poems are ‘stellar gases congealing into orbits’, and they are celebratory confirmations of essential stories we humans need to tell our selves. But be warned: some of these poems cast ‘Hiroshima shadow[s]’ to exorcise our civilisation’s pale myths, its ghosts that too often comfortably haunt us, and our too easy and shallow breaths of memes. At times this book is like opening a grave to find the buried still alive ... and violently gasping out accounts of ‘the ruling passions of the woods’.” Mark Goodwin
The Aesthetics of Breath is very personal, yet very eternal.
ISBN: 978-1-9165052-1-6
68 pages
R.R.P. £10.99
A sample poem from The Aesthetics of Breath can be enjoyed here.
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N.B. Any international customs/duty charges are the buyer's responsibility.
JOHN DUST
“Louise Warren uses grief as an artist uses a sharpened pencil to delicately illustrate that what we leave, we inevitably return to whether through memories or myth. Nature and Death are dancing partners in this beautifully moving collection of poems which explore the idea of roots in family and place. An earthy reverence combined with the keenest observation brings Somerset alive from the ashes of the past. Here, we find apples, owls, folklore, riddles, hedgerows, all linked by the character of John Dust, who is so much more than mere mortality: “I will be your Silhouette, your Diplomat, your Compass” (‘Swifts’). Indeed, the footnote lets us know that these are all caravans. We are in sympathetic imaginative territory to Jacob Polley’s award-winning Jackself where the reader is engaged and often lulled, only to be taken by surprise. It could be argued this how the process of bereavement works – you think you have arrived at a certain point, only to be off-balanced, but the sense of re-discovery of something lost in these poems, is a joyous reclamation. Many of the poems have found recognition in poetry competitions, but this is more than a collection of standout poems; it is the whole that makes it remarkable. The pamphlet is also illustrated with fine drawings by the artist, John Duffin, which match Warren’s words with their deft yet delicate strokes and serve to highlight the wistful strength of this collection.” Lisa Kelly
“Riddles and rhythms weave the wonderful spell of John Dust – Louise Warren's original Somerset legend is a brilliant feat of imagination, and will leave you wanting more stories of this mythical man and his exquisitely off-kilter world.” Kate Garrett
Like a character from a contemporary Somerset folktale, John Dust is very atmospheric and very bewitching.
ISBN: 978-1-9165052-8-5
36 pages
R.R.P. £6.50
A John Dust sample poem by Louise Warren and illustration by John Duffin can be found here.
BUY John Dust NOW using the paypal buttons (with delivery options) below.
MINGLED SPACE
WINNER OF THE INAUGURAL V. PRESS PRIZE FOR POETRY
“These poems are controlled, beautiful and strange, always with a woman’s way of seeing; ‘a hungry vixen barked and waltzed/ with shadows’. Here is music and witchcraft and sometimes things moving backwards. Here is the marvellous musical relationship of one word to another, as Adkins’ gaze shines a light into dark corners, noticing the small, the left behind and the lovely.”
Deborah Alma
“These musical poems bristle with tenderness and beauty. Folklore and myth mysteriously evoked in the sumptuous sweep of language, domestic spaces inhabited by vivid characters leap out at you alive with a kind of gentle danger. Beneath this vivid tapestry of poems there is an echo of poignancy, threaded and pure, delivering a wonderful and haunting debut collection.”
Roz Goddard
“In Mingled Space, Margaret Adkins articulates the concerns of intimacy and how relationships are played out in set spaces, both interior and exterior, and the negotiations people make in those spaces. There is always a keen focus on the capacity to be creative in everyday places; Adkins gives attention to tender details others might miss.” V. Press Guest Editor Ruth Stacey
Mingled Space is very redolent and very melodic.
A sample poem can be found here.
32 pages
ISBN: 978-1-9998444-8-6
R.R.P. £6.50
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N.B. Any international customs/duty charges are the buyer's responsibility.
Gregory Leadbetter
“In Something so wild and new in this feeling, Sarah Doyle has taken Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals and developed excerpts into poems, finding felicities of phrasing, musicality, and ideas. Doyle’s skills in pacing, use of the line, and the possibilities of form help us appreciate anew Wordsworth’s habits of thought and close attention to the natural world. With Wordsworth and Doyle, the reader hears the birds singing in the mist.” Carrie Etter
Something so wild and new in this feeling is very composite and very metamorphic.
ISBN: 978-1-8380488-1-5
36 pages, perfect bound
R.R.P. £6.50
A sample poem from the pamphlet can be found here.
THIS TITLE IS CURRENTLY OUT OF STOCK.
BUT signed copies may be available from the author, using the Contact form at: https://www.sarahdoyle.co.uk/contact.php.
BLUE DOT AUBADE
Light travels as waves
and arrives as particles.
We travel as bodies
and arrive as light.
(From 'Cheating Light')”
Simon Barraclough
“Miranda Lynn Barnes' Blue Dot Aubade uses astrophysics and human experience as lenses for one another and thereby creates a renewed appreciation of both. At times playful, at times poignant, these intelligent poems illuminate our environment in the broadest sense: they give us a new view of our universe and our relationship to it. An engaging, original debut.”
V. Press Guest Editor Carrie Etter
Blue Dot Aubade is very cosmic, and very numinous.
ISBN: 978-1-9161096-7-4
36 pages
R.R.P. £6.50
A sample poem from the pamphlet can be found here.
BUY BLUE DOT AUBADE NOW using the paypal options below.
N.B. Any international customs/duty charges are the buyer's responsibility.
"As there should be when searching for new ways to contemplate tradition, a fresh type of experimentation with language, its spacial arrangement and its breath, is given to the reader, but always with a solid and concrete centre of people and place. A balance is struck between the heart, and the search for a language, scientific or natural, which might be able to fully represent it. Poems such as ‘You and Him: A Venn Diagram’ give us a visual language for exploring the pamphlet’s themes, and the pamphlet as a whole brings together the insertion of the urban and natural, the historical and the contemporary. An exciting new pamphlet from a poet doing important new things with the art.”
Andrew McMillan
“Making Tracks uses the texture of language and collaged fragments to celebrate those people who worked at the now defunct Longbridge car factory. Wareham Morris’s father is the beating heart at the centre of these poems, it’s whose voice we hear, entrusted to her tender keeping. There is the melancholy of a way of life gone here, but also the love of a day’s work and the satisfaction of a job well done.”
Helen Ivory
By design, Making Tracks is very dutiful, yet very fallible.
ISBN: 978-1-8380488-0-8
36 pages
R.R.P. £6.50
A sample poem from the pamphlet can be found here.
BUY MAKING TRACKS NOW using the paypal options below.
