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.
 

Kerry Hadley-Pryce, "Lie of the Land"

 

Kerry Hadley-Pryce has had four novels published by Salt Publishing: The Black Country (Michael Schmidt Prize); Gamble (shortlisted for The Encore Award); God’s Country, and her fourth novel Lie of the Land (January 2025). She has a PhD in Creative Writing from Manchester Metropolitan University, teaches Creative Writing at the University of Wolverhampton, and has contributed to Palgrave’s Smell, Memory & Literature in the Black Country anthology. She has had short stories published in Best British Short Stories 2023 and Best British Short Stories 2024, Takahe Magazine, Fictive Dream and The Incubator and read by Brum Radio. 

About Lie of the Land, by Kerry Hadley-Pryce
Lie of the Land is a dark, domestic literary thriller set in the Black Country in the Midlands, UK.

When Rory and Jemma meet, Rory already has a girlfriend, but that doesn’t stop them getting together and, much sooner than Jemma would like, they’re buying their first house together in the heart of the grimy Midlands.

"The Rocks" is a run-down, "doer-upper" and right from the off, Jemma is reluctant and unhappy, far from ready for commitment. But there is something about the house that is both compelling and sinister, and the situation takes a darker turn when a terrible accident happens involving their new next door neighbours, forcing both Jemma and Rory to tackle their inner demons.

Themes of toxic relationships, secrets and deceit are intensified by a judgmental narrative voice which propels the plot to its even darker resolution.

You can read more about Lie of the Land on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the novel. 

From Lie of the Land
There is, she’ll say, a certain type of bird – she’s not sure which – nesting in the oak tree in the garden. It keeps repeating the same three notes. It must do this, this repetition, hundreds of times a day. Maybe it’s a blackbird, or a fieldfare, it’s that kind of shrill, persistent sound. She’ll admit she’s haunted by it, the sound of it. She hears it coming, the sound – she feels it coming – and it’s like a torture, and she’s formed the habit of stroking the palm of her right hand, stroking the broken life-line there, for comfort. There are eyes everywhere – to her, there is – and she’ll tell how she’s taken to standing in the new conservatory, the one they had built, looking out over the back garden. She’ll concede that Rory did a competent job of making it good, the garden. The plants have taken rooted well; there’s clematis starting to creep up the wall and wisteria against the fence, and the new turf is bedding in. She’ll say she can smell it, all that greenery. The concrete, the rocks, the mess, they’ve all gone. All cleaned up. But the secrets aren’t buried, she’ll say she knows this, they’re still there, somewhere. The oak tree, they thought about removing, is a feature now, and anyway, it seems there might be a family of those birds in there, and everyone, everything needs a home. Standing there, looking out, even with the feverish, constant three-note chorus going on and on, she’ll say she’s not sure she could bear to take the tree down now, not with the nest in there. She’ll say she’s not sure she could bear to destroy it. She’ll say this now.

But, see, people are strange, they’re capable of surprising us. And we’re talking about Jemma Crawford here. And we all know she’s destroyed enough already.

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.” 

Pascale Petit, "My Hummingbird Father"

 

Pascale Petit, photo by Derrick Kakembo

Pascale Petit was born in Paris, grew up in France and Wales and lives in Cornwall. She is of French, Welsh and Indian heritage. Her eighth poetry collection, Tiger Girl, from Bloodaxe in 2020, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection, and for Wales Book of the Year. A poem from the book won the Keats-Shelley Poetry Prize. Her seventh poetry collection Mama Amazonica, published by Bloodaxe in 2017, won the inaugural Laurel Prize in 2020, won the RSL Ondaatje Prize in 2018, was shortlisted for the Roehampton Poetry Prize, and was a Poetry Book Society Choice. Trained as a sculptor at the Royal College of Art, she spent the first part of her life as a visual artist. My Hummingbird Father is her first novel, published by Salt in 2024. Her website is here. 

