Eve Makis, "Where the Earth Holds Secrets"

Born in Nottingham, Eve Makis worked as a journalist before turning to fiction. She is the author of five novels published by Transworld and Sandstone Press, including The Spice Box Letters, shortlisted for the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize and the East Midlands Book Award. She co-wrote the award-winning film Boy on the Bridge and co-authored the life writing guide The Accidental Memoir (HarperCollins). Eve is a fiction tutor on the MA Creative Writing at Nottingham Trent University. She is co-creator of the life writing website the Minute Memoir. Her latest novel, Where the Earth Holds Secrets, is published by Claret Press. 

 

About Where the Earth Holds Secrets, by Eve Makis
Set on the divided island of Cyprus, Where the Earth Holds Secrets follows Nuray, a risk-taking journalist known for uncovering the hidden graves of the missing. When she reaches out to Haris with new information about his father’s disappearance, she pulls him into a past Haris has long tried to avoid.

The case is blown open with the arrival of Elena Clayton, an English forensic archaeologist seeking a fresh start, whose work begins to uncover secrets buried deep beneath the island’s soil. As Nuray, Haris, and Elena are drawn together, they must navigate suspicion, betrayal, and their own tangled histories.

Inspired by the writer’s own family history and the work of inspirational journalist Sevgul Uludag, the book reflects on Cyprus’s unresolved past, tracing a path through loss and remembrance toward the possibility of healing.

You can read more about Where the Earth Holds Secrets on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the opening of the novel. 

From Where the Earth Holds Secrets

Chapter 1

Cyprus 2016

Nuray had promised herself: No More Investigations. 

But the case of the missing man had found its way into her life one sunlit afternoon in Yusef’s coffee shop as she lingered over a square of walnut baklava. An old man had leaned in close, his breath warm at her ear. ‘Nuray Hasan,’ he’d whispered. ‘I have something for you. The name of a witness. An address.’ 

And just like that, she was back on the hunt. 

The sun scorched the battered bonnet of her Fiat Punto as she drove along the Karpas Peninsula, an elongated finger of land that gave the island its distinctive shape. The road cut through parched fields where white-bellied donkeys roamed like Holy cattle. Cicadas droned in the stillness, like the murmur of missing souls. 

The man she was searching for was a cold case. Like so many others who had disappeared during the island’s troubled years, in the fifties and sixties, in 1974 when Cyprus was invaded. Soldiers, civilians, woman and children, newborns too. She’d heard stories of people being dragged from their homes at night, marched off buses, even snatched from hospital beds. Their names were spoken at family gatherings, at official committees, in dark corners and with nighttime prayers.

The Cypriot dust streamed through the open window, clinging to her skin like cheap glitter. It was everywhere – on her clothes, in her hair, under her eyelids, scratching her eyes. A fig tree loomed ahead, pale and weathered, its trunk whitewashed to protect it from the heat. Turn right at the white-washed fig, the old man had written on a napkin in Yusef’s café. In all her years of searching, trees had helped to signpost the way. Cypress, acacia, carobs and wild olives guiding her through remote stretches where farmers still ploughed with cart and horse. 

She had begun her career in journalism writing about fetes and festivals, petty thefts and the slow rhythm of local news. Then she had started investigating the disappearances. No one called them murder victims. At least, not at that point. 

Her research had led her to yellowing archives, old photographs, to grieving mothers and unmarked graves. Her curiosity about the missing had turned into a burden, yes, but a mission too, a passion that gave her life meaning. It was one thing to write about tragedy from a distance; quite another to connect with the victims, to play a role in solving age-old mysteries. 

Andrew Taylor, "European Hymns"

 

Andrew Taylor lives and works in Nottingham. He is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Nottingham Trent University. He has published four collections of poetry with Shearsman Books, edited Peter Finch’s Collected Poems, and his critical book about Finch is forthcoming from Seren Books. His website is here. 