N.B. Any international customs/duty charges are the buyer's responsibility.
HIERARCHY OF NEEDS A Retelling
“This pamphlet is a reminder of the extraordinary paradoxes and dualities cultivated between the shaky coexistence of the natural world within the Anthropocene. We are drawn into other-worldly ecologies populated by ‘giddy’ ‘warriors’ ‘fenced in (for freedom)’ and ‘giants, balancing on toes’; yet also confronted with the harsh and tangible realities that confirm the mortal fragility of our environments, even those we create for ourselves through technology. There is adept writing skill evident in these poems: fresh anthropomorphic voices propagate amongst lyrical lines that converge with direct, demanding declaratives; violent vivid images give way to mellow half-rhymes and assonance; form is executed with precision and also reworked into affecting challenge and experiment. Here lies the adroitness of a pamphlet that moves like rhizomes – with purpose, poise and intelligence.
“Re-working nature’s contradictions and vulnerabilities, and ultimately its needs and desires with this resolute energy, offers a striking parallel: as women writers we might be seen, but not always heard. For me then, this pamphlet is more than just an excellent example of eco-poetry; it is a sophisticated and spirited example of eco-feminism. This is a Mother Earth who nurtures, protects, provides but is also ‘bounty hunter’ with unmistakable, fierce needs of her own: unapologetically pursued and satisfied. ‘Something beautiful’.”
Katy Wareham Morris
“We do not exist without nature, though more and more these days, we seem to be expected to. In this book, Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs theory is used as a narrative to consider the entwining of both nature’s and our own human needs. The book is split into two sections, each headed with its own recreations of the original five-layered hierarchical pyramid. They feel like a catechism – questions that we must keep on asking ourselves.
“The poems are each beautiful and spared from unnecessary clutter – there is such gentleness and consideration to be gained from the reading. Nature is personified and within the poems there is an aching, a longing to be freed from our human bonds – to be able to answer the age-old call of the seasons without our interference.
“Some of the poems writhe with wonderful touches of the fairy tale. Some express nature’s desire to work in harmony with us as it did in days long past. Some stand in stark contrast to our modern, technology reliant world. Some convey a sense of eternal searching, of pain and grief. Some are piquant with our own bodies, loves, families and deaths. Under the current circumstances and the strange times we are living through, this really does feel like a needed book. We could all do with being a bit more tree.”
Jane Burn
Hierarchy of Needs is very structured, very inquisitive.
ISBN: 978-1-9161096-8-1
R.R.P. £6.50
A sample poem from the pamphlet can be enjoyed here.
Buy Hierarchy of Needs now, using the paypal link below.
THIS LEXIA & OTHER LANGUAGES
“In these poems about the relationship between a mother and son, about dyslexia and language itself (‘the dangling hooks of “f”s and “t”s’), Helen Kay forges an idiom which is both tender and firm. Kay draws us into the experience of living in a society shaped around neurotypical expectations. The poems that result are angry and searching. But in feeling out the boundaries of language, they achieve a ‘seedling syntax’ which is alive and beautiful.” Will Harris
“These poems are quicksilver – deft, concise, witty and full of fresh ways of saying things. With empathy, and sometimes anger, they skilfully lead the reader into a world of words that confounds expectation but contains its own very specific delights.” Judy Brown
“We are told ‘all shapes are made to fit’, but sometimes the world has a preordained notion of ‘shape’ that does not include people with dyslexia. In Helen Kay’s latest publication, she reflects on a ‘mother-son bond’, as they navigate a childhood where dyslexic can mean being ‘labelled “slow’’’. This Lexia & Other Languages will awaken you to their world, to ‘hear it, taste it, feel it’ in all its devastating complexity.” Elisabeth Sennitt Clough
This Lexia & Other Languages is very genuine and very human.
A sample poem from This Lexia & Other Languages can be enjoyed here.
ISBN: 978-1-9161096-9-8
32 pages
R.R.P. £6.50
BUY This Lexia & Other Languages NOW using the paypal link below. [This Lexia & Other Languages is published in July 2020. Pre-orders are dispatched in the week of publication.]
YNYGORDNA
“Ynygordna is not a twee poetry collection for your kitschy coffee table display – this is a no-holds-barred fistfight with blood, guts and strap-ons. Williams is a true warrior poet and these poems will wound you. You’ve been warned.”
Jonathan Kinsman
“Bristling with vivid imagery, vibrant language and powerful emotions, these poems are not afraid to challenge conventional boundaries in poetry as in life. Ynygordna is a fresh and striking selection of poems, encompassing a bold and brave exploration of gender, sexuality and love within and against societal expectations.”
Sarah Leavesley, V. Press Prize for Poetry Judge
Ynygordna is very ardent and very versatile.
Winner of the V. Press Prize for Poetry 2019
A sample poem can be found here.
ISBN: 978-1-9161096-2-9
36 pages
R.R.P. £6.50
BUY Ynygordna NOW using the paypal link with posting options below.
A BLUEBOTTLE IN LATE OCTOBER
“John Wheway’s first full collection places its trust exactly where it should be: in the poetic present tense where every gnomic detail is magnified, every commonplace brought to its own species of transfiguration. At a time when the lyric is so much in need, he rejuvenates it in its most pellucid and most effortless form; the couplet is reshaped and crystallised, and comes to life. A Bluebottle in Late October is a memorable sequence of poems.” Tim Liardet
“This is a funny, sad, yet uplifting account of how we live and love. Poems by a formidable poet, pulling no punches, yet with a delightful lightness of touch.
Domestic bliss is here, with moments of tenderness and beauty, hopelessness too, and a deep urge to engage. How can we live together? Why do we need to? What compels us?
These poems made me laugh out loud, though their acuity is sobering. We’ll all glimpse ourselves in them. Marked by meticulous diction and vibrant imagery, this is poetry with an authentic voice.” Neil Rollinson
A Bluebottle in Late October is very particular and very human.
ISBN: 978-1-9161096-0-5
72 pages
R.R.P. £10.99
“This is a poignant but tough love story told against the backdrop of Brexit-era England. Eva is Romanian, a free spirit with a beautiful soul navigating the ignorance and hatred of her adopted country. Elaine Baker’s powerful but understated narrative is told from the perspective of Eva’s British lover, Sean, who is at once enchanted but also bewildered by her foreignness, her language, her precarious status in a country that isn’t hers – all the things that threaten to drive them apart. So what begins as a love story evolves to encompass a greater theme – these poems speak eloquently of the way we live now.”
Tamar Yoseloff
“Elaine Baker writes so beautifully about love: macrocosmic passion and domestic comfort are drawn with sharp, sensual tenderness. But Winter with Eva is also a timely sociopolitical exploration and a gripping page-turner of a pamphlet, one to read carefully yet compulsively in a single sitting.” Rachel Piercey
Winter with Eva is very human, very conscious.
