Julian Stannard, "New and Selected Poems"

Julian Stannard has written nine volumes of poetry including Sottoripa: Genoese Poems (a bilingual publication, Canneto, 2018). His last single collection was Please Don’t Bomb the Ghost of my Brother (Salt, 2023). In January 2025  Salt brought out New and Selected Poems. He has been awarded the International Troubadour Prize for Poetry and nominated various times for the Forward and the Pushcart. In 2024 he was awarded the Lerici Shelley Prize for his contribution to  Ligurian/Italian culture. He has written critical studies of Fleur Adcock, Basil Bunting, Donald Davie, Charles Tomlinson and Leonard Cohen. He co-edited The Palm Beach Effect: Reflections on Michael Hofmann (CB editions, 2013). In 2024 Sagging Meniscus Press (USA) brought out a campus novel called The University of Bliss.

About New and Selected Poems, by Julian Stannard
This new book brings together some twenty-five years of writing. Julian Stannard moved  to Italy in 1984 and worked  at the University of Genoa  for many years. He started teaching at the University of Winchester in 2005. Many of these poems draw on his experiences of living in Genoa / Liguria, though he also writes extensively about contemporary Britain and further afield. New poems represented here have appeared in The Spectator, The Dark Horse, Bad Lilies, Wild Court and AN Editions.

You can read more about New and Selected Poems on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection.  

From New and Selected Poems

The Pool

The chief leaf man rises early.
A breeze in the banyan tree.
The water laps.
Skink lizard on the prowl.
 
Perfection. Blue. Perfection.
No leaves on the water.
Miles Davis - his ghost -
becoming the banyan tree.
 
Chief leaf man sees a leaf
in the corner of the pool
and shouts in Vietnamese.
Leaf man number two crouches, 
picks it out.
 
The apprentice leaf boy,
conical hat,
takes a broom from the storeroom.
Sweeps.
 
The hotel dog – a Saigon mongrel - watches.
 
Eternal – mythological – war of leaves.
The frangipani quickens.
 
I watch its petals drop upon the water.
 
A stiffening breeze from Saigon River.
The palm trees writhe and thrash.
 
 
Gigi Picetti

Actor, Genoese Activist, Molotov Cocktail 

1939-2022

I lived in the caruggi, lived in the Sottoripa
the streets pushing deeper and deeper.
 
I lived in the vicoli:
lamentation, catastrophe, chicory.
 
Ubiquitous Gigi would come and go.
He once knew Dario Fo.
 
I seem to remember Gigi Picetti
had a machete.
 
The day – in question - was hot and hazy.
He swirled it about
 
to frighten the piccolo borghese.
 

David Briggs, "The Odyssey Complex and Other Poems"

David Briggs has published four collections with Salt Publishing. The Method Men (2010) was shortlisted for the London Festival Poetry Prize, and Rain Rider (2013) was a winter selection of the Poetry Book Society. His third book, Cracked Skull Cinema (2019), was a Poetry Wales pick of the year. David received an Eric Gregory Award in 2002, and since then his work has appeared in a wide range of journals and anthologies from The Poetry Review to the generational anthology edited by Roddy Lumsden, Identity Parade (Bloodaxe, 2010). A teacher of English in Bristol since 2005, David founded and currently chairs the Writers' Examination Board, which offers the Apprentice of Fine Arts (AFA) in Creative Writing - a post-16 qualification that is currently live in twelve UK schools. David has been poet-in-residence at Bristol University, and from 2019-2023 he was co-editor of the Bristol-based poetry journal Raceme. In 2023 he completed his practice-based PhD research, The Odyssey Complex: Reading and Writing Midlife Poetics and Middle Style at the University of Exeter.

About The Odyssey Complex and Other Poems
David’s fourth collection, The Odyssey Complex and Other Stories (Salt, 2024), offers a midlife counterpart to the poetics of both youth and late style, exploring themes of family ties, nostalgia and retreat, ageing and mortality, acts of memorial and the impulse towards hospitality. 