About My Hummingbird Father
When artist Dominique receives a letter from her dying father, a reckoning with repressed memories and a pull for romantic and familial love sends shock waves through her life, as she journeys to Paris to face the places and events of her early years.

Balanced with visits to the Venezuelan Amazon, where Dominique explores a spiritual and loving longing (meeting a young guide, Juan), a raw and tender unfolding of this love story is a parallel to the uncovering of the shocking truth of Dominique’s birth, and her parents’ relationship.

Pascale Petit’s My Hummingbird Father is a beautifully lyrical debut novel in dialogue with Pascale’s Ondaatje and Laurel Prize-winning poetry collection, Mama Amazonica.

You can read more about My Hummingbird Father on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the novel.  

From My Hummingbird Father, by Pascale Petit
The letter trembles in Dominique’s hand as if she’s holding Angel Falls – a kilometre-long cataract shrunk to the size of a page. She folds the letter and it’s like trying to hold an archangel’s wing in her palm. She unfolds it and it fills the room. She’s creased it so many times that one line of Father’s address is faint. What if her tears blur his phone number? 

Now she’s dressing, no time for breakfast. She’s running for the tube to the French Consulate, which closes for emergencies at noon. They must renew her passport; she’ll make them do it. 

Now she has her passport and she’s running back home, to the phone, to let him know she’s coming. 

A week ago, she dreamt of him: she was back in Venezuela, at the base of Angel Falls. His face appeared titanic in the tumbling comets. She looked into the vapour as his face dissolved and reformed. First, she saw the lace of a wedding-veil, shreds of skin behind a veil, then his face turned towards her, and she saw her father. 

Dominique dials the number and listens to his phone ringing, and in the pause as she waits for him to answer there is this sound – far away and very near, as if she’s also got the Amazon on the line. A series of low grunts inside her ear, then an icy roar – deeper and longer than a jaguar’s. Howler monkeys swing through the space between them while time drops in light-year-long arrows. And she can wait. She has already waited thirty years. She is not afraid. Then a voice – French, formal, familiar, from the slash-and-burn past: 

‘I have thought of you every day,’ he says. It’s in French, so she has to check she’s heard right. He repeats, ‘I have thought of you every day, chérie.’ 

Dominique tries to absorb this word as he asks, ‘What time will you arrive?’ 

‘I’m catching the Eurostar tomorrow at ten,’ she says.

‘Can’t you come this evening?’ he asks.

‘I have to pack!’ she explains. And she has to tint her hair and wash and dry her best clothes. And there is a mask she has to conjure, to hide her hunting-face. 

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

Venetia Welby, "Dreamtime"

 

Venetia Welby is the author of two novels – Dreamtime, which featured in The Observer’s books of the year, and Mother of Darkness. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in The London Magazine, Irish Times, Spectator and anthologies Garden Among Fires and Trauma, among others. ‘Words Once Said’ was published in The Parracombe Prize Collection 2023, for which it was shortlisted. Venetia lives near Grantham with her husband, son and Bengal cat and can be found online here, on X: @venwelby and Insta: @vvwelby.

About Dreamtime

'So, where is he then, your dad?' The world may be on a precipice but Sol, fresh from Tucson-desert rehab, finally has an answer to the question that has dogged her since childhood. And not a moment too soon. With aviation grinding to a halt in the face of global climate meltdown, this is the last chance to connect with her absentee father, a US marine stationed in Okinawa. To mend their broken past Sol and her lovelorn friend Kit must journey across poisoned oceans to the furthest reaches of the Japanese archipelago, a place where sea, sky and earth converge at the forefront of an encroaching environmental and geopolitical catastrophe; a place battered by the relentless tides of history, haunted by the ghosts of its past, where the real and the virtual, the dreamed and the lived, are ever harder to define. 

In Dreamtime Venetia Welby paints a terrifying and captivating vision of our near future and takes us on a vertiginous odyssey into the unknown.

