Nigel Pantling, "A Foreign Country"

Nigel Pantling served as an officer in the British Army of the Rhine during the Cold War and in Northern Ireland during "The Troubles," as private secretary to Home Office Ministers under the Thatcher Government, and as a merchant banker in the years of rampant mergers and acquisitions of the 1990s. For the 25 years since he has been a strategic adviser to company chief executives. Nigel lives in north London and Somerset. A Foreign Country is his fifth poetry collection. 

About A Foreign Country, by Nigel Pantling
A Foreign Country takes us to some strange places - the exotic, the imaginary and the rediscovered past - and each serves up a heady local brew, equal parts memory, invention, wit and menace. Here, North Korean tourists rub shoulders with Syrian adventurers, the newly dead with a City lothario, Popeye and Olive Oyl with Cold War warriors. Surprising and unsettling by turns, these poems are a whistle-stop journey through different times, countries and customs, enriched by deep personal experience.  

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

From A Foreign Country

Meeting the General

He’s waiting for me at a reinforced bunker,

a few miles west of Panmunjon.

His arm round my shoulder,

he leads me to the border viewpoint.

He sets out the geography and the history, 

adjusting my perspective along with my binoculars, 

and enlightens me on American imperialism.

We get on well.

Later, his gold tooth glints

when he smiles for the one permitted photograph.

He hopes that I will return soon 

to visit a unified country.

He shakes my hand for the second time,

lights another American cigarette, glints again.

Bosra 

I’m up in the gods, not literally, 

not with Bel or belligerent Baalshamin, 

or Astarte or Atargatis, givers of fertility, 

but theatrically, on the fifty-first tier 

of a semicircle of black basalt blocks. 

I’m sitting quite alone under the sun, 

without benefit of the cloth shading 

or misty spray of perfumed water 

that cooled second century patrons, 

so all I can manage is to stay still 

and watch tourists from a waiting bus 

walk purposefully on from the wings, 

and imagining themselves unseen 

hurtle through some Shaw or Wilde 

or mangle “all the world’s a stage”, 

and thanks to the acoustic skills of 

Roman architects I hear each word. 

Until the heat becomes too much 

and I make my way down to give 

my one-man rendering of Godot.

Kim Moore, "What the Trumpet Taught Me"

 

Kim Moore, photograph by Lorna Elizabeth

Kim Moore‘s first full length collection The Art of Falling was published by Seren in April 2015 and won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. She won a New Writing North Award in 2014, an Eric Gregory Award in 2011 and the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2012. Kim was one of the judges in the 2018 National Poetry Competition, along with Kei Miller and Mark Waldron and a judge for the 2020 Forward Prizes.

Her first pamphlet If We Could Speak Like Wolves was a winner in The Poetry Business Pamphlet Competition, judged by Carol Ann Duffy. If We Could Speak Like Wolves was chosen as an Independent Book of the Year in 2012 and was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Pamphlet Award and the Lakeland Book of the Year Award. Kim’s latest full length collection is All the Men I Never Married (Seren, 2021). 

Kim is originally from Leicester. Her website is here. 

About What the Trumpet Taught Me, by Kim Moore 

Award-winning poet Kim Moore studied music and was a trumpet teacher for several years. What the Trumpet Taught Me is a collection of vivid and immediate snapshots, from first lessons to music college, and from teaching the trumpet in schools and running a brass band, right through to playing in working men’s clubs in a ten-piece soul band.

Meditative and often funny, these short prose pieces are always open to experience and clear-eyed about the vagaries of class-prejudice and the intricacies of gender in a predominantly male world. The trumpet is the central character that we always return to as we are asked to consider the pivotal role of music in both an individual and social history.

What the Trumpet Taught Me features watercolour illustrations by Emma Burleigh.

From What the Trumpet Taught Me

My parents take us to a brass band, recommended by my new brass teacher, Mr P, as a place we can get an instrument for free. I ask for a cornet, after watching a young girl playing one with a pearl-like sheen. My sister is given a tenor horn. The conductor, who says we can call him by his first name, W, tells us to join in with the rehearsal, though we cannot read music. I’m told to sit next to a girl with a fox-like face.

I don’t understand why the music in front of me has numbers above each note, rather than letters. I don’t understand that the numbers correspond to the valves I should be pressing down. I don’t even know they are called valves. I’m happily playing along, pressing the valves whenever I feel like it. I don’t know a conductor can hear one person playing a wrong note, even when there are thirty other people playing. Eventually, when I find this out, it seems as if it’s a superpower, and one I’ll never possess.