A sample poem can be found here.
ISBN: 978-1-9161096-4-3
36 pages
R.R.P. £6.50
BUY Winter with Eva NOW using the paypal link with posting options below.
“This pamphlet is a reminder of the extraordinary paradoxes and dualities cultivated between the shaky coexistence of the natural world within the Anthropocene. We are drawn into other-worldly ecologies populated by ‘giddy’ ‘warriors’ ‘fenced in (for freedom)’ and ‘giants, balancing on toes’; yet also confronted with the harsh and tangible realities that confirm the mortal fragility of our environments, even those we create for ourselves through technology. There is adept writing skill evident in these poems: fresh anthropomorphic voices propagate amongst lyrical lines that converge with direct, demanding declaratives; violent vivid images give way to mellow half-rhymes and assonance; form is executed with precision and also reworked into affecting challenge and experiment. Here lies the adroitness of a pamphlet that moves like rhizomes – with purpose, poise and intelligence.“Re-working nature’s contradictions and vulnerabilities, and ultimately its needs and desires with this resolute energy, offers a striking parallel: as women writers we might be seen, but not always heard. For me then, this pamphlet is more than just an excellent example of eco-poetry; it is a sophisticated and spirited example of eco-feminism. This is a Mother Earth who nurtures, protects, provides but is also ‘bounty hunter’ with unmistakable, fierce needs of her own: unapologetically pursued and satisfied. ‘Something beautiful’.”
Katy Wareham Morris
“We do not exist without nature, though more and more these days, we seem to be expected to. In this book, Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs theory is used as a narrative to consider the entwining of both nature’s and our own human needs. The book is split into two sections, each headed with its own recreations of the original five-layered hierarchical pyramid. They feel like a catechism – questions that we must keep on asking ourselves.
“The poems are each beautiful and spared from unnecessary clutter – there is such gentleness and consideration to be gained from the reading. Nature is personified and within the poems there is an aching, a longing to be freed from our human bonds – to be able to answer the age-old call of the seasons without our interference.
“Some of the poems writhe with wonderful touches of the fairy tale. Some express nature’s desire to work in harmony with us as it did in days long past. Some stand in stark contrast to our modern, technology reliant world. Some convey a sense of eternal searching, of pain and grief. Some are piquant with our own bodies, loves, families and deaths. Under the current circumstances and the strange times we are living through, this really does feel like a needed book. We could all do with being a bit more tree.”
Jane Burn
Hierarchy of Needs is very structured, very inquisitive.
ISBN: 978-1-9161096-8-1
R.R.P. £6.50
A sample poem from the pamphlet can be enjoyed here.
Buy Hierarchy of Needs now, using the paypal link below.
N.B. Any international customs/duty charges are the buyer's responsibility.
THIS LEXIA & OTHER LANGUAGES
“These poems are quicksilver – deft, concise, witty and full of fresh ways of saying things. With empathy, and sometimes anger, they skilfully lead the reader into a world of words that confounds expectation but contains its own very specific delights.” Judy Brown
“We are told ‘all shapes are made to fit’, but sometimes the world has a preordained notion of ‘shape’ that does not include people with dyslexia. In Helen Kay’s latest publication, she reflects on a ‘mother-son bond’, as they navigate a childhood where dyslexic can mean being ‘labelled “slow’’’. This Lexia & Other Languages will awaken you to their world, to ‘hear it, taste it, feel it’ in all its devastating complexity.” Elisabeth Sennitt Clough
This Lexia & Other Languages is very genuine and very human.
A sample poem from This Lexia & Other Languages can be enjoyed here.
ISBN: 978-1-9161096-9-8
32 pages
R.R.P. £6.50
BUY This Lexia & Other Languages NOW using the paypal link below. [This Lexia & Other Languages is published in July 2020. Pre-orders are dispatched in the week of publication.]
N.B. Any international customs/duty charges are the buyer's responsibility.
YNYGORDNA
Jonathan Kinsman
“Bristling with vivid imagery, vibrant language and powerful emotions, these poems are not afraid to challenge conventional boundaries in poetry as in life. Ynygordna is a fresh and striking selection of poems, encompassing a bold and brave exploration of gender, sexuality and love within and against societal expectations.”
Sarah Leavesley, V. Press Prize for Poetry Judge
Ynygordna is very ardent and very versatile.
Winner of the V. Press Prize for Poetry 2019
A sample poem can be found here.
ISBN: 978-1-9161096-2-9
36 pages
R.R.P. £6.50
BUY Ynygordna NOW using the paypal link with posting options below.
N.B. Any international customs/duty charges are the buyer's responsibility.
A BLUEBOTTLE IN LATE OCTOBER
“This is a funny, sad, yet uplifting account of how we live and love. Poems by a formidable poet, pulling no punches, yet with a delightful lightness of touch.
Domestic bliss is here, with moments of tenderness and beauty, hopelessness too, and a deep urge to engage. How can we live together? Why do we need to? What compels us?
These poems made me laugh out loud, though their acuity is sobering. We’ll all glimpse ourselves in them. Marked by meticulous diction and vibrant imagery, this is poetry with an authentic voice.” Neil Rollinson
A Bluebottle in Late October is very particular and very human.
ISBN: 978-1-9161096-0-5
72 pages
R.R.P. £10.99
A sample poem from A Bluebottle in Late October can be enjoyed here.
BUY A Bluebottle in Late October NOW using the paypal buttons (with delivery options) below.
WINTER WITH EVA
Tamar Yoseloff
“Elaine Baker writes so beautifully about love: macrocosmic passion and domestic comfort are drawn with sharp, sensual tenderness. But Winter with Eva is also a timely sociopolitical exploration and a gripping page-turner of a pamphlet, one to read carefully yet compulsively in a single sitting.” Rachel Piercey
Winter with Eva is very human, very conscious.
A sample poem can be found here.
ISBN: 978-1-9161096-4-3
36 pages
R.R.P. £6.50
BUY Winter with Eva NOW using the paypal link with posting options below.
I, URSULA
“Stricken and painfully well-observed, Ruth Stacey’s new collection is replete with our magical excuses, boundless infatuations, loyalties and sanctuaries. Her work is particularly poignant on the porousness between our inner and outer lives. To enter the poems is to feel another consciousness pressing against your own through a boundary that seems, for a moment, not to exist.” Luke Kennard
I, Ursula is very haunting and very enigmatic.
