POETRY 35 years of Books | Pamphlets | eBooks ional


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Winner of the


Book & Pamphlet Competition


When I Think of My Body as a Horse


Wendy Pratt 9 781912 196401 International


Winner of the International Book & Pamphlet Competition judged by Imtiaz Dharker & Ian McMillan


Visceral experiences acutely observed. T ese poems hiss with animal motility.


In the “wild-world” of Wendy Pratt’s poetry, the body can become a horse or a hare, a fl ock of pigeons or a mer- maid. T ese poems are transformative in every sense of the word - exploring how language contains and changes grief and how the natural world can help us survive terrible loss. T ey are both heart-breaking and life-affi rm- ing, threaded through with love, concerned with survival and held together by powerful and startling im- agery. Any reader cannot help but be transformed by these poems once they encounter them.


Zondervan Gift Books, 29th April, hb, £12.99, 9780310456599 Popular Instagram poet and artist inspires us to reframe the stories we tell ourselves so we can see through our own brokenness to the beauty inside.


– Michael Stewart SERIES – Kim Moore


An astonishing achievement. In a sequence of powerful, moving and quite remarkable poems she suceeds in expressing an unimaginable grief with rare cohesion and beauty. Amazing.


– Carole Bromley


Te Emma Press Poetry Pamphlets Rehema Njambi 24: This House Te Emma Press, 27th May, pamphlet, eb, £6.50, 9781912915729 Njambi’s début pamphlet explores her identity through the lens of faith, family, tradition, black womanhood and femininity along with the weight of expectation and tradition.


£9.95 ISBN 9781912196401


the beautiful and the strange in poignant contrast with the blood and sweat of the factory floor.


David Onamade Sorrow, Tears and Blood Arkbound, 12th March, pb, eb, £5.99, 9781912092789 Homelessness in the UK in 2021. For a black man on the streets, what is it like? This collection of poetry is both insightful and shocking.


Stanley and Me for Stanley Moss


lephone rummages through the aning faculties of old age. T e


vacious celebration of life-spans comedy of growing old.


ichael Schmidt’s boyish wonder ade his bemused questioning folk all the merrier and more ignant.


elf-questioning, with Schmidt Moss on the phone at night but mself as a boy) while addressing till a boy at heart). T ey are puzzling over what can only be ſt equivocal, in the poem itself.


nd ourselves in the stimulating versationalist par excellence, t feel addressed to us while n what is clearly not.’


l Astley


d in modernist tradition (Yeats new … a passionate discourse


rthy and numinous.’ Ashbery


d: Michael Schmidt


Talking to Stanley on the Telephone


michael schmidt


Stanley’s got the big poems up his sleeve: Love and life and death, and all those landscapes, T e rivers of the world and every mountain


He’s sat at the foot of, or climbed to the top of, Meditating sage-like, tree-like, stone-like, Or making love to yet another dazzling dryad.


I’m old. T ough he’s a good deal older, Accelerating towards exit velocity, He keeps the steering stick fi rmly in his hand


Defying, an inch below the exosphere, God’s most offi cious angels: they grab at him, He hurtles by, they just can’t get a handle.


Stanley’s got the big poems, and he leaves to me, Exhausted, wasted, rueful, out of breath Even on the stairs to the loſt , not much –


T ings he overlooked. How little Can I make my poem out of? T at scrap, this Almost nothing? On the plate: where his


Pork chop steamed, gnawed bone now, a gravy Ideogram and – that at least’s entirely mine – A bright blob of Colman’s ablaze at the lip.


Cover Painting:Western Electric Rotary


Phone & Blue Table by Christopher Stott (https://christopher-stott.tumblr.com/)


Mara Nkere Cherry Cola Eyewear Publishing, 1st March, pb, £10.99, 9781913606831 Centres around a girl and a boy’s unfiltered relationship, giving a voice to both narratives and their individual internal struggles. The journey of falling in love and it’s aftermath.


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wards


Carlow College, ground


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ividual because, ael


nd with e can


Like a Tree Cut Back Michael McCarthy


ee Cut ife is y and rs the assing fl ows,


ing. £9.95 arey www.poetrybusiness.co.uk/ 66 The Bookseller Buyer’s Guide Fiction


day and time are all the same to me because I’m only four.


I


t’s eleven o’clock on Saturday morn- ing. But I don’t know this. T e


Georgie Chambers is ploughing the


big fi eld at the cross. T ere is sudden commotion. My mother is shouting and she’s running out of the house. Something is aſt er happening above on the road. My brother Ando is running aſt er my mother. I’m running aſt er my sister Nora. She’s heading for the house of our neighbours Danny and Mrs Mahony. I can’t keep up with her. Suddenly she’s not there.


I’m standing at the bend on the


road at the top of the hill, and I can’t see where she has gone. What I can see is the way the grass covers the ditch. And the stones coming through the grass. I can see each individual stone clearly. I can see each bit of grass. I wait a long time. T ere is no sign of my sister. Something has happened, but it must have happened somewhere else.