You can read more about The Odyssey Complex and Other Poems on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From The Odyssey Complex and Other Poems, by David Briggs

Cointreau

 
          in memoriam Avril Henry 
 
I love its boozy citrus hit,  
how in licking my lips post-sip  
it sharpens that extra-temporal bit  
of self that’s able to taste  
the past in the present,  
taste two moments co-eval 
in its sweetness. 
          And it puts me in mind of Avril 
placing a bottle of Harpic, and Marigolds,  
on the shelf to the side of her bathtub – 
ever considerate of others,  
of those who might find her  
many days after – 
and climbing in carefully  
in her best purple kaftan; 
diluting the poison  
in a brandy-glass measure  
of blood-orange Cointreau  
to smother its foulness.  
           And I like to imagine  
that she had a book, 
perhaps her translation  
of Guillaume de Deguileville’s  
Pilgrimage of the Life of the Manhode, 
from which I also imagine her  
reading aloud while Death inched closer, 
put one cold hand on her heart. 
          There’s just enough of the past 
swilling around in the present, 
like just enough barbiturate  
in a terminal glass of Cointreau;  
like there’s just enough barbiturate  
for the task, in a vial  
she’d hidden so presciently 
beneath floorboards,  
fearful of interventions, 
of untimely police raids,  
of cold-calling journalists.  
She taught me so much I’m grateful to know. 
           Each year, on this day,  
I pour for myself 
a chilled, double rocks glass  
           of Cointreau. 

Living with the Douglasses
  
Michael Douglas is renting our spare room 
again. It’s just temporary, till work picks up  
 
and/or Catherine takes him back.  
He’s an early riser, and on bright mornings  
 
we’ll find him out in the garden with  
black coffee and a Thai stick, looking  
 
so much like Sandy Kominsky/Grady Tripp  
we wonder how much acting was involved  
 
in these recent projects. But it’s still work I rate –  
notwithstanding the acclaimed roles he played  
 
in the 80s and 90s – since it feels  
as though he’s comfortable enough now  
 
in his accomplishments to take himself 
a little less seriously; as though he no longer needs  
 
some Nietzschean hero narrative to flatter  
an entitled sense of celebrity and is enjoying  
 
the opportunity to play gently botched characters  
with the (often unfulfilled) potential for redemption.  
 
As though he’s embraced his inner clown.  
Sometimes, I wonder if it really is Michael Douglas  
 
who’s living with us, and my wife’ll say, “Well,  
if he’s not Michael Douglas then who the hell is he?”  
 
And I’ll laugh and say: “You’re right. I’m ridiculous.  
Of course he’s Michael Douglas,” before knocking  
 
to see if he wants a cup of joe. I like the way  
he’s arranged his flamboyant neck scarves  
 
on his tailor’s dummy and, sometimes, I think  
Should I grow my hair out like Michael Douglas?  

Whenever I encounter a crisis of self-doubt,  
I’ll give myself a pep talk, saying things like 
 
“Michael Douglas may be going through  
a tough patch right now, but he’s got chutzpah 
 
and is a pretty good style model for the older man.” 
But then I’ll recall that much of his swagger,  
 
the élan that enables him to carry off that look, 
comes from years of Hollywood stardom  
 
and a foot-locker of great anecdotes featuring  
some of the world’s most glamorous people.  
 
And I’ll realise with a sigh that my three books  
with a small press and that time I shared the bill  
 
with Don Paterson don’t really compare,  
that I’m probably kidding myself.  
 
But then I say: “Fuck it. I’m Spartacus!” And laugh.  
And my wife says, “That was Kirk Douglas, knucklehead.” 