ISBN: 978-1-9165052-7-8
72 pages
R.R.P. £10.99
Jane Commane
“I found these remarkable poems intensely moving. They chart a process of huge loss and the road to recovery. Each individual poem is a small gem and the writing is so beautifully controlled that what I took from the collection in the end was a sense of hope. A really strong first collection. I loved it.”
Carole Bromley
About Leaving is very quiet and very precise.
ISBN: 978-1-9161096-1-2
36 pages
R.R.P. £6.50
BUY About Leaving NOW using the paypal buttons (with delivery options) below.
N.B. Any international customs/duty charges are the buyer's responsibility.
PATIENCE
“The poems in Patience address problems of the human condition with a subtleness in technique, a gentleness in approach and a fresh outlook that avoids the cliché or overstatement such poetic themes can sometimes acquire; these poems are beautifully balanced, carefully crafted and the emotional content is all the more powerful because it is so well weighed. Some of these poems subtly convey the sense of a physical loss, others explore the trials of separation and the difficult adjustment in relationships. Grief is expressed but they also remind us of the power of human connection. Joy is held in our memories; in ‘Signs’, there is ‘the glow of orange even in dark beginnings’. These poems touch deeply and yet maintain a calm and measured face. Nina Lewis holds in her hands cogs of isolation, grief and loss moving along the wheels of love, of hope and of patience.” Julie Boden
Patience is very intimate and very fond.
32 pages
R.R.P. £6.50
BUY Patience NOW using the paypal buttons (with delivery options) below.
N.B. Any international customs/duty charges are the buyer's responsibility.
CUCKOO
“Nichola Deane’s imagination has a long reach that pulls the unexpected into line after line. The language, clear yet idiosyncratic, and Deane’s deft touch give these poems ease, lightness and confidence.” Fiona Moore
Cuckoo is very sensory and very spacious.
68 pages
R.R.P. £10.99
BUY Cuckoo NOW using the paypal buttons (with delivery options) below.
N.B. Any international customs/duty charges are the buyer's responsibility.
THE AESTHETICS OF BREATH
“In his debut collection, Charles G. Lauder is not afraid to delve beneath the surface of white masculinites, unearthing violence and toughness but vulnerability and tenderness also. This means examining his own past in the US; what he has inherited, what he brings to his life in England, and what he finds there. Again and again, poems reveal that his family is his lodestone: ‘We are our elements. I would be lost/without them.’ The Aesthetics of Breath is a rich and varied collection which has love and social justice at its heart but does not turn aside from uncomfortable truths.” Pam Thompson
“The Aesthetics of Breath is NOT a breath of fresh air – it is a deep breathing-in of a gas called ‘history’, so that it hurts in the lungs. Be they personal myths or legends of entire nations’ violence, here the vapours of various histories sublimate into Lauder’s vivid solidifications – poems that render the distance and otherness of places and times as touchable and smelt. Some of these poems are ‘stellar gases congealing into orbits’, and they are celebratory confirmations of essential stories we humans need to tell our selves. But be warned: some of these poems cast ‘Hiroshima shadow[s]’ to exorcise our civilisation’s pale myths, its ghosts that too often comfortably haunt us, and our too easy and shallow breaths of memes. At times this book is like opening a grave to find the buried still alive ... and violently gasping out accounts of ‘the ruling passions of the woods’.” Mark Goodwin
The Aesthetics of Breath is very personal, yet very eternal.
ISBN: 978-1-9165052-1-6
68 pages
R.R.P. £10.99
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JOHN DUST
“Riddles and rhythms weave the wonderful spell of John Dust – Louise Warren's original Somerset legend is a brilliant feat of imagination, and will leave you wanting more stories of this mythical man and his exquisitely off-kilter world.” Kate Garrett
Like a character from a contemporary Somerset folktale, John Dust is very atmospheric and very bewitching.
ISBN: 978-1-9165052-8-5
36 pages
R.R.P. £6.50
A John Dust sample poem by Louise Warren and illustration by John Duffin can be found here.
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MINGLED SPACE
“These poems are controlled, beautiful and strange, always with a woman’s way of seeing; ‘a hungry vixen barked and waltzed/ with shadows’. Here is music and witchcraft and sometimes things moving backwards. Here is the marvellous musical relationship of one word to another, as Adkins’ gaze shines a light into dark corners, noticing the small, the left behind and the lovely.”
Deborah Alma
“These musical poems bristle with tenderness and beauty. Folklore and myth mysteriously evoked in the sumptuous sweep of language, domestic spaces inhabited by vivid characters leap out at you alive with a kind of gentle danger. Beneath this vivid tapestry of poems there is an echo of poignancy, threaded and pure, delivering a wonderful and haunting debut collection.”
Roz Goddard
“In Mingled Space, Margaret Adkins articulates the concerns of intimacy and how relationships are played out in set spaces, both interior and exterior, and the negotiations people make in those spaces. There is always a keen focus on the capacity to be creative in everyday places; Adkins gives attention to tender details others might miss.” V. Press Guest Editor Ruth Stacey
Mingled Space is very redolent and very melodic.
A sample poem can be found here.
32 pages
ISBN: 978-1-9998444-8-6
R.R.P. £6.50
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HEROINES ON THE BLUE PENINSULA
“Heroines is about the everyday in the fantastical – bored damsels, witches living on cliff edges, and the Lady of Shallot scrolling through unsolicited ‘sword pics’ – but the fantastical is also in the everyday, and some of my favourites here are Rebecca’s incredibly tender and expansive poems on heartbreak, love and loss. With influences ranging from Apollinaire to Audre Lorde, Heroines is a great debut from this young poet, a gentle network of strong characters.” Alex MacDonald
Heroines: On the Blue Peninsula is very vibrant and very tender.
A sample poem from the pamphlet can be found here.
36 pages
ISBN: ISBN: 978-1-9165052-2-3
RRP £6.50
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THE PROTECTION OF GHOSTS
“In her first pamphlet, Natalie Linh Bolderston portrays the knowledge and care shared among generations of women in poems at once sensory and tender, vivid and emotive. The Protection of Ghosts is a most welcome debut.” V. Press Guest Editor Carrie Etter
The Protection of Ghosts is very haunting and very intricate.
A sample poem from The Protection of Ghosts can be found here.
36 pages
ISBN: 978-1-9165052-3-0
R.R.P. £6.50
NOW OUT OF STOCK
“In a time where high street shops are declining or under threat, Checkout is a timely ode, set in Middle England with a ‘cadenced heart,/ alert to daily rhythms, oiled/ by traffic, chips and friends.’ We can add dogs and peregrine to the series of vignettes of everyday people, caught with a keen ear, passionate not to lose the nuances of a century’s old tradition. These voices are guided by a young narrator, who serves and observes; someone who is on her own odyssey that ventures around the world without moving out of the confines of the cash desk. As people make their daily pilgrimage to this local shop, there are elements of Canterbury Tales and Bukowski flowing through this brave collection.” Roy Mcfarlane
As confident as sugar lumps in Yorkshire Tea, Checkout is very immersive, very real.