You can read more about Dreamtime on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the novel. 

From Dreamtime, by Venetia Welby

Sol notes an all-American smile of implausibly white teeth, many and strong, the troops perfectly drawn up for battle. Even the muscles in his face look powerful, his jaw broad and sharply defined, cheekbones underlining light green eyes and a low-fade haircut, dirty blonde with a sprinkling of steel. He’s mature: there’s something knowing about that grin, despite its openness. 

‘Uh, you don’t remember anything, do ya?’ The man puts his good ursine paw in front of his mouth, but Sol can tell he is still smiling by the lines that fan out from his eyes. Is he mocking her? ‘Hey, hey, don’t worry – there’s nothing to be worried about. You’re completely safe. Nothing happened, you can relax about that.’ 

Sol coughs. She brings herself upright and quickly and silently inventories herself. Her hair feels congealed, her body desiccated as the desert it came from. She still has her dress on – relief – though it’s up round her waist. 

Some guy Sol shot up with once in Tucson had the gall to imply that fucking should be an easy extension of her friendship, almost a perk of her presence, given the nature of her job. No, she explained, that couldn’t be further from the truth. Why is the word ‘escort’ so confusing to people? And in any case, sex is a valuable commodity, not to be given away freely. If it were given away freely, that – that, she emphasised – would be a seriously big thing. It would mean something. 

‘Like a “children of cobblers go unshod” kind of thing,’ the man replied before planting the needle in her shy green vein. He was British, she remembers. Dead now. 

She stares at the new man in front of her, careful to stay very still; a rabbit playing possum in a fox’s jaws. 

Chris Parker, "Nameless Lake"

Chris Parker is a screenwriter who has written for shows ranging from EastEnders and Coronation Street to Bedlam, a Sky TV drama series he co-created for Red Production Company. He is also a prolific animation writer,  with credits including Peppa Pig and Shaun the Sheep. He was born in South Wales and lives in Cambridge.

About Nameless Lake, by Chris Parker

Nameless Lake is about the unspoken pressures of gender and desire, told through the shifting dynamics of a lifelong friendship. Emma and Madryn grow up with dreams of escaping their seaside hometown, sustained by an obsession with photography and secret acts of vandalism. But adulthood brings its own limitations, and Emma yearns for connection beyond the constraints of her family. Drawn deeper into Madryn’s private life, Emma feels new possibilities awakening within herself, but when Madryn faces a backlash from her controlling partner, Emma must finally break out of her role as passive observer.

You can read more about Nameless Lake on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the novel. 

From Nameless Lake

When we carried out our next act, which was to break the arcade window, we were excited by the tiny slice of time we had given ourselves to carry it out – I had agreed to go with you to collect a textbook from a friend’s house, a round trip of no more than twenty minutes. I allowed myself only a few mouthfuls of the cider you carried in your bag so that I was affected less by the alcohol than the alien taste of orchard rot in my nose and throat. I was happy to stretch the swimming pool wristband across two of the seafront railing spikes because it meant the next job must be yours – to pull back the ball bearing you had found in your father’s toolbox until the royal-blue rubber turned pale and we had compressed thought and action into one sharp moment, not of decision, but of simply letting go, giving way to something inevitable so that the rubber band itself became the real culprit. 

Afterwards we threw ourselves down the concrete steps to the beach and scudded along the rocks until we were almost at the harbour, where the waves threatened to come and come without ever arriving, and I thought of a horse I had seen on the common when I was very small, a glorious and terrifying creature with a chestnut shine that appeared just at the moment when I happened to be thinking about horses, and I felt certain it had been made by the force of my own wishes

Julian Stannard, "Please Don't Bomb the Ghost of My Brother"

Julian Stannard has written nine books of poetry including Sottoripa: Genoese Poems (a bilingual publication, Canneto, 2018). His most recent collection is Please Don’t Bomb the Ghost of my Brother (Salt, 2023). He teaches at the University of Winchester, having spent many years working at the University of Genoa. He has been awarded the International Troubadour Prize for Poetry and nominated various times for the Forward. He has written critical studies of Fleur Adcock, Basil Bunting, Donal Davie, Charles Tomlinson and Leonard Cohen. He co-edited The Palm Beach Effect: Reflections on Michael Hofmann (CB editions, 2013). He reviews for Poetry Review and TLS.