Martyn Crucefix, "Between a Drowning Man"

Martyn Crucefix is a British poet and translator. He is the author of seven original collections of poetry, most recently Cargo of Limbs (Hercules Editions, 2019) and Between a Drowning Man (Salt, 2023). He has received an Eric Gregory award, a Hawthornden Fellowship, and the Schlegel-Tieck Prize for his translations (from the German) of the poems of Peter Huchel (Shearsman, 2019). His translation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies (Enitharmon, 2006) was shortlisted for the Popescu Prize for Poetry Translation. His translations of essays by German poet and novelist, Lutz Seiler, In Case of Loss, has just been published by And Other Stories. A major Rilke Selected Poems, Change Your Life, will be published by Pushkin Press in 2024. Till recently a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at The British Library, Martyn also edits the Acumen Poetry Magazine Young Poets web page. His blog and website, including more details on publications, are here. 

About Between a Drowning Man
Martyn Crucefix’s new collection of poems traces the forensic unfolding of two different landscapes – contemporary Britain post-2016 and the countryside of the Marche in central, eastern Italy. Both places are vividly evoked – the coffee shops, traffic tailbacks, shopping malls, tourist-dotted hillsides and valleys of modern Britain appear in stark contrast to the hilltop villages, church spires, deep gorges, natural history and Classical ruins of Italy. Both landscapes come to represent psychic journeys: closer to home there is division everywhere – depicted in both tragic and comic detail – that only a metaphorical death of the self seems able to counteract. Closer to the Mediterranean, the geographical and personal, or romantic, divisions are also shown ultimately to offer possibilities of transcendence.

The poems of the longer sequence, ‘Works and Days,’ are startlingly free-wheeling, allusive – brilliantly deploying diverse source materials and inspiration from Hesiod and the so-called vacana poems, written in India in the 10/12th century – all bound together by the repeated refrain of bridges breaking down. The shorter sequence of Italian poems, a crown of sonnets, is more formally controlled, but the close repetition of first and last lines of the individual poems likewise serves to suggest an overarching unity.

In the end, both sequences travel towards death which – while not denying the reality of human mortality and the passage of time – is intended to represent a challenge to the powerful dividing walls between Thee and Me, the liberation of empathetic feeling, perhaps even the Daoist erasure of the assumed gulf between self and not-self: ‘these millions of us aspiring to the condition / of ubiquitous dust on the fiery water.’

Here are two podcasts in which Martyn discusses this new collection of poems: Planet Poetry and A Mouthful of Air. Below, you can read two poems from the collection. 

From Between a Drowning Man

Two poems from ‘Works and Days’

‘how you order’ 

how you order then sip your flat white with care
or diesel with care or cling film

or eat responsibly sourced seafood with care
red meat or bottled carbonated water

you dispose of in the bins provided with care
with care what you have locked away

what you have stowed in the understairs cupboard
how you travel by land sea and air with care

then insist on being used by the language with care
with care conversing with friends

when touching friends and your extended family
with care your actions

have a care and your reactions with care
with a passionate care where possible your politics

how you govern or set out to work or choose
how and who you play with tomorrow

with care I mean take care not forgetting
all the bridges are down

‘to tell the truth it’s hardly more’
 
to tell the truth it’s hardly more
      than a convenient extension to the back lot
 
of the forecourt of my local BP garage
      on the northernmost side of this satellite town
 
yet we all agree it’s an excellent shop
      which means we’ll be back here tomorrow
 
and the next day most likely and in this way
      family traditions put down roots
 
as today we buy tampons and baked beans
      a salad bag and a brace of frozen garlic bread
 
at the very last moment we choose
      to snatch up a print newspaper from its rack
 
with its bold and reassuring headline
      all bridges fit for purpose says govt. minister

Richard Skinner, "White Noise Machine"

 

Richard Skinner has published seven books of poetry. His most recent collections are Dream into Play (Poetry Salzburg, 2022), Cut Up (Vanguard Editions, 2023) & White Noise Machine (Salt, 2023).

About White Noise Machine

Where Richard Skinner’s previous pamphlets, Invisible Sun and Dream into Play, were primarily concerned with the play of light and playfulness respectively, White Noise Machine is mainly concerned with sound. A white noise machine is a device that produces a noise that calms the listener, which in many cases sounds like a rushing waterfall or wind blowing through trees, and other serene or nature-like sounds. Skinner has used this idea to try to create this effect in many of the poems.

