Anne Caldwell, "The Language of Now"

 

Anne Caldwell is a poet, editor and arts collaborator based in Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire. She lectures in Creative Writing for the Open University. She has been described as one of "fifty-one world class prose poets" in the international anthology, Dreaming Awake: Prose Poetry from Australia, the USA and United Kingdom (Madhat Press, 2022). She has gained a national and international reputation for this genre. She has four previous collections of poetry, including Neither Here nor There (SurVision), which won a James Tait Prize. 2024. Anne’s work is featured in The Book of Bogs (Little Toller Press, 2025). She had an Arts Council Award in 2024 to write about peatlands in West Yorkshire and Finland with filmmaker Lewis Landini and Dance Artist Inari Hulkkonnen. Her website is here. 

About The Language of Now, by Anne Caldwell
The Language of Now is a prose poetry collection firmly rooted in a northern sense of place and eco-poetics, as well as an exploration of the turbulence of illness and climate change. Prose poetry is brilliant at holding contradictions and juxtapositions: qualities that are exploited in a search for an intimate relationship with the natural world. Caldwell explores childhood memories, the fragility of landscapes both rural and urban, and the impact of the pandemic, where our connection to each other was fragmented and stretched. The prose poems combine the real and the fairytale, memoir and myth, where humans transform into birds and language is lost and found. She sees poems as small acts of resistance. As the title poem suggests, "The language of now is short and full of gaps." Here is darkness, but also a sense of playfulness in the writing, as the poems interweave the down-to-earth cadences of prose and the musical intensity of poetry. 

You can read more about The Language of Now on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample prose poems from the book. 

From The Language of Now

Wasp’s Nest 

I wanted to be a goat when I was young. Agile and cloven-hooved. My days were spent poking cowpats with a stick, sending clouds of bluebottles into the hot sky as the hay meadows chirped with crickets and grasshoppers. One evening there was an empty wasp's nest in Nana Clarke’s attic. Paper whorls, like a handmade balloon. I went and sat with it, amongst trunks of musty linen and love letters, the regrets and hopes of her thrifty, wartime generation. I'd always thought of Nana as a good witch, full of herbal remedies and canny wisdom. Neighbours had her down as a complete and utter crackpot. What would she have made of Brexit, Long Covid, Climate Catastrophe? Would these words have been barbs in her throat, as she pursed her lips and searched for marshmallow and lemon verbena? Perhaps the wasps were still swarming out there, looking for a place to shelter. I listen for the thrumming of wings, the ragged edges of our lives. 

Widdop Gate, High Summer

Mowing weather and a blue tractor races across Shakleton, fields striped with drying grass. The moor is rectangles of heather burnt or shorn, year after year. I’m trying to forge a path through the bog, King Common Rough below me and the sparkle of Graining Water. It’s a hot day up on the tops. Meadow browns flit between sedge and rushes, bracken carpets the valley sides. The wind sings, no turbines, this land is egg-shell delicate.

Goldfinch break cover, crickets chirp, lambs bleat for mothers. I think of my boy gone to the Far East looking for adventure, seeking out the last scraps of Sumatran rainforest, searching for Orangutan before they’re all gone.

Here, the bog’s pleasures are quieter. If we healed its wounds, peat would soothe our over-heating earth like honey. Moss feathers boulders, bilberry nestles in crevices. I discover lichen circles blooming on stone — a map of the whole world in miniature.

Elleke Boehmer, "Ice Shock"

 

Elleke Boehmer is the author of a wide range of books including fiction, biography, award-winning history and literary criticism. She has published five novels to date, including Screens Against the Sky (short-listed David Higham Prize, 1990), and The Shouting in the Dark (co-winner of the EASA Olive Schreiner Prize, 2015). Her two short-story collections are Sharmilla, and Other Portraits (2010), and To the Volcano (2019, with "Supermarket Love" commended for the Australian Review of Books Elizabeth Jolley Prize). Her work has been translated into many languages, including German, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, Arabic, Thai and Mandarin. Her novels Bloodlines (2000) and Nile Baby (2008) were published in Mandarin in China in 2024. Her website is here.

About Ice Shock, by Elleke Boehmer
The year is 2010. An Icelandic volcano has thrown an ash cloud into the atmosphere and, across the world, planes have stopped flying. Leah and Niall, twenty-somethings in love, find themselves strangely restless, and set out on different but parallel paths; Niall travels to a polar station in Antarctica, where the strange, lonely beauty of the ice mirrors the fragility of his hopes, while Leah studies writing in England, surrounded by tradition yet struggling to find her place.

Separated by thousands of miles, but determined to stay connected, they learn that true communication can be as fragile as the melting landscape between them. Ice Shock is a love story that asks what it means to stay close even when we are far apart – and how love can endure, in a world changing catastrophically by the day.

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

From Ice Shock
Leah Nash was not looking for love. Love was the last thing she needed. That winter morning, she wanted only to get out of town and head home.  

But then the trains south from Edinburgh were cancelled. Floods on the line. So here she was at the coach station, ten minutes to spare, dragging her backpack up into the London coach.

Yesterday’s interview had taken everything. It had felt like her life depended on the outcome—the fulfilment of every dream she’d ever had. The shelf of books she would one day write. 

But had they liked her? The seven blank faces at the long table gave away nothing. She had blundered on through, ears ringing.

"Sorry, could you repeat that, please?" she’d asked twice, three times. "I didn’t quite get the question." 