About Please Don't Bomb the Ghost of My Brother

Please Don’t Bomb the Ghost of my Brother is an extended elegy for a brother lost some twenty years ago. The title poem is part of a sequence which is mindful of the war in Ukraine and conflict in general. The poet’s brother was a soldier. The elegiac vein considers the loss of friends and the painful years of the pandemic. Yet the collection is never overly solemn.  Strangeness drives the work forward in a number of ways. The work is both international in scope and alludes, on various occasions, to Gogol’s Dead Souls.

You can read more about Please Don't Bomb the Ghost of My Brother on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From Please Don't Bomb the Ghost of My Brother, by Julian Stannard

Please Don’t Bomb The Ghost of my Brother 

He’s riding a white horse.
I was going to say he was riding into the forest. 
It’s more like a wood, a large wood 
with sycamore trees and silver birch 
and if you look you can see a Weeping Willow.
There are deer in the undergrowth 
watching carefully 
and there are a lot of small animals.
He’s talking to the horse and patting its neck. 
There’s no one else around
and the wood has a beguiling music.
 
The horse breaks into a canter. 
Rabbits listen and twitch. 
An oyster catcher flies overhead. 
And coming into view a long-winged buzzard. 

 
The horse slows and steps into the river - 
He’s a good horse, my brother’s a good horseman.
Now they’re getting out on the other side 
where there are fewer trees. 
The ghost of my brother finds a glade. 
There must be a score of white horses.
There’s sun light and there’s a breeze. 
The horses drink from the water. 
And the ghosts, soldiers like my brother,
strip off and throw themselves into the lake.
Some lie on their backs. 

My brother has slipped from view.
I bet you he’s taken a big breath 
kicked his legs and plunged down deep.
The horses stand under a tree.
My brother’s horse is whinnying.

Zoom Time  

1

One of the most wretched things about lockdown 
was being zoomed into hundreds of well-lit
middle class homes whose impeccable taste    
made me feel down at heel, even shitty, 
as if I were Edward Lear sitting at the table of Lord Stanley 
trying to make the soup not trickle into my beard 
and called upon at any moment to entertain (a singular fellow.) 

There was an Old Person of Cromer who stood on one leg  
reading Homer … 

2

Artfully arranged bookshelves frame the background 
of every Zoomer, the libraries of the baby boomer -
Sometimes I catch the titles on the spines: Proudhon
The 120 Days of Sodom, Plato’s critique of humour.  

3

The undoubted advantage of a Zoom conference, 
as far as I can tell, is that no one 
has banned smoking although I have to admit 
that when I took out a cigarette which I did 
without thinking, I am after all sitting in my room, 
not book-lined but nevertheless containing
an impressive collection of revolving ashtrays,  
so as to lift the familiar stick to my wanting lips, 
I understood I was smoking in the face  
of a global plague and suddenly I was afraid.  

4

The don from Cambridge is explaining that the poem 
he is about to read, I fear it won’t be short, 
required the reading of one thousand five hundred books. 
I suspect that behind him in that donnish room 
we can see the one thousand five hundred books. 

5

Oh fellow Zoomers
how much lovelier to think of a theatre 
playing THE SHOW CAN’T GO ON!
An empty stage with blood-red seats  
and balconies with strips of gold. 
A man walks across the stage  
and stops and turns and smiles – 
Very old school, Ja, he says.
You think life disappointing? 
We have no troubles here! Here life is beautiful.
The girls are beautiful. the orchestra is beautiful.
And for a tantalising moment we can see the girls 
and we can hear the orchestra 
like the shadow of a coachman outside a hermitage. 