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

From White Noise Machine, by Richard Skinner

Amaryllis & the Iceman

for J
 
Your journey began in the Holocene
in Central Siberia. Your ancestors follow 
desire lines through deep snow 
to the warmer places,
swathes of rosebay and oleander.
 
Your sickle cells grow inch 
by creeping inch, 
forging Blaschko’s lines
to follow the amethyst S
of your upper spine. 
 
Only in the UV can I see
the fluorescence 
of roots in your face,
the yearning of melasma
to trace your forebears. 
 
Mark it. Your body is a map.
The amaryllis flourishes
on your shoulder 
& the hungry ghost of the iceman 
roams through your head.


Hem
 
Objects are the bones of time, the stones just barely pink. 
Depression is an inability to construct a future, 
a game of fundamentals smuggled in anagrams,
but I am building a position to reach my small final.
 
Depression is an inability to construct a future, 
a feathered directional arrow to an unanchored amnesia,
but I am building a position to reach my small final—
something to respect, but not love, like money.
 
A feathered directional arrow to an unanchored amnesia—
I remember everything so I limit what I see.
Something to respect, but not love, like money,
signposts vs weathervanes, watersheds & ridgelines.
 
I remember everything so I limit what I see. 
A game of fundamentals smuggled in anagrams,
signposts vs weathervanes, watersheds & ridgelines—
objects are the bones of time, the stones just barely pink. 

Louise Peterkin, "The Night Jar"

 

Louise Peterkin, photograph by Scott Barron

Louise Peterkin is a poet and editor from Edinburgh. She is a recipient of a New Writers Award from the Scottish Book Trust. She is the co-editor along with Rob. A. Mackenzie of Spark: Poetry and Art Inspired by the Novels of Muriel Spark (Blue Diode, 2018). She is a poetry editor for the long running magazine The Interpreter’s House. Her first poetry collection The Night Jar was published by Salt in 2020. She works in the Law Library at the University of Edinburgh.

About The Night Jar, by Louise Peterkin

My debut poetry collection features a number of monologues. I envisaged the Night Jar of the title as a sort of Pandora’s Box containing the voices of various characters, sometimes wronged and misunderstood, sometimes defiant, occasionally villainous; multifaceted. Through these individual voices, I try to explore universal themes: religion, patriarchy, repression, lust, envy, sexuality.

Some of the personas are my own inventions – an inquisitive nun called Sister Agnieszka who embarks on a series of adventures, a wildly imaginative young woman called Innes living in a rural community. Other poems feature real-life historical figures or ones lifted from the pages of novels or from popular culture – Indiana Jones, Hitchcock, Renfield, HP Lovecraft, Indiana Jones and Jaws (The Bond movie henchman, not the shark!).

The characters within the collection are often trapped within literal or metaphorical prisons – asylums, institutions, small communities, domesticity. There is imagery throughout of boxes and keys and vivid description of setting – both landscapes and the intimate interiors of the narrator’s surroundings.

Many of the poems are influenced by my enduring fascinations with cinema, especially horror and film noir and old Hollywood, and engage with myth and fairy tale. 

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

From The Night Jar

Sister Agnieszka Runs Away to the Circus

Roll up! Big Top in view like a yummy mirage;
scalloped, candy-striped, as good as any church
in scale, in height for the swooping,
the twirling, the leaping and curving
for the love of God, the love
of the falling. The good folk here
fit you for your leotard.
Instructed all day in the fine arts: juggling,
knife throwing, tightrope walking.
You know now balance
is an act of sheer faith,
so spread those arms out in the style of the cross
on a frail bridge above, on the back of a horse.
After work, there is much to enjoy –
a consignment of massive animals,
the Ark-stink of dark and straw.
Lie with the strongman, all night long
if you care to, savour the taste of his body,
his shiny skin, his Colonel Blimp face.
Or console the associates of the sideshow
as they hover towards your implicit grace, soothe them,
let the conjoined twins envelop you like a moth.
Be fearless as you walk that line,
straight across, don’t look up or down.
And don’t succumb to your nightmare –
you know the one –
where the ground, the trailers,
the skin of the tent tremble,
and you run outside to see
a legion of nuns
come to collect you
come to take you home
lapping at the horizon like an army of penguins,
in their vengeance, Sister,
in their thousands.