A sample poem from the pamphlet can be found here.
36 pages
ISBN: 978-1-9165052-0-9
RRP £6.50
MAKING WAVES
LIKE LOVE
“The poems in Like love are uncluttered. They are simple, profound, and immensely touching. There is great empathy at work here, an empathy without which no real poems can exist. Read-Brown deserves a far wider readership than hitherto, and one hopes with this collection she will find it.” Brian Patten
“These approachable poems are full of humour and life experience. Like love faces up to ageing, loss and injustice with an eye for contradiction and detail. Poems about clearing out a child’s bedroom after they have left home, about angels, first love and sunbathing topless exude unquenchable enthusiasm for living! A collection to relish from a seasoned and generous poet.” Chloe Garner, Artistic Director, Ledbury Poetry Festival
“The most prolific slam winner the UK has ever had; a joy of a performer with a huge range of material that varies in style and content.” Steve Larkin
“These poems remind me of the tingles. I’m so happy to feel them. This collection makes me want to run outside, kiss, fall in leaves and then write.” Hollie McNish
“The most prolific slam winner the UK has ever had; a joy of a performer with a huge range of material that varies in style and content.” Steve Larkin
“These poems remind me of the tingles. I’m so happy to feel them. This collection makes me want to run outside, kiss, fall in leaves and then write.” Hollie McNish
Like love is very open and very unpredictable.
ISBN: 978-1-9998444-3-1
76 pages
R.R.P. £10.99
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A Z-HEARTED GUIDE TO HEARTACHE
“The poems in A Z-hearted Guide to Heartache will make you re-think your relationship with pizza, garlic bread and your mobile phone. These sharp, sad and wry observations – on the reality of living with mental illness and disability, the heartbreak of the everyday, and perseverance despite everything – capture what it is to be twenty-something, in love, and healing through food. This is an exciting debut pamphlet from a new and honest voice.” Jenna Clake“In her debut pamphlet, Charley Barnes examines the reality of heartbreak and its different forms, highlighting how aspects of modern society can play – often brutally – on our insecurities: the wish to be prettier, more popular, more lovable. These poems deftly explore the bitter, lasting sting of loss and how it shapes us. Yet there is also the tenderness of possibility at play – a sweetness to offset the sharpness encountered by a young woman trying to navigate her way; a knowing, self-deprecating humour that shines through, even in dark experiences. There is a wisdom of the importance of nurturing here, accompanied by the will that, whatever happens, ‘you have to keep going, don’t you?’ ('The lie my mum told me').” Claire Walker
A Z-hearted Guide to Heartache is very quirky yet very full-blooded.
36pages, R.R.P. £6.50
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AGAINST THE PULL OF TIME
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“Against the Pull of Time is a spiritual and physical journey. On the island of Iona Jenna Plewes travels far into herself to come to terms with loss, ageing and mortality. The outer landscape is wonderfully realized. Sea, shore, shells, birds and buildings play a central role in her inner exploration. The immediacy of the pared writing in this sequence, its telling details and the sharing of a deeply-felt experience, draw the reader into Plewes’ journey.”
Myra Schneider
“In tender, beautiful and unsentimental language Jenna Plewes takes us on a journey, walking barefoot on wet sand, sitting in a ruined nunnery, musing on the shoreline 'handcuffed to the sea'. it is a long time since I have read a collection that moved me so. One line somehow says it all: 'so many things are precious in the leaving and the letting go'. This is a collection I want to read over and over – also rare these days.” Roselle Angwin
Against the Pull of Time is very deep-rooted and seamlessly woven.
R.R.P. £6.50
A sample poem from the pamphlet may be enjoyed here.
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UNABLE MOTHER
“This work challenges our abstract and cosy notions of motherhood with
a brutal and vulnerable delve into the psyche. Calcutt grapples, sometimes
violently, sometimes with aching tenderness, each hard-won line ‘like squeezing
/ flesh and fruit from the bone, / this terrible love’. Yet these poems reach
even further, into the rent world, and the remarkable kinds of beauty to which
poetry alone can allude. is an intimate book, the kind that comes in close to
your ear to whisper dark secrets and unavoidable truths. These poems are spare,
careful, insistent--and devastatingly good.” Robert Peake
“Helen Calcutt’s poems are full of surprising and intricate moments -
they unfold like origami, deftly packing and unpacking themselves into new
forms and presenting the reader with confidences, secrets and insight, the
tender words for the things that are hard to say. In their explorations of
motherhood, loss and discovery, Calcutt’s poetry is steeled with precise
language, always finding clarity forged in the heart of experience. These
are intimate poems which are felt in the body, and written with a keen
physicality – ‘love is meant to live on in the body’ writes Calcutt,
‘My flesh making heaven of it.’ In their makings and re-makings, each poem here
reveals this to be a remarkable and potent debut.” Jane Commane
Unable
Mother is very
revelatory and very achingly poised.
60 pages
R.R.P. £9.99
A sample poem from the collection can be enjoyed here.
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HOW TO PARALLEL PARK
"Stark, poised, precisely observed, James Davey’s
poetry well demonstrates how much more emotion is conveyed the greater the
restraint. The poems also exhibit an impressive musicality, from the lilting to
the percussive. Each poem rewards rereading." Carrie Etter
"These poems by James Davey are vivid, articulate
and entertaining. They evoke the peculiar intensity of childhood fears, the
angst of adolescence, the tremors of first loves. Davey has a gift for
clear-eyed dramatic presentation, as well as an often-humorous take on human
condition and a true empathy for the various characters he comes across, be
they ‘pyroman’ a down-and-out who accumulates trash to burn, the terrified
child taken on a hunting trip, or the lover discovering the ‘colours’ of a
girlfriend. This is a promising and well-wrought debut." Amy Wack
"Davey’s work is confident, crafted, elegant in
its simplicity. The poems are full of moments of recognition for the reader,
subtle emotive power balancing understated humour. I trust him to show me
something worth seeing with no fluff around the substance." Anna Freeman
Set in England and Italy, the poems of How to Parallel Park are very emotive,
very molto a pelle.
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SOMEWHERE BETWEEN ROSE AND BLACK
“Claire Walker’s quiet, almost still, narrative
through these poems could reflect their rural setting or the sadness within the
protagonist, yet that quietness is deceptive. There are passions here amid the juxtaposition
of man and stag. These poems will have you checking your fingernails for
soil, seeing antlers in your peripheral vision.” Brett Evans
Somewhere
Between Rose and Black is very earthy and very enigmatic.