About European Hymns, by Andrew Taylor
European Hymns traces the calendar year throughout the seasons. Beginning with the optimism that spring brings, the book offers up the arrival of the nightingales in rural France (an ongoing interest of Taylor’s) then navigates through summer trips to cities, takes in periods of reflection amongst the closing down of a summer house, the sudden shift to Autumn and the inevitable descent into winter.

The book is Taylor’s most wide-ranging collection to-date, in turns observational and detailed. The poems also deal with the changes in the natural world, while others offer snapshots of moments in time, with Taylor often re-employing his minimalist practice to useful effect.

You can read more about European Hymns on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From European Hymns

Eydís Poem
 
Bean for leaf
a ritual swapped
 
the darkest hour
is nearest dawn
 
arctic drone
remote scents
 
bay & rosemary
subtle draught
 
piano bones
displayed
go conduct clouds

Midwinter Poem
 
Clean the snuffer with a sharp
blade decorate with found materials
Pygmalion’s cello & guitar duvet to
settle the stomach 15 hours in the
saddle is enough for anyone close
the shutters before lighting candles
let’s quieten the draught appropriateness
of light as Bernadette’s ‘Midwinter Day’
50 years to the day Julianna’s voice
from Iceland with the strings finally
fade Mary’s sequencing works well
a heart hand drawn on the envelope
bearing a gift slow burn of aged oak
though birch is the slowest raise the
temperate deliberately it’s about
preservation one jar of honey mustard
per customer the store is quiet the track
is being cleared in advance of works
entrance to the station is barred a world
of separateness within the season
the lane reveals its secrets at dusk
get the picture on watch the screen
like a list of sources Kim sits on the rug
Sydney wants a haircut at 4.00 a.m.
wait for the hit it folds in nicely west coast
standing in for the east mainline gets you
there in time fling the hat from the roof
watch it tumble to the park European
stamps for the passport &
exchange currencies sketches of France
plans made & recorded in the six month
old notebook sweetness of incense as
it gathers on the landing magic of the
espresso bean its symbols of health
& happiness

Rory Waterman, "Come Here to This Gate"

 

Rory Waterman was born in Belfast in 1981, and grew up mainly in Lincolnshire. His fourth full-length collection, Come Here to This Gate, has just been published by Carcanet Press. His other collections, all published by Carcanet, are: Tonight the Summer’s Over (2013), which was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for a Seamus Heaney Award; Sarajevo Roses (2017), which was shortlisted for the Ledbury Forte Prize for Second Collections; and Sweet Nothings (2020). He is also regularly a critic for the TLS, PN Review and other publications, and has published several books on modern and contemporary poetry. He co-edits New Walk Editions with Nick Everett at the University of Leicester. He has a BA and PhD from the University of Leicester. Since 2012, he has worked at Nottingham Trent University, where he is Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature and leads the MA in Creative Writing. He lives in Nottingham. His website is here. 

About Come Here to This Gate
Come Here to This Gate, Rory Waterman's fourth collection, is his most candid and unexpected, personal, brash, hilarious, and wide-ranging. The book is in three parts, the first a sequence about the last year of the life of his father, the poet Andrew Waterman, against a backdrop of recrimination, love and alcoholic dementia: "your silences were trains departing." The second consists of poems that open various gates, or are forcibly restrained behind them, from the literal North and South Korean border to the borders between friends, and those imposed by photographs, memories, and paths taken and not taken. The third opens on the poet's rural home county of Lincolnshire. He rewrites several folk tales into galloping, sometimes rambunctious ballads for the 2020s: what happens when imps, ghosts, and a boggart who looks like a "doll left behind at Chernobyl" must reckon with the modern world and the people who lumber through it.

You can read more about Come Here to This Gate on the publisher's website here. You can read a review of the book on Everybody's Reviewing here. Below, you can read two poems from the collection. 

From Come here to This Gate, by Rory Waterman

Home

T-shirt weather today: a bumble bee bumps
the window, and the door of the visiting room
yawns and nudges a pot. We could go out,
sniff freedom over the fence. You’d rather not.