Niall Lawrence wasn’t looking for love either. Leant up against the coach window, he was trying to get home, too. Kent, via London. But he did like to be loved. That idea of a love-match, a soul-mate—this past weekend something had changed about that. He’d been up north for a school friend’s wedding. Steph, who was marrying Rosie. He’d watched the couple take their first dance, looking into each other’s eyes, faces glowing, never dropping their gaze, and he’d thought—amazing. 

So if someone this early morning had asked him about love—say this nameless stranger with red-brown hair in the seat beside his, asleep on his shoulder, uninvited—then he might have said yes, carefully. "But," he might have added, "I don’t think I’ve met them yet." 

The stranger stretched her arm across his waist.

Inside her evaporating sleep, the body under her arm was warm, warmer than her own. 

Niall felt her breath on his face, feathering his cheek.

A jolt. The coach engine coughed deep and low under their feet. Leah opened her eyes, rubbed her temple. She saw pale eyes, somehow bearably close-by. Curious, maybe quizzical. The man they belonged to must have been cradling her for some time. She was slumped half across his chest. 

Beyond his head, she saw London’s brown fuzz begin to thicken along the horizon.

James Nash, "Notes of Your Music"

James Nash is a writer and poet. A long-term resident of Leeds, his third collection of poems, Coma Songs, was published in 2003 and reprinted in 2006. He has two poems in Branch-Lines (Enitharmon Press, 2007), among fifty contemporary poets, including Seamus Heaney and U. A. Fanthorpe. Since 2012, his poetry has been published by Valley Press, beginning with selected poems, A Bit of An Ice Breaker, and his first collection of sonnets, Some Things Matter. Cinema Stories, celebrating the history of cinema in Leeds and written with fellow poet Matthew Hedley Stoppard, came out in 2015. A Bench for Billie Holiday was published in 2018, followed by his third collection of sonnets, Heart Stones, in November 2021. Notes of Your Music, a collection of sonnets bookended by two older-free verse poems, was published in June 2025. James's website is here.

About Notes of Your Music, by James Nash
In his fourth collection of sonnets – bookended by two free-form pieces – James Nash sets out to celebrate what may be gone, or flag up what might be celebrated before it goes. From the simple music of the bottle bank (a favourite task), to the biggest questions of the human experience, the poet's gentle, perceptive gaze illuminates all it surveys, delighting and moving in equal measure.

You can read more about Notes of Your Music on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read three sample poems from the collection. 

From Notes of Your Music

Petals – a preface

Remember the music we used to play?
The instruments still hang on the wall,
a trellis of brass roses
or an exotic vine with bugle flowers.
Like plumbing but not joined up,
and silent now.
And the lid of the piano is down

The tunes still prickle in my blood,
and though blooming less
each successive year,
have kept a scent of you.
And the truth is
that I have grown older and loved others,
but I shall always carry some notes of your music
in my pockets, like petals,
wherever I go.

1: This Resolution

This resolution to write more, to chase
Away the shadows, comes with fear.
I hope for a kindly, creative space
Where I can heal myself, where I can dare
To think and write again, to cast off
The fractures of the past, or celebrate
Their complex patterns, the tightly woven stuff
Of a lived life, that can chafe and fret.
For it comes with dangers, the possibility
Of a dark alley mugging, the bruised skin
And the traps of a past life that I can’t foresee
That might not free but chain my nightmares in.
But I will try to keep this promise that I give
And explore the life I’ve had, and now live.

 
2:  The promise

The parrot says, "Good morning," from its pen,
The menu is open in front of us
And I am in the world of choice again,
A solace, and all its promises.
If I were a doctor I would harness more
The power of self-prescribing, it brings
A sense of autonomy, of growth, the core
Is stimulated again and my tired heart sings.
It gives my self a chance to recalibrate,
To sift through what I feel and what I know,
Let melancholy in and then what fate
May choose to find for me, to show.
I rattle like buttons in a toffee tin,
I need to sort them. So let me in.

Caroline Bath, "The Life We Make"

Caroline Bath’s first novel was published by Valley Press in December 2023. She also writes poetry, and in 1999 was awarded an MA in Poetry with distinction from Huddersfield University for her thesis on Irish poetry with a particular focus on Louis MacNeice. She has a professional background as a teacher and university lecturer in Education and Early Childhood and is the author of several academic journal articles which deal with the ethics of care and young children’s participation. She is particularly interested in family issues and in 2015 she hosted a blog about the life of her elderly father and the care he received at the end of his life. You can see it here. She currently hosts a blog which discusses the issues raised by and about her novel. You can see it here. 

About The Life We Make, by Caroline Bath
Against a backdrop which is full of convincing and vivid period detail, The Life We Make features a man haunted by desertion, as well as several strong and complex women characters, as seen from a feminist perspective. Because it revolves around the question of why generations unwittingly follow similar paths, the characters are multi-layered and often introspective as events play out and they attempt to build and rebuild their lives. 

The Life We Make is essentially the story of Arthur and Agnes, a grocer and milliner, who marry somewhat in haste, following the emigration of Arthur’s family to Canada. They go through the motions of married life but often misunderstand each other. When Arthur is conscripted, the rupture burns a hole in him, and upon return from the war, despite his best intentions to be a good husband and father, he gambles and slides into mounting debts.

Whilst Arthur struggles with unrequited loss and money problems, Agnes discovers an innate capacity to be independent, so that when Arthur moves the family to Bournemouth, she returns home to rebuild her own life. The marriage limps on, despite their changing roles, but when another of Arthur’s jobs, ends in unemployment, he reaches the limits of financial and emotional humiliation and leaves his home and family for good.