W is an elderly man with bone-white hair. He waves his arms, urging us onward. Although it doesn’t seem as if anybody is looking at him, or noticing what he’s doing, I understand he is important, that the weather of the room starts and finishes with him. 

Jim McElroy, "We Are the Weather"

 

Jim McElroy is winner of the 2021 Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing, the 2021 Poetry Business International Book and Pamphlet Competition, and the 2020 winner of the Francis Ledwidge Poetry Award. In 2019 he was selected for Poetry Ireland Introductions, runner-up in the Bridport Poetry Prize, and awarded an Individual Artist Award by Arts Council NI. He has been shortlisted for the Rialto Pamphlet Award, Gutter Edwin Morgan Prize, Bridport Poetry Prize, Cúirt New Writing Prize, runner-up in the Fingal Poetry Prize and nominated for Pushcart and Forward prizes. His winning pamphlet, We Are The Weather, is published by Smith|Doorstop.

About We Are the Weather, by Jim McElroy

We are the Weather is the winner of The Poetry Business International Book & Pamphlet Competition 2021. It is a mature and coherent first collection by a distinctive and compelling writer. The poems present vivid and often pungent scenes of rural life in exuberant and hardworking language, with childhood and family relationships at their heart.

You can see more details about We Are the Weather on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From We Are the Weather

Pouring the yard 

We shovel sand and stones into the chunter,

shake in cement. The gravel scratch 

of crushed aggregate scrapes 

in the mixer’s churn; hosed-in water 

dampens the crackle of the mortar’s 

lime reaction. The steel belly tilts 

to the turn of the dump wheel, 

remade earth slithers from its iron pout, 

slumps on the ground, buries 

hoof pock, boot print, rut of cartwheel. 

The concrete’s moist slurp greying our boots, 

our shovels shunt its mass across 

the sections, spread its clad to the party wall 

of the link shed; tamper planks 

race the hardening time, slap it flat, 

agitate in ridges, angle gullies for run-off. 

The poured yard drying, hosed-on gallons 

slake its drouth, seep to the darkness beneath. 

Bunkered earth gulps its pallid leech; 

bugs, slaters, scuttle for cover, worms, grubs,  

squirm deep, root growth diverts for light. 

Concrete ripples stiffen across the screed, 

its load bearing ridges grip for tyres.

 

Weatherbeaten 

My Father took the weather personally, 

watched buds unfurl in whispers, 

the low sun fix its eye on sticky petals. 

The skies spring cleaned, let him work 

in quick skifts. The clouds swept out rains, 

watched his retreats to the shed. 

Its tinny discussions beat the roof, 

spouts gushed to gable barrels, overflowed 

to Buchan traps. Downpours made a river 

of the Hill Road. On Radio Four, 

Athlone, he listened for forecasts, saw 

the mercury drop on the hall barometer. 

The wet patter eased, wider isobars of highs 

circled in the pulsed ripple of puddles. 

The sun cast its width, swole blisters 

on road tar; bullocks snogged the lusty grass. 

On the breeze, the pollen whoosh of rye, 

and boysadear, the hay fever sneeze. 

Then the mood swing: June’s parched glare 

lowered the reservoir, caked earth 

cried out for water; tightening isobars 

swooped, winds swirled, reeled him in. 

His eyes would peel the horizon 

as the wielded knives of Siberian easts 

hacked his cheeks, ripped off petal and leaf. 

In the verge, grounded leaves buried each other. 

Sarah Barnsley, "The Thoughts"

Sarah Barnsley grew up in the Midlands where her dad was a firefighter. A winner in the Poetry Society Members’ Poems Competition (2021, 2018), her work has appeared widely in magazines including Poetry Wales, The Rialto and The White Review. Other publications include a pamphlet, The Fire Station (Telltale Press, 2015), co-editorship of Truths: A Telltale Press Anthology (2018), and literary criticism. Sarah is Senior Lecturer in English and American Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London, Contributing Editor to The Understory Conversation and lives in Hove. Her website is here. 

About The Thoughts 

An assured and inventive debut, The Thoughts explores different manifestations of intrusive thoughts as part of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) before navigating through the twists and turns of recovery and love. These poems inhabit therapists’ treatment rooms, waiting rooms, and everyday documents, appearing in such varied forms as emails, research proposals and kids’ puzzles. Compassionate and at times painfully humorous, The Thoughts is an act of advocacy, giving voice to critically underrepresented experiences of illness through poems that are as peculiar and creative as they are arresting.

You can read more about The Thoughts on the publisher's website here. You can read a review of The Thoughts on Everybody's Reviewing here. Below, you can read a sample poem from the collection. 