‘You’ve come to take me home?’ No, Dad. I’ve come
to bring it to you, blind on your piss-proof seat
on wheels, most of you a line of little knots
beneath a blanket. Stop-gap Clov to your Hamm – 

you’d get that, and it wouldn’t help – I ask 
someone to bring your sippy cup, some biscuits,
and you chew them in the back of your open mouth
in quiet, ‘thinking,’ too afraid to talk.

So I watch the ridge of your forehead, feel my own – 
for impulse, or connection, which doesn’t come
until a nurse does, panting, to the door, 
to tell us darlings we have five minutes more. 

         (first published in the Times Literary Supplement)

ICN to LHR

‘Keep the reunified Korea in your heart’
an old man had said, palming his chest. And 
okay, I do. And there it stays, doing nothing 

as flight KE 907 to London lifts 
from a (re)claimed island, over (re)claimed islands
stacked with containers: a concreted sarcophagus,

the memorial to Operation Chromite,
which has no other memorial. A child beside me
pulls down her mask, is chastened, frumps.

‘We’re progress,’ he had added. See it down there,
a phosphoresced capital washing round its hills,
a land of neon chaebols and kimchi jars

where new friends complete the circuits
of their lives for Samsung, Lotte, Hyundai,
as I complete this circuit for Hanjin.

See the sea ooze the yellow they don’t call it 
here – there – with silt from China, as we skirt
North Korean airspace. This land is your land

I hum before noticing. Far towns are like colonies
of barnacles; dark fishing vessels ply 
what looks turbid. And when we start to cross

the safety of China, from where this – that – 
is ordained, a city (Shenyang?) shifts, 
a molten web in new night. Now there will be

nothing but black, the dark familiar nowhere, 
and then the grind of lowering, the misted plots
of ruined nametagged earth around our lives.

I.M. Sue Dymoke (1962-2023)

 

It is with great sadness that we have to report that Sue Dymoke, poet, lecturer, educator and researcher, died on 13 June 2023, after a long illness. 

Sue was Associate Professor of Education at Nottingham Trent University, and previously, for many years, Reader in Education at the University of Leicester. She was a well-known and well-loved figure on the literary scene, in universities, schools and the wider community, both in the East Midlands and nationally. She gave a fantastic guest masterclass on the MA in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester in 2019.

Sue wrote widely on the role of poetry in education, and was herself a wonderful poet. Her books include three poetry collections with Shoestring Press, including most recently What They Left Behind. She was co-editor of Making Poetry Happen: Transforming the Poetry Classroom and Making Poetry Matter: International Research on Poetry Pedagogy, and author of Drafting and Assessing Poetry. Sue regularly gave readings and talks across the UK and beyond.  

Sue was an inspirational teacher, a brilliant poet and a wonderful colleague and friend. She will be greatly missed. A few days before she died, she celebrated her civil partnership with her long-term partner, the novelist David Belbin. 

You can read a short article by Sue on Creative Writing at Leicester here. Below, you can watch a film by Rebecca Goldsmith, featuring a poem by Sue, "Roaming Range."

Gregory Woods, "Records of an Incitement to Silence"

 

Gregory Woods was born in Egypt in 1953, and brought up in Ghana. He is the author of Articulate Flesh: Male Homo-eroticism and Modern Poetry (1987), A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition (1998) and Homintern: How Gay Culture Liberated the Modern World (2016), all from Yale University Press. His six main poetry collections, all with Carcanet Press, are We Have the Melon (1992), May I Say Nothing (1998), The District Commissioner’s Dreams (2002), Quidnunc (2007), An Ordinary Dog (2011) and, now, Records of an Incitement to Silence (2021). Woods has two doctorates from the University of East Anglia (1983, 2006). He began his teaching career at the University of Salerno in 1980. In 1998 he became the first Professor of Gay & Lesbian Studies in the UK, at Nottingham Trent University, where he is now Professor Emeritus.