Shortlisted in Saboteur Awards 2018 Best Poetry Pamphlet category!!!
Shortlisted in Saboteur Awards 2018 Best Poetry Pamphlet category!!!
A sample poem from the pamphlet may be enjoyed here.
R.R.P. £6.50
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BLINK
“Jacqui Rowe’s Blink shares extraordinary visions
of personhood and place, giving voice to the many voiceless figures
in her finely tuned ekphrasis and emotive allegorical poems inspired by
the likes of Apollinaire, Verlaine, and Lorca. Combined with plaintive
elegies for both loved ones and her heartland, this is
syntactically refreshing poetry that serves to move and inspire.” Robert Harper
“Sometimes a poetry collection won’t let you
put it down. This is one such collection. In Blink, Jacqui Rowe has
transcended the mere act of description, lifting the poems from the page with a
lyrical palette knife, painting each scene with an intelligent, witty and
moving style. This is how to write poetry. I will return to these poems again
and again.” Wendy Pratt
Blink is very very vibrant and mercurial.
64 pages
R.R.P. £9.99
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The poetry in Romalyn Ante's Rice & Rain is very rich and very distinct.“Romalyn Ante's poems are exquisitely detailed and a real feast for the senses. She has an instinctive talent for crafting precise and finely-tuned poetry that captures the exact sensations – potent, close to home and as incisive and accurate as a scalpel's first cut. Whether it is the sun's rays that ‘infiltrated your bones, filling them with gold’, or the heart which breaks open like a pomegranate, ‘the seeds, / rusty-red like rivets, / contour a constellation’, life's preciousness is measured here carefully in its proximity to death. These poems are gracefully poised and balanced perfectly, alive with their own irresistible songs of love and longing.” Jane Commane
“Rice & Rain is an impressive first collection of poems that take us from the Philippines to Cannock Chase. The poems are confidently written – Romalyn Ante’s surprising and original imagery shows us how to fatten a boy with the boiled water from rice-rinsing; a handbag mirror made from solidified gin; cornflake sunsets.
“Her poems explore sickness and separation – the longing for the sour-sweet taste of home – but there is also emphasis on nurturing and nourishment. With many references to food from ‘sheen pieces of bullet tuna wrapped in banana leaves’ to ‘luggage stuffed with sun-dried squid’ it is a book you feel you could almost eat.” Jane Seabourne
WINNER of Saboteur Awards 2018 Best Poetry Pamphlet category!!!
R.R.P. £6.50
CURRENTLY OUT OF STOCK
THE NAGASAKI ELDER
“Antony Owen is the bravest British poet of
his generation. He goes to places poetry doesn't visit and lingering there,
crafts acts of testimony and tribute. He does what art is supposed to; raising
us the highest so that we can see the deepest. The Nagasaki Elder in its
stunning evocation of human suffering is simply his best work yet.” Joe Horgan
“The Nagasaki Elder is a beautiful and harrowing
account of a journey through the bombed cities of Japan. Unlike most poets who hold forth about
atrocities, Antony Owen has been there.
He has spoken in depth to the Hibakusha and transformed their voices
into some extraordinary poems. And we
must listen, if we don't want our world to end as theirs did.” Merryn Williams
The Nagasaki
Elder is very very
hard-hitting yet very tender.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE TED HUGHES AWARD FOR NEW WORK IN POETRY 2017!!!
SHORTLISTED FOR THE TED HUGHES AWARD FOR NEW WORK IN POETRY 2017!!!
R.R.P. £9.99
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TELL MISTAKES I LOVE THEM
“What Stephen
Daniels does here is to lead us with wit and wisecrack absurdities over to the
other side of the looking-glass and then leave us there staring at our scary
selves, unable to put back together the uneven pieces of our daily eruptions
and catastrophes. This is humanity caught botching it through life, but
Stephen’s choice is to float over the nausea and master the downwards flying
that is our constant falling.” Cristina
Navazo-Eguía Newton
“Stephen
Daniels’ poems deal with the difficulty of growing in an uncomfortable world.
These poems are structured to be as uncomfortable as the stories they reveal,
they are awkward and honest, show the true damage of childhood shame rising
into adulthood – they take unexpected turns: human trauma in a real twisted,
surreal reality. A striking first pamphlet!” Hilda Sheehan
“Stephen Daniels
takes the ordinary, the everyday and makes it strange and sinister – revealing
how ordinary life is, in fact, rooted in strangeness. Daniels takes us on a
journey through childhood and modern family life. But these are not happy or
sentimental poems; they don’t shy away from the more difficult aspects of
domestic life – often exploring ideas of miscommunication, regret and how
families are casually cruel to one another. Daniels is a master recreating the
implied sense of threat that often lurks behind the everyday. The language of
the poems is deceptively light and playful, which make them a joy to read: “we
stole a real imaginary lorry/that smelled of circus” (Grounded), but the real
power of these poems is in the way he uses surreal and sometimes disjointed
language in the spinning of his tales. The effect is not unlike finding
yourself in a dream where everything is slightly off kilter. This wrong-footing
made me want to revisit the poems again and again – and on each reading I
discovered something new and exciting. Daniels is definitely a poet worth
watching.” Julia Webb
Tell Mistakes I
Love Them exposes social nerves and pokes at the wounds with
poems that are very vulnerable and very poignant.
A sample poem from the collection may be enjoyed here.
R.R.P. £6.50
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SCARE STORIES
“David Clarke conjures up post-apocalyptic visions that are uncomfortably close to our present. All of humanity is played out here, from gamers to generals, the whole bitingly observed. Scare Stories is a frightening mirror, but it’s also compelling and hypnotic, I dare you to look away.” Claire Trévien
Scare Stories is a sequence of poems that is very unusual and very unsettling.
LONGLISTED for Best Poetry Pamphlet in Saboteur Awards 2017.
David Clarke's sequence-length pamphlet Scare Stories is published by V. Press in March 2017. Clarke's pamphlet, Gaud (Flarestack), won the Michael Marks Award in 2013. His first full collection of poetry, Arc, was published by Nine Arches Press in 2016 and was longlisted for the Polari First Book Prize.
A sample from the pamphlet can be found here.
Buy Scare Stories now using the paypal link below. BOLT DOWN THIS EARTH
Bolt Down This Earth is Gram Joel Davies' first collection, published by V. Press in March 2017.