Joyce Carol Oates American Melancholy Ecco Press, 1st April, hb, £20, 9780063035263 New collection of poetry from an American literary legend after nearly 25 years.


ISBN 9781912196432


Gboyega Odubanjo Aunty Uncle Poems New Poets List, 1st June, pamphlet, eb, £5, 9781912196562 Winner of the 2020 New Poets Prize. “Deep, funny, thought-provoking— a powerful evocation of culture and family with assured phrasing and imagery, and confident formal innovation”—Luke Kennard.


9 781912 196432


Ilse Pedler Auscultation Seren, 14th June, pb, £9.99, 9781781726266 Pedler’s striking début poetry collection is Auscultation (the act of listening). Her career as a veterinary surgeon influences much of her work.


Jill Penny In Your Absence Smith|Doorstop, 1st February, pamphlet, eb, £6, 9781912196425 Troubled by ghosts, these poems respond to a murder and a trial, to bereavement and estrangements, yet remain, ultimately, a gift to anyone stranded in the whiteout of loss.


Rebecca Perry Stone Fruit Bloodaxe Books, 27th May, pb, eb, £10.99, 9781780375687 The poems in Perry’s second collection share many common concerns: memory, grief, the fallibility of the physical form and our connection to and place in the world, natural and otherwise.


Holly Pester Comic Timing Granta Books, 4th February, pb, eb, £10.99, 9781783786862 Long-awaited first collection of poems from an influential young poet. Pester chronicles the experience of living and working as a radical and resistant act.


Joseph Ponthus, Stephanie Smee On the Line Apollo, 1st April, hb, eb, £16.99, 9781800243965 A novel in verse that captures the mundane,


Francis Powell Together Behind Four Walls Arkbound, 10th February, pb, eb, £5.99, 9781912092802 Collection of prose and poetry by those most adversely affected by Covid-19. Includes contributions from those connected with Marie Curie nurses.


Wendy Pratt When I Think of My Body As a Horse Smith|Doorstop, 1st March, pb, eb, £9.95, 9781912196401 Taut, muscular and animal, these poems explore motherhood and body identity within the context of baby loss when there is no “rainbow baby” to add closure to the narrative.


Monika Radojevic Teeth in the Back of My Neck Merky Books, 4th May, pb, eb, £10, 9781529118636 Arresting début collection about identity, ancestry and history from a young poet selected as an inaugural winner of the #Merky Books New Writers Prize.


Rumi, Haleh Liza Gafori Gold


NYRB Classics, 13th April, pb, eb, £11.99, 9781681375335 Selection of original translations of the great Persian poet by an up-and-coming American translator and musician.


Edward Rushton, Paul Baines The Collected Writings of Edward Rushton: (1756-1814) Liverpool University Press, 1st March, pb, £29.95, 9781800349162 Works from the earliest datable sources, in newspapers, chapbooks, periodicals and broadsides, providing a clean text with significant revisions and variants noted in the commentary.


Ana Sampson Night Feeds and Morning Song Trapeze, 4th March, hb, £12.99, 9781398702400 Beautiful collection of poems about motherhood from acclaimed anthologist.


Michael Schmidt Talking to Stanley on the Telephone


Smith|Doorstop, 1st March, pb, eb, £9.95, 9781912196449 Unapologetic, lustful, resigned, almost politically incorrect: these poems story the desires, frustrations and waning faculties of old age with unexpected hilarity.


Karolin Schnoor (illus), Kimiko Hahn (illus) She Holds a Cosmos Chronicle Books, 29th April, hb, £12.99, 9781797209890 Collection of poems about the experience of being a mother.


Robert Seatter The Museum of Everything Seren, 15th March, pb, £9.99, 9781781725856 Seatter’s poetic evocation, along with beautifully designed artwork, of the Sir John Soane Museum in London.


Tina Sederholm This is Not Therapy Burning Eye Books, 15th April, pb, £9.99, 9781913958015 Infectious rebel shout-out to the healing power of art which contends that no person or day is exempt from an interesting story.


Frederick Seidel New Selected Poems Faber & Faber, 4th March, pb, eb, £18.99, 9780571365357 Overview of Seidel’s best and most famous poetry from the past five decades shows the evolution of a master poet’s craft.


Penelope Shuttle Lyonesse Bloodaxe Books, 21st May, pb, eb, £12.99, 9781780375540 The submerged land of Lyonesse is a lost paradise in Arthurian legend but becomes an emblem of human frailty in the face of climate change in Shuttle’s new poems.


Michael Smith King Arthur’s Death Unbound, 18th February, hb, £18.99, 9781783529087 New translation of the classic poem that inspired Malory, beautifully illustrated with linocut.


Wendy Pratt


When I Think of My Body as a Horse


MICHAEL SCHMIDT


|


TALKING TO STANLEY ON THE TELEPHONE


Michael McCarthy


Like a Tree Cut Back


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