Andrew Button, "Shatner in Space: Beyond the Cosmic Pizza"

 

Born in Nottingham in 1965, Andrew Button grew up there before leaving for university and currently lives in Leicestershire. He works as a librarian for Warwickshire County Council. Andrew has had many poems placed in magazines and anthologies and a pamphlet, Dry Days in Wet Towns, was published in 2016. To date, he has had three collections published by erbacce press: The Melted Cheese on the Cosmic Pizza (2017), Music for Empty Car Parks (2019) and Shatner in Space: Beyond the Cosmic Pizza (2023).

As a performing poet, he has headlined and performed at various open mics and in libraries (and online) mainly across the Midlands, including Coventry’s Fire & Dust, Coventry Central Library, Nottingham’s Crossed Words, Derby’s Wordwise, Chesterfield’s Spire Writes, Leicester’s now-defunct Shindig, Birmingham’s Poetry Bites, Lichfield’s Poetry Alight, Leamington’s Script Stuff and PureGoodandRight and several Warwickshire libraries, to name but a few. In April 2025, he started his own open mic, Can of Words, in Coalville.

Andrew's poetic influences range from Ian MacMillan, Simon Armitage, Phillip Larkin, Lavinia Greenlaw, Roger McGough to Ray Bradbury, the lyrics of 10cc and Mary Chapin Carpenter, music in general and Yorkshire tea (lots of it)! His poetry is observational, anecdotal and ironic. He likens himself to a poetic eavesdropper and is a keen observer of eccentric and obsessive behaviour. 

About Shatner in Space: Beyond the Cosmic Pizza, by Andrew Button
Many of the poems in Andrew’s latest collection were written in Lockdown and shortly afterwards. As a result, there are a raft of poems that reflect the state of physical and mental confinement that we faced, but at the same time, they are looking for the light of better times. This is juxtaposed with poems about space (including the title piece), the irony of which was never more evident than during the COVID crisis. 

At other moments, the book is interspersed with quirky poetical observations on everything from pensioners riding in pelotons, the President of the UK Roundabout Appreciation Society, to toilet paper engineers and the eccentric habits of the Swiss on Sundays.

Above all, this collection reveals Andrew’s certifiable optimism and roving poetic eye that takes in a smorgasbord of subjects and themes.

You can read more about Shatner in Space: Beyond the Cosmic Pizza on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From Shatner in Space: Beyond the Cosmic Pizza

Space

Floating in our tiny orbits,
satellites of the sofa,
the world has shrunk.
If it wasn’t for the gravity
of the situation,
we’d be free to roam,
untethered, beyond these rooms.

Housebound, the supermarket mission
is one small step of any kind
and our ground control
is Marcus Rashford and Sir Captain Tom.

Distance from loved ones
feels like galaxies
as parts of families
have become detached
from their docking stations.

Like astronauts
and the Kinks
on Waterloo Sunset,
every day, we look at the world
from our windows,
real and televisual
and fasten ourselves in
to the sentiments of Mr Blue Sky.

Keep telling ourselves,
as Tim Peake must have done
when falling to earth,
re-entry won’t be long.

Static in the Wires

We surge through the years
from babbling babies
to vibrant young adults.
From confident thirty somethings
to anchored middle age
and venerable seniority.
Industrious as ants,
we accumulate memories
and experiences
storing them on the grid
of our minds
ready to be discharged
when required. 
If we’re lucky,
in life we’ll rub off
on our children, relatives
and friends
and in death,
remain an invisible force
of energy
like static in the wires.

Rhiannon Buckley, "A Mind Blown"

 

Rhiannon Buckley is an East Midlands-based creative. Trained as an actor over 20 years ago, she has since worked professionally in theatre, education and healthcare both nationally and internationally. She is a big believer in stories of all kinds and has a passion for poetry, hip-hop, film and dog walks. 