“Linguistically bold and alive to the thisness of
its moments, Bolt Down This Earth is
a debut collection of lyric energy and inventiveness, full-throated and
confident in its own power to convince. An arrival to be celebrated.” Martin Malone
“Gram Joel Davies’s first collection slips deftly
between a West Country past and the present. The poems are full of taut
observation and meticulous attention to detail. And though there is an urban
feel to many of them, the collection is brimful of nature. The poems are often
peopled with the troubled or misunderstood, and the worlds they move in are
shadowy and uncomfortable versions of those we know – almost dystopian at
times. There is often a sense of the narrator or central character being the
outsider (a boy almost drowning, two teenagers exploring a derelict hospital, a
father too fond of his drink) and there is a disquieting and almost violent
sensuality too. The complexity of the worlds these people move in is echoed by
the complexity of the way Davies puts words together – sometimes joining two
words together to create new words; weaving something rich and new that casts
its melancholy spell over the reader, but never excludes them. In these poems
the uncomfortable tinnitus of the past encroaches on the very real tinnitus of
the present. This is compounded in the powerful Tinnitus sequence that is
dotted throughout the collection − like a central column that
the other poems hang on. The cumulative effect of the layering of numerous and
various language is both troubling and stunning. These are poems whose subtle
inventiveness works its way into your subconsciousness, poems that you will
want to revisit time and again.” Julia
Webb
Bolt Down This Earth is very vital and very charged.
Bolt Down This Earth is very vital and very charged.
56 pages
FRAGILE HOUSES
Fragile Houses is Nina Lewis' first pamphlet, published by V. Press in autumn 2016.
Home is more than
a brick building, family trees or ancestral bones. In Fragile Houses, Nina Lewis explores the people, places and
memories carried through life. Vibrant imagery and precise insight reveal
strength in the most tender places. The pamphlet includes a photographic
sequence from S.A. Leavesley that is directly inspired by the poems’ vivid mix
of fragility and sharpness. Fragile
Houses is very authentic and very fervent.
“In this engaging
debut pamphlet, Nina Lewis deftly examines the human condition through the lens
of family relationships. There is more than memoir here; issues of connection
and disconnection, presence and absence, are gently explored while always acknowledging
‘These years can’t be backtracked or re-spent’ (from ‘Fusion’).” Angela
France
“Nina Lewis’ debut
pamphlet from V. Press explores memory and family. These are exact,
concisely-conceived poems which find their power in restraint and understatement
– ‘In our family, minds go missing’. She writes observantly about memory, and
its trickeries, caught ‘somewhere in the space/ between those two lost letters,
/ as vivid as gold-dust,/ falling to the earth.’ Throughout the pamphlet Lewis
maintains a voice which is sometimes sad, but truthful and grown wise, with
some really memorable images which successfully convey the strong emotions she
deals in – ‘He stayed away. Radio silence. / An opaque circle was drawn around
our house/ filled with white noise.’” Jean Atkin
R.R.P. £6.50
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A CAREER IN ACCOMPANIMENT
A Career in Accompaniment is a pamphlet of love, loss and surprising lightness. Based on Alex Reed’s personal experiences, these poems witness what it is like to care for a lover with severe illness and to live with a future where there is no “escape without damage”. Spare and accessible language of the everyday reinforces the emotional power and resonance of “all the falling” but also recalls moments of great tenderness, when “the world lit in her eye”. This poetry of “fragile places” is very intimate yet very universal.
“Reading these poems, you are struck by their striving for truthfulness – as if that might be the key to making sense of a seemingly senseless situation, a life no one could prepare for. And yes, truthfulness seems to work – opening into absolute presence, careful observation of detail and moment-by-moment tenderness and courage. Here you are listening to a generous, unassuming voice, drawing our human vulnerability and capacity for endurance closely together, with space to breathe and gather what threatens to scatter. Restraint and discretion characterise the poems as well as openness – a hard-won but lightly-worn congruence. ‘A Career in Accompaniment’ reminds us what poetry makes possible.” Linda France
R.R.P. £5.50
Currently out of stock.
A sample poem from the pamphlet can be found here.
THE OLD MAN IN THE HOUSE OF BONE
Dramatic language and absorbing images blend together seamlessly into this very dark and very surreal account of ageing and loss.
"'Who’s there? Who is it? Who is it?
Who’s there? The house of bone puts its finger to its lips.
Says nothing. It’s keeping its secret to itself.’
David Calcutt’s The Old Man in the House of Bone is an invitation inside a shadowy and mysterious dwelling, one that is also full of curious magic and charismatic strangeness. Questions and secrets abound – does the occupier occupy the house, or does the house occupy its resident? Readers will find themselves irresistibly drawn in, and pondering these enigmas, too. This precise and striking series of poems is both consequential and sequential; each one building on the previous and the following like sediment, creating a brooding and disquieting atmosphere. Calcutt’s poetry is alert and surefooted – written with a humane touch, and always compelling.” Jane Commane
“The Old Man in the House of Bone is a fable, a fairytale, is a humane and tender account of an old man’s mental and physical decline into the final silence. David Calcutt’s imagery grows from the page and fixes itself inside the skull. He is a master magician, a seeker of darkness.” Helen Ivory
R.R.P. £5.50
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A sample poem and illustration from the pamphlet can be enjoyed here.
BOOK OF BONES
Book of Bones is Kathy Gee's debut poetry collection, published April 2016.“Every contact leaves a trace,” said Edmund Locard. Book of Bones examines who we are, our impact and what we leave behind. Rich with imagery, thoughtfulness and levity, Kathy Gee’s poetry is vibrant with people, places and lives connecting across time. From skeletons, scandal and hidden narratives to fathers, friendship and photographs, these are poems of identity, warmth and melancholy.
Book of Bones is very observant, very vivid.
“Kathy Gee's debut is a cabinet of
curiosities, exploring the personal and monumental past. Small artefacts and
once-silenced voices are brought to life. Her observing eye takes in figures
from King Henry to Goering and all points in between, seeking historical
answers to very modern concerns." Jo
Bell
“In this entertaining first
collection Kathy Gee curates a rich display of historical artefacts, landscapes
and personalities that bring the past up close – and personal. The poems,
deftly fashioned and imbued with a feisty tenderness, leave traces of wonder,
joy, compassion and a wry humour all of which linger pleasurably in the mind.” Stephen Boyce
RRP £9.99
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THE GIRL WHO GREW INTO A CROCODILE
Buy Book of Bones now:
THE GIRL WHO GREW INTO A CROCODILE
The Girl Who Grew Into a Crocodile is Claire Walker's first pamphlet, published by V. Press in October 2015.
Daughter, wife and mother; femme fatale, object of study and maker of myths…The Girl Who Grew Into a Crocodile explores what being a real woman has been, is, and could be in today’s society of celebrity, stereotypes and media spin. Beneath the poems’ sometimes quiet surfaces, a strong voice, pared word choices, precise images and thought-provoking metaphor make this a powerful pamphlet. The Girl Who Grew Into a Crocodile is very vivid and very resonant.