About Records of an Incitement to Silence
These are dispatches from a world united in strife and riven by desire. A sequence of stripped-down, unrhymed sonnets, and the longer poems that accentuate it, suggest a missing narrative: the growth of the individual in a world of upheaval, the search for and loss of love, the formation of memories, the limits of what can truthfully be said, the traces we leave and the chance of their survival. ‘One of my creative habits,’ Woods writes, ‘is the wringing-out of a single form until it’s bone dry: the unrhymed sonnets; the monosyllabic syllabics of the long poem “Hat Reef Loud”; the incompatible yoking-together of iambic pentameter and dactylic trimeter in the long poem “No Title Yet.”’ His formal stringency intensifies the poems’ emotional and erotic charge, their celebration and their plaint.

You can find more details about Records of an Incitement to Silence on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two poems from the book. 

From Records of an Incitement to Silence, by Gregory Woods

The Enigma of Survival

The fittest, who survives, seeks no reward

but rest from mortal combat’s melodrama.

By plighting his devotion to a sword

and delegating feeling to his armour,

anaesthetised by neat adrenaline,

he barely feels the piercing of his skin.

He need not even be the pluckiest

so long as he remains the luckiest.

The fittest, who survives, tries to conceal

his wounds, as if they suppurated thought.

Detached from the beliefs for which he fought,

a guilty conscience his Achilles heel,

he sways above the body of his rival,

upbraiding his own heart for its survival.

The Empty House 

A book is open on

the table at the window.

The light is filtered through

lace curtains and the leaves

of the old mango tree.

A breath of scented air

(wood smoke and frangipani)

discreetly turns a page.

It is as if the house

had taught itself to read

but only did so when

the family was out

and there was ample time

for Aristophanes.

Rory Waterman, "Sweet Nothings"

Rory Waterman was born in Belfast in 1981, grew up in rural Lincolnshire, and lives in Nottingham, where he is Senior Lecturer in English at Nottingham Trent University. He has a BA and a PhD from the Department of English at the University of Leicester. His first collection of poetry, Tonight the Summer's Over, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Prize. His second, Sarajevo Roses, was shortlisted for the Ledbury Forte Prize for second collections. The poems featured below are taken from his third book, Sweet Nothings, published by Carcanet this month. He is also the author  of several books on modern poetry, and co-edits New Walk Editions. You can find out more about Rory and his work at www.rorywaterman.com.

Sweet Nothings, his new collection, is about absences, how they tempt us, and sometimes what they make us do. An absence is a conjuration, not palpably present in longing, imagination or dream. We are lured on by absences, and how they call to us, in Thomas Hardy's memorable phrase. The poems sometimes come in sequences; always they are in dialogue with one another, responding, echoing - within and between the book's two sections. At times, the leitmotifs are apparently personal, exploring divisions and painful losses. But we also encounter the largely invented academic Dr Bob Pintle, promoted at work since his cameo in Waterman's previous book, an anti-hero of the modern university system. In this book we also find the zero football score, the zero scores in life's more significant conflicts, and an obverse: the desire to settle at nothing, or for nothing less than what life might offer. Sweet Nothings is in fact a book of hopes and passions - quiet and lyrical at times, but also fiercely witty and bold.

Until 28 May, you can get 25% off the cover price of the book at www.carcanet.co.uk, if you enter the code WATERMAN25 at checkout.

Here are some poems from the collection:


Reaping

          ‘We need to test harder whether we can take a young 18- or 19-year-old out of their 
          PlayStation bedroom, and put them into a Reaper cabin and say: “Right, you have 
          never flown an aircraft before. That does not matter, you can operate this.”’

- Air Marshal Greg Bagwell

18 or 19 – what was I doing then? 
Well, one day, I biked here 
to RAF Waddington’s ‘viewing point’, 

from where I saw no action –
called by the urgent Tornados
which had skimmed our village 

shocking pliant heads
at intervals of my childhood,
and must have come from somewhere.

Runway approach lights have switched on
and point skywards at nothing 
coming in. A pigeon. A slip of moon.