In 2010 she survived a catastrophic brain injury which took her to the brink of death. A Mind Blown is her honest memoir of this journey and is her first book.

You can connect with Rhiannon through Instagram @rhiannonbuckleyauthor, by following her Facebook page Rhiannon Buckley Author or by visiting her website here. 

About A Mind Blown, by Rhiannon Buckley 
In a single second, everything can change. At 28, the author is thrown into a waking nightmare when an aneurysm at the centre of her brain ruptures. Initially dismissed as a migraine by the doctors, she lives ten "ordinary" days with an undiagnosed haemorrhage, her body slowly disconnecting from the world as her brain disconnects from her body. When help finally arrives she is so far gone that the hospital advises her to say goodbye. She can feel she is fading away – but what she doesn’t know is that the real work is just beginning.

Join the author on a rare and surprisingly witty adventure of survival, alongside her dying brain as it attempts to outsmart a shape-shifting bear, orders a Buddhist monk and tries to reattach to a life it once knew.

This is the remarkable story of one woman’s fight against acute neurological deterioration and her unexpected journey to find herself on the other side.

You can read more about A Mind Blown on the author's website here. Below, you can read a short extract from the memoir. 

From A Mind Blown
Steps transforming into steps are moments trapped in time. I have no concept of how far we have to go or what’ll happen once we get inside but I know this is it. It's not a feeling, or a sensation, or even a thought but something more basic stripped back and bare. I cannot keep going. Each time I return from the darkness I have less strength and so this is it. 

"Here, lean back, there's a chair behind you."

I try to pull myself away from Alex's body but I can’t hold myself up. My head scrapes across his chest and falls forward. I hear a voice and know that we must be inside the A&E department. Salt stings the back of my throat. Every second I’m upright is a second lived in flames. With Alex's arm curled around my waist, he tries again to lower me into the chair but we don’t get very far before he has to straighten up again. I’m desperate to lie down. Adding equal weight to Alex's increased efforts is my growing awareness of the futility of this situation. For the first time since we left the house, I speak. 

"Leave me here." 

And with that, I loosen my arm and let go. My legs collapse underneath me. Alex, not able to hold my weight, is bent at the middle. Half falling and half being placed, I connect with the floor and roll forwards until my cheek’s soaking up the cool coming from its surface. Alex’s feet slowly back out of my view and I’m left feeling my skin pressed into Lino and wonder how many injured footsteps came before mine.

I.M. John Lucas, 1937-2025

By Merryn Williams

So many people are feeling miserable because John Lucas, a constant friend and with undiminished mental powers, is suddenly gone. He was 88, but he was still a ferocious worker and never wanted to slow down.

He was probably the last academic on earth who refused to use the internet. Books were his life (he also loved jazz and cricket), and he published around sixty of them, short and long: studies of Dickens, Clare, Arnold Bennett and Ivor Gurney; a memoir of the 1950s (he was an authority, too, on the 1920s and '30s); novels, poems, travels around Greece - I could go on!

But while some writers are interested only in their own careers, John constantly and enthusiastically made space for other people's work. Poets will be especially grateful to him for creating the splendid Shoestring Press in 1994. It really was run on a shoestring, and dozens of talented people were helped into print, and the press also brought a wider audience to the Georgians, Vernon Scannell and Ruth Bidgood.

John disdained the internet, instead firing off letters and postcards to all concerned (although his beloved wife Pauline did once drag him on to a Zoom). He would never have let himself be conscripted into an army or accepted a title. He loved "England, literature, cricket, criticism, history, teaching, publishing, politics, poetry, beer, jazz .... common experience, the regional and the radical, the demotic and the democratic, the poetics of saying what you mean and the politics of meaning what you say." He is going to be missed by, I do not exaggerate, hundreds of people, and I am still aching.

I don't know whether Shoestring will survive. But John's books are still there, and still worth reading, and I hope that some of us will soon be able to get together to share our memories of him.