In the final part of the novel, the focus of the story switches to 1941 and onto their youngest daughter, Eva, now 18, who has fallen for Cambridge scholar, David. She immerses herself in a secretarial job in London and witnesses the drama of the blitz, but the war triggers more despair over her father’s disappearance, and she finally confronts her mother and elder sister about what happened to him. As she learns more about her parents’ marriage, she decides to reject David’s proposal and find her father - but also to continue in her mother’s independent footsteps and build a career for herself.

You can read more about The Life We Make on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the novel's "Prologue." 

From The Life We Make
Whenever I feel worried like this, I make a cave with my covers and stay there for a few minutes. The air is warm, sounds are muffled, and the dark keeps me safe. People don’t realise that nine-year-olds get worried, but I’ve been worried for as long as I can remember – and I remember a lot – not quite being a baby, but I remember being small and seeing grown-up legs coming and going, then, suddenly, strange faces looming at me when I was picked up. It was scary at first, but Daddy was there, holding me and I knew his face. It had creases going in different directions which gathered around his wide mouth when he smiled at me. Most of his front teeth were white, but I could always see a blackened tooth at the back when he opened his mouth, pretending that he was surprised to see me. Bunny, where have you been hiding? he would say, his whole face a smile, and his mouth open – I always giggled which made him clutch me tighter. Then it was good to see faces, not legs – and giggling at the right time meant that other faces crowded in behind his, and I would bathe in a sea of smiles. I could bring happiness to the world, so long as he was there to lift me up. 

I’m too big for him to pick me up now, he tells me, but at least he’s here again. There have been times when he wasn’t here, and Mummy wouldn’t say his name. Helen would tell me that he was coming back when his job finished, so I learnt to wait. Then, after I waited, he would come back and make me happy again, and I’d go with him to buy cigarettes, as if he’d never been away. Mummy was furious, but I was relieved that he’d found us because I wasn’t sure that he knew where we lived after we left the flat with the hiss of the sea. I wondered if I’d made up that place, but when he came back, he told me about it, and it became real again – as he did. His face had a few more creases and his hair started further back than I expected, but his teeth were the same. 

When Daddy came back that last time, that was when I started to grow fast, and my worries got bigger. Everyone kept saying how much I’d grown, which was embarrassing. So, I would sink into my knees and avoid people’s eyes – at least the eyes of the people I didn’t want to meet which was, at that point, most people. Now, I’m better at looking them in the eye. He taught me that people back off if you look straight back at them. It doesn’t make sense, but he was right – you look up, and they leave you alone. It’s like magic. 

Ilaria Boffa, "Beginnings & Other Tragedies / Inizi e Altre Tragedie"

Ilaria Boffa is an Italian poet and sound recordist. She writes bilingual poetry and she has published four poetry collections to date. She is one of the eight authors included in the North East American Publication Writing in a Different Language, Vol. XL 2018. Her sono-poems, which combine poetry and field recording, have been played at international experimental sound art festivals and radio events (among others, Radiophrenia and Clyde Built Radio both in Glasgow). Audio-video installations, produced in collaboration with international video-artists, have been exhibited at the Mahalla Festival Murmuration 2021 in Turkey, the Nature & Culture Poetry Film Festival 2021 in Sweden, at the !Flick! 2023 International Film Festival in the US and MK Architektur Exhibition 2023 in Germany. She is a permanent member of EAPS international collective working with poetry and sound art and she is collaborating with the Swiss theatre group Collettivo Treppenwitz. 

About Beginnings & Other Tragedies / Inizi e Altre Tragedie
Beginnings & Other Tragedies / Inizi e Altre Tragedie is a bilingual book-length poem, with both texts written by the original poet, offering a choral experience of a present-future Venice where almost all hope seems lost – except for that offered by poetry itself, and the "beginners" who care about our planet and dream of making a change.

Drawing on nature poetry, dystopian fiction and Greek tragedy (three characters voice the verses: the chorus, "they" and "she"), the book reimagines scientific and ecological language as sites of beauty, with the power to change reality; seen here as something malleable and unstable, to be made and remade. 

Through confronting the most painful, discomforting parts of the world and ourselves, this long poem reminds us why "it's good to think difficult things," and why it may be time to repurpose ourselves and start again. 

A soundscape for the book has been recorded and produced by the author. Listen here. You can read more about Beginnings & Other Tragedies / Inizi e Altre Tragedie on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read excerpts from the book. 

From Beginnings & Other Tragedies / Inizi e Altre Tragedie, by Ilaria Boffa

English

(chorus)

Because of necessity it happens to live

because of belongingness it happens to become

(they)

Ode for the Beginners

Whatever comes to pass

time will file the time

and this extraordinary wait.

The drama and the epic

the events that befall

the beginners

invoke glory and rage.

Because of necessity

they happen to live

because of belongingness

they happen to become.

There’s no difference between

starting and starting over for

what was or wasn’t done

cycles with the stringency

of a climate loop.

And the silence of hesitation

saturates the air condensing

inside the mask

accelerating the dew point.

It muffles this new normal.

Beginners challenge

the so called tragedy

of the time horizon

in which people can’t imagine

the suffering of the humans

of the future and

nothing much gets done

on their behalf.

Beginners are seamless

and they care.

Some of them give in.

… 

Tintoretto paintings

at Scuola Grande di San Rocco

also suffer, hung and apart

from a fallen world.

They survive dazed

in their rooms.