From The Thoughts, by Sarah Barnsley

This horse

There’s this horse
that can’t eat apples.
It’s not that the horse
doesn’t like apples
or that its castle of teeth
can’t crush them
or that its leather-satchel tongue
can’t collect the bits
or that its upturned welly of a throat
can’t tramp down the chunks – 

it’s that one day,
as it drew up an apple
of no distinction,
the horse had a thought:
What if I choke on this?
And the more the horse tried
to swat the thought away,
the more the apple grew,
and the more the thought grew

until the horse felt it had Jupiter
and all its moons in its mouth
and it couldn’t breathe
and it was gagging
and its owner tried to reason with it,
but the horse wouldn’t be told
and over the course of a year
the horse visited the vet
every Wednesday at 12

and the vet advised the horse
to try an exercise where the horse
had to choose a small globe 
from a bagged assortment
and hold each one in its mouth
in a series of graded steps:
a robin’s egg for one minute, 
a beetroot for two, 
a cannonball for three;

and the horse had to 
commit to the process
and tolerate the discomfort
and by all means note down 
its thoughts and feelings
but not respond to them
and none of this worked
and the only thing for the horse
to do was to eat oats and practise 
radical acceptance
of apples as something eaten
by other horses 
in another place and time
as if all the apples in the world
were locked behind
glass cabinets
in a museum
with all the other things 
the horse’s thoughts had
forced it to give up: 
cool pools, 
hugs of mud, 
low-hedged fields.

Jonathan Davidson, "A Commonplace"

Jonathan Davidson, photo by Lee Allen

Jonathan Davidson was born in 1964 and grew up in the Didcot, South Oxfordshire. He has lived for many years in Coventry and now lives in Birmingham. He won an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors in 1990 and his first collection of poetry, The Living Room, was published by Arc Publications in 1994. This was followed, seventeen years later by Early Train (Smith|Doorstop, 2011). He has also published three poetry pamphlets, Moving the Stereo (Jackson’s Arm, 1993), A Horse Called House (Smith|Doorstop, 1997) and Humfrey Coningsby: Poems, Complaints, Explanations and Demands for Satisfaction (Valley Press, 2015), and an e-book Selected Poems (Smith|Doorstop, 2014). His combination of memoir and criticism, On Poetry, was published by Smith|Doorstop in 2018 and his latest collection is A Commonplace (Smith|Doorstop, 2020).

He has had eight radio plays broadcast on BBC Radio Three and Radio Four, along with radio adaptations of Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns and W. S. Graham’s The Nightfishing on BBC Radio Three. His stage adaptation of Mary Webb’s novel Precious Bane was produced by Interplay Theatre and toured extensively in 2008 and 2009. He has produced six poetry-theatre works, his most recent touring shows were The Hundred Years’ War (touring in 2014/15) and Towards the Water’s Edge (touring in 2016/17), both co-productions with Bloodaxe Books and the Belgrade Theatre Coventry. Jonathan's website is here. 

About A Commonplace

By Jonathan Davidson

Poems – my own and other people’s – are scattered across my life. They are in books and notebooks, folded in wallets and hidden in desk drawers; a few are memorised. They are as commonplace as food and drink. I wouldn’t want to live without them, although I dare say I could. They will be the last things I forget when I have forgotten everything else. Some of these poems are gathered together in this book, A Commonplace.

A Commonplace is a collection of my own poems interleaved with other people’s poems, poems I admire and that give solace or inspiration. As there are things I want to say about my own poems, and about those by other poets, I have included an on-going commentary. This isn’t something I’ve done before, but it has made me think about how poetry is released into the world.

You can order A Commonplace here. Below, you can read two poems from the book. 

 

Borders

They are bringing back the borders.

So a night train whines to a dead halt

and in the blazing darkness of suspicion

uniformed men – just doing a job – thump

through doors and fill the corridors

with their orders and mistrust.

They are looking for the others, not you.

But still, your eyes look to your shoes

in need of spit and polish. You hope

they do not stop. They stop.

You hear the hum of electricity.

Voices demand papers. And it begins.

 

Live Broadcast

Too late to go out and nowhere to go

anyway, I content myself with this

celestial but dis-concerting music,

a Brandenburg by J S Bach, which they enjoy

in London very much. Your message says

you’re sitting down to listen to it too,

or busying yourself with things that must

be done, or watching as the last high clouds

grow dark. Although we are alone the gods

of digital transmission have ensured

the sound they give to me they give to you.

Now all that is between us is the music,

which is not anything at all, but keeps

our little minutes and our little thoughts

in its design, so that we can be known

each to the other, keeping time, until

the final notes have died away and grand

applause releases us back to our selves.