A screech owl would be too apposite. 
But I saw one once a mile from here,
on Bloxholm Lane. It stalled a moment, 

then beat on past the hedges
tall as houses, living its purpose
suddenly beyond range.

And who knows what they do 
in a concreted cube two hundred yards
behind wires and warning signs,

or who does it – or why
an inch from where it would have died
a sandfly fills its nest?

Grasses by the road 
dip like a million rods 
to a million tiny catches. A saloon

half a mile off indicates 
only to the clouding dusk,
slows to corner the perimeter

on a red route B road to home. 
Nothing to do but follow
at a generous distance.


First published in PN Review. 



Where to Build

I never thought I’d have a home
but then I’d built one up from the bay,
a shrub-scrubbed cleft half-hiding it,
a plunging stream behind the grate

and locals pointed up, or down,
to where I lived beside myself
for years, with all I’d wanted most,
building a greenhouse, annexe, shelves, 

and made it all I knew to want
and drowned the voice that said I don’t
with all I’d always done for this
and grew tomatoes, seed to light

and ate them, happily, every night,
and fixed the leak that drew the rain
and fixed it when it sprung again.
Well, I knew of rock across the bay – 

a skerry? – green-topped, curving round
to out of sight behind near rock.
But rain set in, the endless rain,
and through the sheet of endless cloud

a jet of sudden light cracked down
across that further hunk of land,
which glimmered ginger. And it stayed
for seconds, minutes, hours, days,

the whole life of my house away.


First published in the Times Literary Supplement. 


Re: Application

FAO Dr Bob Pintle
Senior Lecturer in Professional Creativity, Peterborough University

Dear Robert,
                    The Board regrets to inform
several colleagues, including you,
that your recent sabbatical applications
will not go forward, after review.

The panel felt that ‘Write some poems
I haven’t yet written, so it’s absurd
to say much else’ lacked requisite rigour.
We do ask for ‘No more than 2000 words’

but suitable answers require something close.
We advise you attend our ‘Winning Support for
Sabbaticals Workshop’, when places are open.
There are none at present. We’ll advertise more

when we secure funding. To raise an objection,
write to your Sub-Dean of Sub-Research. State
your grounds for appeal, in accordance with Guideline
11 6 2 (Staff Handbook, page 8).

Ensure your 4* REF Output Agreement
and book contract are both attached to the email,
with endorsements from two Student Reps and your Mentor,
and a piece of your heart. Should your first appeal fail,

we invite fresh applications each year,
though from March 2020, all will be screened
for written support from Lead Industry Partners
linked to our Strategy Goals. We are keen

to support your research. We value team players
and wish you every success going forward.
Lastly, I’m pleased, on a personal note,
to congratulate you on your Teaching Award

(Bronze.) Our Faculty Press Team will write
a blog post next week, and request you take part
in our new poster ad, so congratulations!
Yours,
Dr Jim Jones
Dean, School of Arts


First published in Wild Court. 


Re: Re: Application

FAO Dr Jim Jones
Dean of Arts, Peterborough University

Hi Jim, Bob pecks, then deletes. Dear Jim, Oh YES!
I’ll write with that! Those sabbaticals: who got them?
And have those colleagues had thirteen precious years
on what you term ‘the front line’? Anyway, Cheers!
When I find time, I’ll thank you in a poem,
and place it in the fucking TLS.

I see you proclaim in your email signature line
you’re ‘often abroad and send out-of-hours emails,
but rarely expect instant replies to them.’ 
Well, Jim, tonight I marked till 10pm:
Rhetoric essays. I’d give your email a Fail,
you shite-backfilled and heaving cliché-mine.

On a personal note, how are the kids, you knob?
See much of them? Does Nanny wipe their arses?
And what are the call girls like out in Guangdong?
He sighs. Holds backspace till all his work is gone.
The cursor blinks along with his catharsis,
and he stabs Dear Jim, That’s excellent! Thanks. Bob.


First published in Wild Court. 


You can also watch Rory perform one of his poems here.
.