And so St Mary of Egypt

sits contemplative

her book on her lap

her gaze upon the bush.

The mesh of humans, in-humans and post-humans

all their devices, languages and frequencies

crossing halls

up and down the stairs

next of kin and familiar strangers.

When did we lose

our sense of marvel?

…

(she)

Daylight saving time is finally over.

As the rain pours and spatters

the dogs with mud

magpies seek shelter and give way

to snails and earthworms

to their composure.

A cumulonimbus above the hills

we start running.

The real issue is rhythm.

On the leash they pull asynchronous

and the rubbery noise of the wellies

is not promising.

I might crash to the ground

and be dragged by these two furies or

the river in flood could overflow and

have a memorable ending in store.

Italian

(coro)

Per necessità succede di vivere

per appartenenza succede di divenire

(loro)

Ode a Coloro che Iniziano

Qualunque cosa accada

il tempo archivierà il tempo

e questa straordinaria attesa.

Il dramma e l’epopea

gli eventi che accadono

a chi comincia

suscitano gloria e rabbia.

Per necessità

succede di vivere

per appartenenza

succede di divenire.

Non c’è differenza tra

iniziare e ricominciare perché

ciò che è stato o non è stato fatto

si ripete con l’intransigenza

dei cicli climatici.

E il silenzio dell’esitazione

satura l’aria che condensa

all’interno della mascherina

accelerando il punto di rugiada.

Attutisce questa nuova normalità.

Coloro che iniziano sfidano

la cosiddetta tragedia

dell’orizzonte temporale

per cui le persone non riescono

a immaginare la sofferenza

degli esseri umani del futuro e

poco viene speso a loro favore.

Coloro che iniziano sono senza soluzione

di continuità e a loro importa.

Alcuni si arrendono.

…

Anche i dipinti del Tintoretto

alla Scuola Grande di San Rocco

soffrono, appesi e lontani

da un mondo in decadimento.

Sopravvivono disorientati

nelle loro stanze.

E così siede contemplativa

Santa Maria Egiziaca

il libro sulle ginocchia

lo sguardo al bosco.

La rete di umani, non umani, post umani

i loro device, linguaggi e frequenze

quel passare attraverso i saloni

su e giù per le scalinate

parenti prossimi e familiari estranei.

Quand’è che abbiamo perso

il senso della meraviglia?

…

(lei)

È terminata l’ora legale finalmente.

Mentre la pioggia scroscia e

schizza di fango i cani

le gazze cercano rifugio e lasciano

il passo a lumache e lombrichi

al loro contegno.

Un cumulonembo sopra i colli

cominciamo a correre.

Il vero problema è il ritmo.

Al guinzaglio tirano in modo asincrono

e il rumore gommoso degli stivali

non promette nulla di buono.

Potrei schiantarmi al suolo

e venir trascinata da queste due furie o

il fiume in piena potrebbe

riservarci un finale memorabile.

Simon Maddrell, "The Whole Island"

Simon Maddrell writes as a queer Manx man, thriving with HIV in Brighton & Hove. Since 2019, over a hundred of his poems have appeared in numerous publications including Acumen, Ambit, Butcher’s Dog, Poetry Wales, Propel, Stand, The Gay & Lesbian Review, The Moth, The Rialto, Under the Radar. In 2020, Simon’s debut chapbook, Throatbone, was published by UnCollected Press, and Queerfella jointly-won The Rialto Open Pamphlet Competition. In 2023, The Whole Island and Isle of Sin were both Poetry Book Society Selections. In Feb 2024, a finger in derek jarman's mouth marks 30 years after Jarman's death. Find his books and social media here.

About The Whole Island    
The Whole Island explores the poet's relationship with the Isle of Man, in poems which touch on family and folklore, history and politics, nature and wildlife, as well as their tangled connections. Through lines that charm and blaze, Simon Maddrell considers what it means to be endemic: the island navigated as a body, the body as an island. Here, the poet calls upon his cherished Isle as an allegory for the nature of his own queerness, the queerness of nature, and the threat of extinction more broadly: linguistic, cultural, physical, environmental.

Liberally scattered with Manx dialect and Manx Gaelic – a language that was pronounced extinct by UNESCO in 2009 but is now undergoing rapid revitalisation and restoration – The Whole Island constantly teeters on the fringe of its own peripheries. Here, history ‘repeats itself like a kippered burp,’ and freedom ‘is an oxymoron.’ Throughout, the images are slick, taut, and multi-sensory. We move swiftly from sea, sugar, smoke – licked rock and the sweet-lipped tip of melting ice-cream – to barbed wire, broken branches, and ingested plastic. 

Celebratory, lamenting, but also hopeful, The Whole Island ultimately resists definition, seeking, instead, to weave personal and communal narratives and examine their complex interactions through time. Meanwhile, a chorus of characters – Vikings and Puffins, fairies and drag queens – introduce us to the histories of this conflicted Isle. As the poet notes: ‘whose island is this anyway?’

You can read more about The Whole Island on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read three sample poems from the collection.

From The Whole Island, by Simon Maddrell

our language drips

in the dark   I am afraid   of meeting 
my emptiness   but I must
return   to the isle of my birth
before I become   my own extinction.
Our native   Yn Ghaelg  
was nearly silenced
from what   only it   can express. 

I nearly zipped   my own lips
in a black-bagged lack   of understanding 
that it is language   that restores our place
that speaks louder than any plinth
that   when it cries   deepens the sea.

It is near impossible   to describe the sun 
rising   but it is possible   to feel 
the language   of the sun   
setting   on darkness.    