Death (please) thou shalt die.

6

There’s a young couple in one of the boxes 
sitting entwined in comfortable repose.
The man’s hand is on the woman’s knee
and I’m wondering what would happen 
if, in the comfort of their sitting room, 
they forget that in panoptic mode 
fifty pairs of eyes can see how 
knee touching leads to greater acts
of intimacy; their caresses more ardent, 
more urgent – O Corinna, Corona!
Someone has turned up the wattage, 
some unexpected Zoomer frottage …
  
7

I notice the professor from St Petersburg  
has left his chair and I lean forward to see 
if I can make out titles in that august language.   
He has several shelves of Gogol 
(for a fleeting moment I thought he had the tales 
of Nikolai Vasilyevich Google) 
which brings me a sudden unbridled joy. 
I too will leave my place, if only to return,
like Banquo at the feast of Zoom - 
and let the viewers admire my wall of nothing.

                                                         I saw the shadow of a coachman 
                                                         who with the shadow of a brush
                                                         did clean the shadow of a coach 

David Frankel, "Forgetting is How We Survive"

David Frankel was born in Salford and raised on the westerly fringes of Manchester. His short stories have been shortlisted in several competitions including The Bristol Prize, The Bridport Prize, The ALCS Tom-Gallon Trust Award, The Willesden Herald, and the Fish Memoir Prize. His work has been widely published in anthologies and magazines, and also in a chapbook by Nightjar Press. He also writes nonfiction exploring memory and landscape. Forgetting is How We Survive is his first collection. 

About Forgetting is How We Survive

A plane crashes. A boy drowns. A body is found on a dark lakeside. A woman tries to make sense of a strange memory from her childhood. A father searches for a missing dog – his only link to his lost son. A boy on the brink of adolescence embarks on a journey and gets more than he bargained for. Young lovers get their kicks trespassing in empty houses. A young man prepares to leave his hometown for the last time, and a giant sink hole threatens to swallow EVERYTHING.  

In Forgetting is How We Survive, people are haunted by ghosts of the past, tormented by doppelgangers and pining for the futures that have been lost to them. Each faces a turning point – an event that will move their life from one path to another, and every event casts a shadow. 

The stories in this collection come from another England in which earthy realism hides another world where anything is possible. 

You can read more about Forgetting is How We Survive on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the collection.

From Forgetting is How We Survive, by David Frankel

Ghost Story

More investigators come, so you tell your story again. Some believe you, others don’t. Some pay, others don’t. Sometimes you forget details, or the story gets muddled and you are forced to double back, retracing your steps. Sometimes you get excited as you describe what happened and, in your enthusiasm, you embellish — you are only human, after all. These variances create doubt, and you don’t want to be perceived as dishonest, so you begin to consider your words more carefully. Each time you recount the facts, your delivery becomes more refined. You know, now, how to project integrity, trustworthiness, and when to pause to allow the gravity of what you are saying sink in. You understand how to present your best side to the suspicious lens of the camera. 

Although you only ever wanted to tell the truth, you cannot remember what that strange mixture of feelings was like. You know only how it looked in your mind’s eye the last time you recalled it. Each time you recount what happened that day, you piece it together from what you remember saying the time before, the image resolving a little more with each re-telling, its edges becoming more clearly drawn, and you are comforted by this lack of doubt. So you tell the story of what you saw again; the memory of a memory of a memory. A ghost, if you will.

Jonathan Taylor, "Scablands and Other Stories"

Jonathan Taylor is a Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Leicester, where he directs the MA in Creative Writing. He is an author, lecturer, editor and critic. His books include the memoir Take Me Home (Granta, 2007), the novels Entertaining Strangers (Salt, 2012) and Melissa (Salt, 2015), and the poetry collection Cassandra Complex (Shoestring, 2018). His new book is a collection of short stories, written over many years, called Scablands and Other Stories (Salt, 2023). Originally from Stoke-on-Trent, he now lives in Leicestershire, with his wife, the poet Maria Taylor, and their twin daughters, Miranda and Rosalind. His website is here. 