Renfield

Not entomology, nor some god-aping
yen for a menagerie to bend to my will
but for the blood, the lifeblood sir! It flows
through the strata of the littlest things.
I was precious

at first, reticent. So when a bee marred
itself in a clumsy descent from the window
I let it curl for days like a dried flower
before I sampled. 

I smiled: it tasted liverish, autumnal.

I dusted the sill with sugar for a fly

I blackened the sill with flies for a spider

The spider would tempt down a bird

But I was impatient; I indulged.
I rattled a flea to my ear
then popped it in my mouth like a pill.
My fingers took on the tang of a bell,
faint arcs of gore under each nail

as if I had been playing a black pudding piano.
Small viscera
hung from my gums like a piñata.
I needed self-control if I wanted the sparrows!
I began once again to propagate.

Until the day the doctor entered my cell
to find the air and my hair full of birds.
And what he conveyed, not so much in words
but a sharpening glint in his eyes was a sort of . . .
respect. I wouldn’t say awe. No, not just yet.

Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana, "Sing me down from the dark"

 

Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana has an MA in Writing Poetry from Newcastle University and an MA in Japanese Language and Culture from Sheffield University. She lives in Newcastle and is module leader for the International Foundation programme in Humanities at Newcastle University. In the last year, she was published in The North, The Moth, Poetry Wales, Fenland Poetry Journal, The Frogmore Papers, Tears in the Fence, The Alchemy Spoon, Obsessed with Pipework and The Cannon’s Mouth. Online her work can be found in Anthropocene, The High Window and London Grip. 

She came third in the 2020 Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition and in the 2020 'To Sonnet or Not' Competition. In 2021, she was shortlisted for Winchester and Troubadour prizes and this year she had two poems shortlisted by Billy Collins for the Fish Prize. She read at the 2021 Aldeburgh and Winchester Poetry festivals, alongside poets Wendy Cope and Jacqueline Saphra, and performed as a featured poet at the 2022 Tears in the Fence festival, in Dorset. Her debut collection, Sing me down from the dark, is now out with Salt Publishing.

About Sing me down from the dark, by Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana

Sing me down from the dark explores the highs and lows of a ten-year sojourn in Japan, two international marriages, a homecoming, and the struggles of cross-cultural relationships. It is full of light and dark, as if the writer herself has been ‘caught off guard’ in the making of these poems.

You can read more about Sing me down from the dark on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read a sample poem from the collection. 

From Sing me down from the dark 

Body Language 

You rub up behind me as I wipe the Sainsbury’s shop. Like that time babysitting when Bruce, the randy labrador, stood on his hind legs and whined. I was fourteen and had to shut him outside. He scratched at the door. As I leave for my lockdown walk, you say: etchi kangaite ne. Etchi: horny; aroused. Four months ago I took down our wedding photos. That 31-year-old on Waimanolo beach didn’t feel like me. 

I put up a painting of turbulent waves by Bamburgh fort. The trigger was an argument about Machiko, your sister-in-law. You defended her awfulness to me. Because she is Japanese. And the lack of sex. What do you expect when you’ve chosen to be on a futon in the spare room? And going back to the wedding photos, it took you a month to notice. You said you were so sad you could write a poem. 

You say I am no longer sharp –– a ‘loan word’ for slim –– yet I thought the Japanese love the notion of shiawase butori, plump, happily married women. When I lose a few pounds you say: beijin ne natta ne –– you’ve regained beauty. Once upon a time, you were all that I could see. I watched you sleep. 