Manannan mac y Leir

Nothing has changed. Mourning 
a ruined family, his lost humanity 
inflicting wounds on the Otherworld. 

His tears, pearls that fled the sea 
turn into that single mountain island 
where I was raised from my mother’s 
 
womb, gasping for life in a tent 
for seven days, seven years or seventy 
score months, I now forget. When      

I cried it was on the inside, growing 
a cardiac rock with lichen cracks 
and moss where I weep. 


Foddeeaght 

He asks if I yearn for it,
if we have a word for it, like Hiraeth,

how he feels when away from his Celtic 
home, and I brush it off

like a speck of fluff, as if it’s obvious
a queer would hate being kept

in a beautifully busy cottage, tucked away
in a private bay below Milner’s Tower —  

it’s a folly, to think I want to be
where he is, to think I could 

add anything to this, like my pride 
in having scuba-dived the world over,

in the marine biology station here at Port Erin.
How it’s now closed. 

Catherine Cole, "Slipstream: On Memory and Migration"

Catherine Cole is Professor of Creative Writing at Liverpool John Moores University in Liverpool, Merseyside. She is an Honorary Professorial Fellow at the University of Wollongong in Australia. She has published ten books including novels, a collection of short stories, memoir, academic monographs and edited collections. She has been a visiting fellow in the UK at UEA and in China at Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangzhou. She also has been a writer-in-residence at the Cite International des Arts, Paris, and in Hanoi, China, UK and Australia. She has peer reviewed for the Australian Research Council and the Literature Board of the Australia Council. She was twice a member of the Professorial Committee for the Australian Research Council’s Excellence in Research Assessment process (REF) in the Humanities and Creative Arts. She has reviewed research and curriculum in the Creative Arts and Humanities in the UK, China, New Zealand and Australia. She has published with University presses, major publishing houses and small press publishers. She also has judged leading writing awards in Australia. She is currently on the Board of University of Cambridge Press (Crime series).

 

About Slipstream: On Memory and Migration

Slipstream explores the ways in which migration changes the lives of those who migrate. It draws on the experiences of Catherine’s family who migrated from Yorkshire to Sydney after World War Two as ‘Ten Pound Poms,’ also called ‘Australia’s hidden migrants.’ The memoir examines the impact of migration on the children of migrants, especially those born in the new place. ‘As happens in so many migrant narratives,’ she noted, ‘the drive for a better life for their children became a kind of family mantra, a way of confirming my parents had done the right thing, however painful. In many ways Slipstream was my way of expressing my gratitude to my parents for the sacrifices they made when they left their homes and families behind.’

What made their journey as Ten Pound Poms of great interest, she noted, was how the family transplanted Yorkshire into Sydney’s south-western suburbs. ‘When you think about it, their journey was remarkable. They came from large families in a mining village not far from Barnsley and had never travelled much beyond it. Yet they travelled up to Glasgow to embark The Empire Brent and sailed for 5 weeks to a new life in Australia. Twelve thousand miles is quite an adventure when you’d never left Yorkshire.’ 

Catherine’s research also drew on a range of resources in the UK. She spent time in a number of museums and archives, most notably the Maritime Museum in Liverpool, the Central Library in Glasgow – the city from which her family sailed - and the Barnsley Town Hall archives. Field research involved trips to Royston and Barnsley, exploring the towns and landmarks of her parents’ lives before they left for Australia. Catherine remains fascinated by the ways in which the experience of migration spreads from generation to generation, affecting those born in the new place as potently as it affected those who left home. ‘My childhood in Sydney was spent listening to stories about my parents’ former lives in the UK and I felt very torn between my two different identities. I wasn’t unique in this. My school friends were Lithuanian, Italian, Polish, Finnish, Dutch, Scottish – all of us watched as our parents adjusted to their new lives, torn just as they were between the old world and the new one.’

You can read more about Slipstream on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read a short excerpt from the memoir. 

 

From Slipstream: On Memory and Migration, by Catherine Cole

Any aspirations our parents might have had for themselves seemed to have burned out with their migration and the establishment of a new home – surely their great trip across the oceans, their building of a house and garden, two new Australian children and a new job were enough? The house lingers in us all, though. It aspired to roses and the thrift of making do, those perversities of expectation where a house became the inanimate representation of what our parents’ long sea voyage really had been about – a nice home on a quarter acre block halfway across the world, the mortgage paid off as quickly as possible. Thus, we return to our childhood home through memory, our world shrinking, receding as nostalgia claims us. We return to Bachelard’s world of ‘motionless childhood … motionless in the way all Immemorial things are.’ Our childhood homes gone, all the hopes and struggles of building a new home in a new place are replaced with a middle-aged nostalgia for the childhood homes we left. ‘Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality of those at home,’ Bachelard said, ‘and by recalling these memories we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.’

Our family home in Bankstown also retains a tyranny of memory. Now both parents are dead, my siblings and I rarely talk about the house, nor about those unsettled early years when we became Australians, in theory at least. The house might rise before us when a memory needs verification. Was it then? Where was that? Waiting for older siblings’ memories to act as the binding agent for something not quite formed. Our parents can’t be asked at all. But the dead speak through photographs and tape recordings, in a flickering family home movie of us all standing self-consciously in front of the flowering jacaranda opposite the back door, its bell flowers drifting above us like purple snow.