About Scablands and Other Stories, by Jonathan Taylor

These are tales from the post-industrial scablands – stories of austerity, poverty, masochism and migration. The people here are sick, lonely, lost, half-living in the aftermath of upheaval or trauma. A teacher obsessively canes himself. A neurologist forgets where home is. A starving woman sells hugs in an abandoned kiosk.

Yet sometimes, even in the twilit scablands, there’s also beauty, music, laughter. Sometimes a town square is filled with bubbles. Sometimes sisters dream they can fly. Sometimes an old man plays Bach to an empty street, two ailing actors see animal shapes in clouds, a cancer survivor searches for a winning lottery ticket in her rundown flat. And sometimes Gustav Mahler lives just round the corner, hoarding rare records in a Stoke terrace.

You can see more details about Scablands and Other Stories on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an exclusive and complete short story from the collection. 

From Scablands and Other Stories

High Dependency

Then we went to the hospital. 

Then we came home. 

Then we went to the hospital. 

Then we came home. 

Then we went to the hospital. 

Our twins slept. A passing consultant mumbled something about vital signs, ups and downs. Machines bleeped, as if swearing to themselves. 

Then we went home. 

Then we went to the hospital.

Then we came home.

We ate a lukewarm takeaway. We ignored the phone. It kept ringing, ringing. We picked up the phone, and said: “Yes, yes, no, no, still no change.” We went to bed. 

We went to the hospital. In our dreams. 

We came home. In our dreams. 

We woke up and went to the hospital in reality. 

A couple of people visited. We got their faces and names mixed up with other faces and names. 

We came home. We watched World’s Worst Serial Killers on TV till three. 

We snored on the sofa. 

We woke up, had four hours in bed, then went to the hospital. 

Our twins cried, slept, pooed, slept, cried, pooed. 

Another parent muttered something about a case of meningitis on the ward. Then said we should always look on the bright side and pray – though whether to Jesus or Monty Python, she didn’t specify. 

In the afternoon, the neonatal nurses dimmed the lights and played Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik to rows of premature babies. 

We went home. A lightbulb in the hallway had blown, so we had to change it. It blew again. The microwave burnt our tea. We tried to wash up, but the hot water was off. We turned the boiler off and on again. It still didn’t work. We rang a plumber, but couldn’t find a time when he could come and fix it and we’d be in. We rang another plumber. And another. We cried. We went to bed. 

Next morning, we went to the hospital. Without a shower. 

A passing consultant flicked through the twins’ notes, mumbled something about vital signs, downs and ups. Machines bleeped, as if swearing to themselves. 

We sat in the cafeteria for breakfast, slurping lukewarm soup. One of us went to express. The other stayed sitting for a while. 

When we both got back to the ward, they’d dimmed the lights, and were playing the prems Eine Kleine Nachtmusik again, orchestrated for strings and machinic bleeps. 

We reached through holes in an incubator, touched a hand the size and texture of a petal.

One day, we whispered, one day, in years to come, we will play you Eine Kleine Nachtmusik and it will trigger in you something distant, something infinitesimal, like an infection, like cells dividing, like the tiny zigzags on a monitor, the bleep-bleep-bleeps which will never stop. Must never stop. The four of us, we will not be stuck in this twilight world forever. There will be a future, not just an ever-recurring present, believe me – a future, years away, when we are not here, trapped in this enchanted circle. Then you will hear Mozart’s little night music, and it will remind you of something you can’t recall, something beyond memory’s horizon – it will teleport your unconscious back here, for a fleeting moment. A bleep, no more, and then gone. 

The petal closed.

We went home. 

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.