Alan Baker, "A Book of Psalms"

 

Alan Baker was born and raised in Newcastle-upon-Tyne and has lived in Nottingham since 1985. He runs the poetry publisher Leafe Press and its associated magazine, Litter. His recent collections include Riverrun, a book of modernist sonnets about the river Trent and a book of prose poems, Letters From The Underworld.

About A Book of Psalms, by Alan Baker
A Book of Psalms is a sequence of 64 lyric poems in the form of psalms which attempt to do what the Biblical psalms did: praise, lament, critique the state of the world and humanity, elegize a lost homeland, look for faith, and provide comfort and consolation in times of trouble.

You can read more about A Book of Psalms on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From A Book of Psalms

Psalm 13

A scattered pigeon, a day named Wednesday

An afternoon declined into undifferentiated colours

As I stumbled into the town where neither the flies

Deceived into activity by the January sun

Nor the stallholders unrolling their canvass

A risen Sun and a working day earth tilted from the light

And all the people chilled and shouting their wares

Seemed more than living words that carry a history

In each syllable, a song in every vowel

Psalm 45

If it should ever come, and I suppose it must, let it be

On a bright morning when all the possibilities settle as one

Like a flock of sparrows who don’t know whether

They’re coming or going or whether the air

Seems cooler, their numbers fewer

Who don’t know that they’re symbols of lust and vulgarity

Who deserve a constellation to be their aid and shelter

And to notice their fall, to hover over late-night pharmacies

To dart between the eaves of Amazon warehouses, to alight at last

In a dream I had of a red-brick terrace in some northern Celestial City

Andrew Taylor, "Northangerland: Re-versions of the Poetry of Branwell Brontë"

Andrew Taylor is the author of 3 collections of poetry published by Shearsman Books, the latest, Not There-Here, was published in October 2021. His latest collection is Northangerland: Re-versions of the Poetry of Branwell Brontë, published by Leafe Press. He recently edited the Collected Poems of Peter Finch for Seren Books. He is the author of the first monograph on the work of Liverpool poet, Adrian Henri: Adrian Henri: A Critical Reading (London: Greenwich Exchange, 2019). He lives and works in Nottingham where he is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Nottingham Trent University. His website is here. 

About Northangerland, by Andrew Taylor

Out of a conversation in a Nottingham city centre coffee shop in November 2021, discussing poetry and publishing, I sought to develop the idea of engaging with the poetry of Patrick Branwell Brontë. I was aware that the work of writers such as Shakespeare, Keats and Wordsworth had been engaged with in a ‘collaborative’ manner and wondered about the prospect of working with the poetry of Branwell Brontë. Branwell, so often overlooked and overshadowed in literary terms, by his three sisters, needs reappraisal, particularly with regards to his poetry. Even the most authoritative of critics, Juliet Barker noted back in 1994 that Branwell (as well as his father, Patrick) were due a ‘fresh look.’ 

I was determined to only use Branwell’s words and not add mine to the poetry. There was a temptation to update the work with a modern audience in mind. Early drafts of some of the poems did employ my own work, but I soon adjusted and followed John Seed’s methodology. Taking two of John Seed’s collections published by Shearsman Books, Pictures of Mayhew: London 1850 (2005) and That Barrikins: Pictures of Mayhew - London 1850 (2007), as my cue, I noted Seed’s statement that: 'Every word in the pages that follow is drawn from Henry Mayhew’s writings on London published in the Morning Chronicle from 1849 to 1850, then in 63 editions of his own weekly paper, London Labour and the London Poor, between December 1850 and February 1852 and then in the four volume work of the same title.' 

You can read more about Northangerland on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read a poem from the collection. 

From Northangerland

The Emigrant. I

Sink from sight the landmarks 

  of home & the bitterness 

of farewells we yield spirit 

to the ocean & the life before 

the new born shores of Columbia 

& Australia exchange past time 

for time to come

  how melancholy if morning restores

(Less welcome than the night’s gloom)

  Old England’s harsh blue hills 

while we wake to a silenced pain

like a sick man resigned 

to die a well

remembered voice in eternity

 

May 28, 1848 [May 25, 1845 in Neufeldt] - Branwell Brontë

May 12, 2022 – Andrew Taylor

 

Kathleen Bell, "Do You Know How Kind I Am?"

Until recently, Kathleen Bell was an Associate Professor in Creative Writing at De Montfort University. She has published poems in a number of magazines and anthologies including PN Review, New Walk, Under the Radar, Unarmed and A Speaking Silence, and has won prizes in the Nottingham Poetry Competition and the Brittle Star Competition. Her first poetry collection, Disappearances, is due from Shoestring later this year. Kathleen has also published short fiction. She is on Twitter as @kazbel and blogs at https://kathzbell.wordpress.com. 

About Do You Know How Kind I Am?

Do You Know How Kind I Am? is a sequence of twenty poems in different voices, all emerging from and responding to the experience of Covid and lockdown. They range from the carefully sympathetic to the hyped-up enthusiasm of the Covid-denier. The poems suggest a greater distance between humans than the mandated 2-metre physical distance illustrated on the cover. 

You can see more details about Do You Know How Kind I Am on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read a sample from the collection. 

From Do You Know How Kind I Am? by Kathleen Bell

1.

Out there’s a woman, driving a bus.

Her only cargo is cloth, metal and air
and at night, light.

Out there’s a man who walks dutiful, slow,
lugging a bag.
Two talk at a distance – a third
leans in to listen.
The masked and gloved make their way
into shops. Some stumble at kerbs.

Others are sniffing the air
as if free but they know
it may hold disaster and death
and breath can bring pain in its train.

15.

Organise, please
one dead celeb a week
or, if you can’t, somebody blonde,
pretty of course, and young
in floods of tears, for failing that
how can we hope
to unite a nation’s grief?