Amanda Huggins, "An Unfamiliar Landscape"

 

Amanda Huggins is the author of All Our Squandered Beauty and Crossing the Lines – both of which won a Saboteur Award for Best Novella – as well as four collections of short stories and a poetry chapbook. Amanda's fiction and travel writing have appeared in publications such as Mslexia, Popshot, Tokyo Weekender, The Telegraph, Traveller, Wanderlust and the Guardian. Three of her flash fiction stories have also been broadcast on BBC radio.

She has won numerous awards, including the Colm Toibin International Short Story Award, the H. E. Bates Short Story Prize and the British Guild of Travel Writers New Travel Writer of the Year. She was a runner-up in the Costa Short Story Award and the Fish Short Story Prize, and has been shortlisted for the Bridport Flash Prize, The Alpine Fellowship Award and many others. 

Amanda lives in Yorkshire and works as an editor and publishing assistant. Her first full-length poetry collection will be published by Victorina Press in 2023.

About An Unfamiliar Landscape

Stories from the city, the sea, the forest; stories from places where everything is not always as it first appears … 

From a rain-soaked Berlin to a neon-lit Tokyo, the midwest of North America to the Parisian backstreets, a suburban London kitchen to a fishing village on the Yorkshire coast, wherever these characters are travelling from or to, they are all navigating unfamiliar ground in search of answers.

In ‘The Names of the Missing,’ Kara walks the streets of Berlin, photographing the homeless and the displaced while looking for her own missing boys. Sam and Isla’s familiar world is irrevocably altered ‘In the Time It Takes to Make a Risotto,’ and in ‘Waiting to Fall’ Gina is unsettled by the wild landscape when she stays at remote Ragwood Hall. In ‘Something in the Night,’ an urban forest plays tricks on Anna’s perception of reality, and in the title story, Sophia moves through Tokyo almost unseen; simultaneously freed and trapped by her apparent invisibility. 

These are stories of the yearning to belong and the urge to escape; tales of grief and alienation, loss and betrayal, love and truth, change and hope.

You can read more about An Unfamiliar Landscape on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from one of the stories, 'Aleksandr.' 

From An Unfamiliar Landscape, by Amanda Huggins

Aleksandr

I watch Alex through the kitchen window. He turns his collar up against the salt-licked wind, walks past without looking up, his wool cap pulled low. 

The room is quiet and hollow now he’s gone, the mantel clock widening the emptiness as it strikes the hour. Alex said it would be fine, my mother taking the baby for a few days, he said it would do me good to have a break. But I miss the wee boy already, the straightforward way he fills each day with the mundane, the way he tangles me up in his needs, sweeps me up with his smile. He shows me the best of myself, leaves no room for the dark doubt underneath.

I say my husband’s name out loud. Aleksandr. I try to pronounce it the way his mother does, turning it over in my mouth. The sharp bite of the ‘k’ followed by the soft hiss of the ‘s,’ then the sigh of the fall and the short uptick of the finish. 

Aleksandr, Aleksandr, Aleksandr. 

When I first met him – first craved him – I thrilled to hear his mother say it, pronouncing it in her beautiful Russian accent. The anticipation made me dizzy. I mouthed ‘Aleksandr’ at my reflection in the mirror, conscious of the way the word was formed by my lips, my tongue, my teeth. It raced down my spine in a way I knew it never would again after the first time we made love. His name was a precious gift, a gift I still hold tightly to my ribs, never daring to call him it for fear it will shatter. To everyone other than his mother he is always Alex. 

I stack the bowls and plates on the shelf, turn back to the window, pause for a moment when I see him in the distance outside the herring shed. I clutch the edge of the sink until the door swings shut behind him, then I let go of my breath, watch it curl around the room like sea mist.

If Alex were to get his job back on the trawlers then perhaps he would walk tall again, north wind or no wind, no longer cowed by the weight of his needless guilt. It follows him around the house, a monkey clinging to his back, and when he leaves for work he carries it with him in his knapsack. At night it lies between us in the bed, and he turns away from it, scratches his arms as though he can feel its fingers tapping. 

He says he only wants the best for me, for our baby, and I tell him we already have the best. I chose this life. I always understood it would be hard, realised that new clothes and expensive dinners would be rare. I’d seen the damp patches on the parlour walls, knew I would be dragging buckets of coal from the cellar and struggling to keep the Aga alight, that I would be fighting the rain and the wind to carry washing out to the scullery in the winter. This is exactly the life I expected when I made my choice, and it’s a good life, an honest life, a solid life. 

But this morning I’m temporarily uprooted, drifting, trying to float above the high wall that bricks me in a little further every day. My comforting mantra no longer rings true; I’m unsure that anything can make Alex walk tall again.

Robert Graham, "The Former Boy Wonder"

Robert Graham is the author of the novel Holy Joe; the short story collections The Only Living Boy and When You Were a Mod, I Was A Rocker; and the novella A Man Walks Into A Kitchen. His play about fans of The Smiths, If You Have Five Seconds To Spare, was staged by Contact Theatre, Manchester. He is co-author, with Keith Baty, of Elvis – The Novel, a spoof biography; and, with Julie Armstrong, Heather Leach, Helen Newall et al, of The Road To Somewhere: A Creative Writing Companion, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Creative Writing, and How To Write A Short Story (And Think About It). He grew up in Northern Ireland and for most of his adult life has lived in Manchester. He teaches Creative Writing at Liverpool John Moores University. For more information please see his website here and follow Robert on Instagram @robert55graham. 

Below, you can read more about his new novel, The Former Boy Wonder, published in 2022 by Valley Press. 