"Claire Walker's debut pamphlet The Girl Who Grew Into a Crocodile is a riveting meditation on motherhood and transformation that crackles with drama. There are moments of lyrical delicacy and oceanic longings, and Walker's perceptual acuity pitches the reader into a world where nothing is taken at face value – a girl might be a crocodile, a mermaid could become captor, and seeds are studied for their mnemonic potential. This is a work to be savoured." Carolyn Jess Cooke
"A confident and impressive debut by Claire Walker. The alluring qualities in this collection are the sense of mystique in many of her poems which at first glance appear elucidating. The stylistic fusion of narrative and illustrative poetry see-saws from the adult experience of life to a fabling account of the innocence and fragility of childhood and adolescence. Claire Walker is a writer who clearly cares about her craft and some of the dreamlike qualities of this collection are reminiscent of Joy Davidman’s work." Antony Owen
"A confident and impressive debut by Claire Walker. The alluring qualities in this collection are the sense of mystique in many of her poems which at first glance appear elucidating. The stylistic fusion of narrative and illustrative poetry see-saws from the adult experience of life to a fabling account of the innocence and fragility of childhood and adolescence. Claire Walker is a writer who clearly cares about her craft and some of the dreamlike qualities of this collection are reminiscent of Joy Davidman’s work." Antony Owen
"These are poems of growth, fertility and flow – rivers, plants, women. Claire Walker skilfully combines nature, myth and the everyday, and when reading her work, it’s difficult to imagine a world where things are ever any other way. The Girl Who Grew Into a Crocodile is a stunning, quietly powerful debut pamphlet, full of wistful smiles and blissful tears." Kate Garrett
The Girl Who Grew Into a Crocodile was chosen for the Poetry Book Society Spring Bulletin 2016 ‘Other New Pamphlets’.
RRP £4.99
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A sample poem from the pamphlet can be read here.
ART BRUT
art brut is David O'Hanlon's first pamphlet, published by V. Press summer 2015.
Set against a background of literary and artistic allusions, art brut is a precise and moving sequence on childhood and teenage institutionalisation. Tackling the nature of trying to reshape memories and carve out something positive, this pamphlet is a concentrated crafting of raw experiences into a poetry that is alive with characters and thought-provoking truths. Stripping back the sometimes over-romanticised notions of institution life, David O’Hanlon creates his own sharp and haunting art that is very real and very gripping.
"The poems in David O’Hanlon’s first collection are ‘epiphanies of sun’ which shine a light on the poet’s experiences of psychiatric illness; to read them is to experience serial insights into a much overlooked and frequently taboo aspect of the human condition. Through poetry which is both lucid and engaging, O’Hanlon manages to transform his intensely personal experiences into something more universal: poems which can resonate with everyone (and not just those who have regular appointments with a psychiatrist). Bright lights cast dark shadows, and there are references to padded cells, catatonic states, self-harm, suicide attempts, OCD, et al, yet the deftness with which they are revealed, and the resilience, honesty and humour of this highly promising young poet’s writing, will leave you feeling uplifted. David O’Hanlon shows us that while the past can have a powerful hold over us, beauty, truth and poetry can emerge from the depths of anguish and despair. An astonishing debut." Fergus McGonigal
"If David O'Hanlon had written this sentence, you'd have shed a tear by now." Jenni Pascoe, JibbaJabba
RANSOM NOTES
Ransom Notes is Jacqui Rowe's fourth published pamphlet, launched by V. Press in spring 2015.
This pamphlet is a sequence of little poetry fictions that
are simultaneously very serendipitous and very idiosyncratic. Each poem is an
abstraction from the lives of characters conceived by chance and who emerge
through the writing without ever fully
explaining themselves.
Originating from a process of cutting up and randomness, fragments of
writing, sketches, poem drafts and found texts were initially combined to form
documents resembling a kidnapper’s ransom notes. These were then crafted and
shaped. It may be that the same people recur throughout the poems, heard
variously in different voices from diverse points of view, or that they are
several characters, interacting in and populating the same world.
“Ransom Notes
is a beguiling construct of abducted and redeemed words, still trailing the
resonances of unknown former contexts. From them, Jacqui Rowe has teased and
finessed new narratives, characterized by dissonant echoes, tonal shifts,
sudden depths and elliptical insights.” Alasdair Paterson
“Beautifully
crafted poems which reveal themselves slowly with each read. This is a
pioneering work by a poet on top of her game.” Antony Owen
A sample poem from the pamphlet can be viewed here.
In a detailed review of Ransom Notes on Sabotage Reviews, Alice Tarbuck comments on how “Rowe enjoys playing with meaning, but is also aware of the potency of the non-meaningful in found poetry” and concludes: “the tantalizing lack of punctuation makes this poetry text flexible, as if what is found there might alter according to the reader’s whim. A fascinating pamphlet.”
The full review may be found here.
RRP: £4.99A sample poem from the pamphlet can be viewed here.
In a detailed review of Ransom Notes on Sabotage Reviews, Alice Tarbuck comments on how “Rowe enjoys playing with meaning, but is also aware of the potency of the non-meaningful in found poetry” and concludes: “the tantalizing lack of punctuation makes this poetry text flexible, as if what is found there might alter according to the reader’s whim. A fascinating pamphlet.”
The full review may be found here.
THE VAGINELLAS
V.Press's first title – published in June 2013 for The Vaginellas' live performance at Ledbury Poetry Festival in July 2013.
Stark, ballsy and
all-embracing, the poems in The Vaginellas are in turns very funny, very
feminist and very empowering.
The strong distinct voices
of these poets – Catherine Crosswell,
Jenny Hope, Sarah James and Ruth Stacey
– explore the highs and lows of both the male and female body. No intimate
parts escape untouched in this delightful concoction of fun, feminism, sauce
and seriousness.
Their tight and engaging writing sets mythology,
metaphor and belly laughs alongside thought-provoking explorations of modern
society, historical female creativity and contemporary cultural concerns.
That this should be V. Press’s first
title, also seems particularly apt, given Tony Harrison’s eponymous poem V.
None of the language in The Vaginellas
is gratuitous, every word serves its purpose – to captivate readers, be it in a
lyrical, erotic, fun way or a reclaiming of historical terms that have been
manhandled for years.
Sample poems from the book can be viewed here: The Vaginellas.
RRP: £5 / $8 / €6
Copies are now only available via Amazon.
Sample poems from the book can be viewed here: The Vaginellas.
RRP: £5 / $8 / €6
Copies are now only available via Amazon.
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