And the day Scottish Maggie died –– lovely mad Maggie, who made me tupperwares of butter tablet –– you wouldn’t shut up. Kept saying sorry. But you met her only once. I wanted to shout shut the fuck up. Sei Sensei says the Japanese are good at carrying boxes when you move house. Today, as I leave this house, you ask, with a teenagerish grin, if I’m having an affair. In the exact same way you ask if I’ve sorted the recycling. 

Aidan Semmens, "The Jazz Age: An Entertainment"

 

Aidan Semmens has been publishing poetry in small-press magazines since the mid-1970s, apart from a gap of around sixteen years from 1985 to 2001. A former winner of the Cambridge University Chancellor’s Medal for an English Poem, and a former chair of the Cambridge Poetry Society, he published his first pamphlet in 1978, but it was not until 2011 that his first full collection, A Stone Dog, appeared from Shearsman Books. Five more volumes have followed since, most recently The Jazz Age, one of the titles chosen by Salt Publishing to relaunch its Salt Modern Poets series. After a 43-year career in journalism, mostly as a sports sub-editor and writer, he now lives in Orkney, where he continues to work online.

About The Jazz Age, by Aidan Semmens

Having previously tended to write darker, more “difficult” poetry – The Book of Isaac is a sequence of “distressed sonnets,” while Life Has Become More Cheerful is largely about the Russian Revolution, its causes and outcomes – I was encouraged to produce this lighter, funnier and more accessible book by the response I got at readings to some of the early pieces in it, which confirmed the publisher’s description of it as “laugh-out-loud funny.” It consists of a loosely structured sequence of prose vignettes, surreal fantasies in which famous figures from (mostly) the past – sometimes singly, sometimes in unlikely pairings – make incongruous, anachronistic appearances in modern settings and situations, or in episodes from times not their own.

I can’t really say how I began writing these rather whimsical pieces, but once I did it became quite compulsive. Characters, scenes and phrases would suggest themselves to me on dog walks, so a whole poem / story (The Fortnightly Review billed them as “very short fictions”) would be fully composed by the time I got home; or they would take shape as I lay awake in bed at night. The process began purely as an entertainment for myself, so I was delighted to find others seemed to be entertained too. I can’t stop now, so there’s sure to be another volume some time, should anyone want it.

You can read more about The Jazz Age on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read four sample pieces from it. 

From The Jazz Age

La vie en rose

Tiring at last of gazing out over the streets and monuments of Haussmann’s new Paris from the heights of Montmartre, Eleanor of Anjou turns on her heel and walks away. She has always loved the phrase ‘she turned on her heel,’ since encountering it long ago in the pages of some otherwise forgotten gem of children’s literature, though there, no doubt, the pronoun was strictly male. In much the same way she has always loved the crunch of feet on gravel, and been drawn to heavy black boots of the kind she now wears, ever since watching as a child the ominous opening of an early episode of Z-Cars.

The first Churchills

Idly flicking through Facebook while she waits for the bus, Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, comes across something that causes her to spit her Wrigley’s spearmint in startled fury – a close-up of the Duke in intimate nightclub clinch with her till-now friend Marie-Antoinette. By the time she gets to Woodstock her status has changed from ‘In a relationship’ to ‘It’s complicated.’

A walk in the woods

Arrested by the sudden appearance of a dark shadow among the trees, Walt Disney halts in his tracks. The thing moves just slightly towards him, then stands its ground. He can tell it is bigger than him. It may be a bear or perhaps an unfeasibly large dark mouse with perfectly spherical protruding ears. Walt holds his breath. Somewhere behind him, Pocahontas has the whole scene in the telescopic sights of her high-velocity hunting rifle. She takes careful aim, trigger-finger poised. Are the crosshairs trained on the bear or on Walt? How accurate will her shot be?

Ferdinand Magellan misses his connection at Mombasa

He cannot understand why Africa is known as the Dark Continent. It does not seem dark to him. Indeed, its days seem almost unnaturally, not to say excessively, bright. He should not have elected to wear this shirt. The sun has burned a likeness of Che Guevara into the skin of his chest.