About The Former Boy Wonder, by Robert Graham

My novel offers an insight into the way a man’s mind and heart works – not always with great wisdom. Mid-life crisis men who, failing on many levels, seek comfort in chasing after the ghost of their first love cause a lot of pain to the women who live with them. These men are also ridiculous. Because many have experienced it, this theme may appeal to women readers. It may also appeal to men who are having a similar mid-life crisis. 

Peter, the protagonist, is a romantic who is also needy and a bit of an idiot. The novel leans towards the side of the women in it, but at the same time, Peter is funny and has a fair degree of charm. So many readers won’t like his behaviour, but they may end up on his side – even though they will know he is heading towards a self-inflicted disaster. 

Peter’s attitudes and behaviour are not uncommon in mid-life men. Research shows that men often romanticise their first loves in a way that women don’t. To that degree, he may resonate with both female and male readers. Some will have experienced what happens when the dying of the light causes them to make foolish decisions while others may relate to frustrations and temptations my protagonist experiences in the course of the novel.

From The Former Boy Wonder

I was a romantic boy, looking for some whispered mystery, hungering for wonder. In my teens, I had a flickering dream about the fabulous girl who would someday appear. I would see her and recognise her, and life would finally begin. For years before this dream, though, I believed I lived under an evil spell. I had been the little prince, the apple of my father’s eye, and then he left. The little prince had lost his kingdom; he had been a happy little boy before it all went wrong. By the time I went to college, my circumstances had primed me to be rescued, reborn once I met this fabulous girl. She would appear before me, I would be hit by a bolt of lightning, fall for her in a heartbeat. That was the dream.

Manchester was bigger and more exciting than Belfast, any day. I arrived at the Poly and entered a new universe. In Manchester, nobody blew up bus stations and people didn’t shoot each other. Over here, it was safe to go out and have fun. British bands, the ones I listened to and read about pretty much never came to Belfast. The only gig in town was Rory Gallagher, who played the Ulster Hall at least once a year and swept audiences away, but that wasn’t much compensation for living in a musical ghost town. Yes, British bands who would risk their necks to come over were as rare as a solar eclipse, but every UK tour came to Manchester. Not many years before, I could have caught Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust tour at the Hard Rock in Stretford, and a few years before that somebody shouted ‘Judas!’ at Dylan in the Free Trade Hall. This was the place where the magic names in the NME walked off the page and into a venue that was only a bus ride away.

James Nash, "Heart Stones"

James Nash is a writer and poet. A long-term resident of Leeds, his third collection of poems, Coma Songs, was published in 2003 and reprinted in 2006. He has two poems in Branch-Lines (Enitharmon Press, 2007), among fifty contemporary poets, including Seamus Heaney and U. A. Fanthorpe. 

Since 2012, his poetry has been published by Valley Press, beginning with selected poems, A Bit of An Ice Breaker, and his first collection of sonnets, Some Things Matter.

Cinema Stories, celebrating the history of cinema in Leeds and written with fellow poet Matthew Hedley Stoppard, came out in 2015..  

A Bench for Billie Holiday was published in 2018, followed by his latest collection of sonnets, Heart Stones, in November 2021.

James's website is here.

About Heart Stones, by James Nash

In his third volume of sonnets, James Nash examines urban and seaside environments in a Yorkshire he has known through fifty years of living in the North. His sonnets soar over the land - from Leeds, a predominantly Victorian city, to the Wolds in the East Riding of Yorkshire, walking and cycling into the natural world with a pen and paper never far from his hand. 

James openly shows his debts to the great poets and writers of previous generations, from Winifred Holtby to Philip Larkin, from Matthew Arnold to Dylan Thomas. To borrow some of his won words, James's gifrt sit to be a "clear microscope" for our times, finding hope in the many "miralces of detail" that pass through his unwavering gaze.

Below, you can read two poems from Heart Stones. You can see further details about the collection on the publisher's website here. 

From Heart Stones

Yorkshire skies for Patricia

We shared these Yorkshire skies at different times,

A West Riding jumble of spire and mill

And, much later, the eastern coastal dreams 

Which began for me at Garrowby Hill.

I’d no idea fifty years ago

That each daily walk would now be full of you,

The cliffs and beaches, where white pebbles glow,

Each prospect of the Wolds, each distant view.

And yesterday I saw across the bay

As dusk deepened with the slow dropping sun,

You signalling in the last dregs of day;

You are the lighthouse flash, not yet quite done.

I would give you a heart-stone from the beach

But you are fading light, too faint to reach. 

 

Heart stones 

I 

The incoming tide has covered them, fanned

Over, drowned the heart-shaped pattern of stones

Made from beach pebbles and secured in sand.

Large, white punctuation marks; the bleached bones

Of a dinosaur’s toes, gathered, arranged 

By a young artist on a bike with time

He did not have, until all slowed and changed,

To leave temporary signs in chalky rhyme.

From our cliff top eyrie we see it all,

Huge heart under water unmoved by tide.

Can love survive whatever might befall,

Perhaps live on when other things have died?

Just this; in slow erosion, it is worn

Down, dissolving more each day, stone by stone.

Anne Caldwell, "Alice and the North"

Dr Anne Caldwell is a freelance writer and education specialist, based in West Yorkshire. She has worked for the National Association of Writers in Education, the British Council as their Literature Programme Manager, and currently lectures for the Open University. Her specialism is prose poetry and she is a keen walker. Her poetry has appeared in a range of anthologies and magazines in the UK and internationally. These include The Rialto, Writing Women, The North, Poetry Wales and Stride. Anne has published three collections including Painting the Spiral Staircase (Cinnamon Press, 2016). In 2019, she was co-editor of The Valley Press Anthology of Prose Poetry, alongside Oz Hardwick. Some of her prose poems were runners up in The Rialto Pamphlet Competition in 2017. Anne has just been awarded a PhD in Creative Writing, focusing on prose poetry, at the University of Bolton. Her website is here.

About Alice and the North 
Alice and the North (Valley Press 2020) is a sequence of prose poems that form a love-song to the North, its post-industrial landscapes, wild uplands, obsession with weather, seasonal change and awkwardness. Like Lewis Carroll's Alice before her, the lead character shifts and changes as her journey across the North continues; she is at turns playful, sexy, rebellious and adventurous, carving a new identity for the region as she goes. From herring quines to the hidden corners of Manchester, from Lytham St Anne’s to the canals of Congleton, readers are invited to grow up with Alice as she finds her voice – straddling the territory between prose and poetry, exploring the down to earth cadences of everyday speech and the richness of the North’s many idioms and dialects. Alice even finds time to gently tease the 'titans' of Northern poetry, Ted Hughes and Simon Armitage, whose voices have long shaped the poetry-reading public's idea of the North. Now, however, they must step aside and make room for Alice. 

Copies of Alice and the North are available from here. Below, you can read three prose poems from the collection. 

Caroline Hardaker, "Little Quakes Every Day"

Caroline Hardaker lives in the north east of England and writes quite a lot of things. She earned her BA (English Literature) and MA (Cultural and Heritage Studies) from Newcastle University, and writes poetry, fiction, libretto, and occasional scripts, too.

Caroline’s debut poetry collection, Bone Ovation, was published by Valley Press in 2017, and her first full length collection, Little Quakes Every Day, will be published by Valley Press on 9th November 2020. Her debut novel, Composite Creatures, will also be published by Angry Robot in April 2021.

Caroline’s poetry has been published worldwide, most recently in Magma, The Interpreter’s House, The Emma Press, Neon Magazine, Shoreline of Infinity, Eyewear Publishing’s Best New British and Irish Poets, and Contemporary British Poetry from Platypus Press.

Caroline’s worked with various organisations and community groups to advocate the holistic benefits of writing and making. She currently works as the Content Manager for Newcastle University in the north east of England. In 2019, Caroline was the Writer in Residence for ‘Moving Parts’ Newcastle Puppetry Festival and a Theatre Reviewer for NARC Magazine. Throughout 2019 and 2020, she’s collaborating with the Royal Northern College of Music to produce a cycle of operatic art songs to be performed at festivals across the UK. In September 2020, Folk Tales premiered at the Tête à Tête Festival in London.

You can read more and follow her adventures on her writers’ blog.

About Little Quakes Every Day

In Caroline Hardaker's first full-length collection of poetry, readers will find tales of human evolution and natural laws, of technology, of the world's problems and the twisted inventions we create. Each encounter takes a host of characters to the brink of epiphany – sometimes they’ll burn bright, and sometimes they’ll fall apart.

Through the poems in the collection, the book imagines a world of explorers, philosophers, automatons, wild things, and the ghosts that dwell deep in the heart of the earth itself.

Caroline says, “The poems in this collection have been developed over a three year period, in which I wanted to explore the nature of discoveries in history and mythology and how they impact our everyday lives. I’ve balanced these larger questions with everyday ‘kitchen sink’ encounters, to demonstrate that both have a huge impact on our lives.”

You can find out more about Little Quakes Every Day and pre-order the book here.

Below, you can read two poems from the book. 

From Little Quakes Every Day

On Polar Bears Brought Together by the Death of a Humpback Whale

The boulders approach, grown with hoary turf
and smudging rune-marks across the tundra;
a moving tide to mount the hunt that’s found.
Jaws meet meat in many places to break the hide.

In the belly, brothers do not know brothers;
skins smell of sleep, birth-blood lost, and the beasts
take turns to tear out the swim-bladder or fists
of blubber. The bears are tied together with ropes

of knotted gut, and each hollows out his grotto
from fat, oiling his coat as if preparing for battle in woad –
but white as snow. Drifts of broad backs reinvent genesis.
Slow stomachfuls last a day, a night, a day,

and pressing for the last, boulders roll in the colossal arch;
ribs hanging above like paths of comets. After the feast,
blood flecks the ice like constellations, and then,
stones in a round, each brother licks his sores and retreats alone.

The supernova shatters, and the whale shrinks.

Little Shoe

It shone – a world on a little satin thing
poking through the rose of wrinkled Tyvek;
a ruby to slip a lily into.

Lifting it from the case, I sit it on one cottoned palm,
fingers fanning beneath like a lark’s wing around an egg
or a teacup, stitched from sun-silk
and curving to a point slim enough to perch on
the thumb-loop of a girl
painting a sky she watched in childhood.
All her favourite garden sights;
bluebirds, tamed hoopoes, palm-swifts
in peach of blushing cheek and perching proudly
amongst trickling vines in lagoon blue.
Hosts of cloud-like lotus flowers – falling
in a white flush of doves,
swooping on the whistle-crack of wind
up from the stone floor. Scenes from before

this life of little stitches, shuffling steps on fists of flesh
in groups of golden lilies tipped with red
and held together by hands grasping sisters’ sleeves.
Tied in this amorphous knot of quiet,
each face meets another mouthing the name
inked in a bird’s nest of strokes
hidden inside her shoes.