In all of Robin Thomas's work there is a subtlety and wit so contained that it invites re-reading. It takes full immersion to savour the linguistic dexterity and intelligence at work, to appreciate that humour often belies the absolute seriousness of life. In reminded of something, this balance is particularly delicate and the poignancy superbly controlled and utterly affecting. With a yearning that can only come of love and loss, the poems use the simplest of metaphors in the most lucid language to convey memories and emotions so complex and heart-breaking that they are almost beyond the scope of words-a collection that is profoundly moving and exquisitely realised.Praise for Robin Thomas's previous workPoems are like rooms. One might feel safe in such a room and, at first sight, the poems of Robin Thomas employ an architecture which is reassuring. [...] Yet walls shake and windows crack and the 'homely' formal qualities of these well-made poems belie a mystery, a strangeness, a reckoning.- Julian StannardRobin Thomas's is a fragile world, whose unexpected strengths derive from his elastic, unsentimental grasp of reality. It's not surprising that I find myself smiling with recognition as I read Robin Thomas's view of the universe ... after all, ambiguity and contradiction are embedded in comedy of the most serious kind.- Janice DempseyOccasionally I seize upon a single poem sent to me, or discovered by accident, and rejoice in its particular oddness or specialness or combination of the two. Robin Thomas's poetry evokes this response with its extraordinary quirkiness, combination of wild and everyday wisdom, the way the clues are always in the margins, chuckling as they wait to be found or found out. Thomas is the master of irony and juxtaposition, never obvious, always surprising.- Wendy KleinRobin Thomas completed the MA in Writing Poetry at Kingston University in 2012. He has had poems published in a number of journals including Acuman, Agenda, Envoi, Orbis, Brittle Star, Poetry Salzburg, Poetry Scotland, Pennine Platform, The High Window, South, Stand, Rialto and The Interpreter's House. He has been shortlisted for the Buzzwords, Bridport and Bath Poetry Café prizes and is represented in several anthologies. His pamphlet, A Fury of Yellow, was published by Eyewear in 2016. His debut collection, Momentary Turmoil, was published in 2018, followed by A Distant Hum in 2021, both by Cinnamon. Dempsey and Windle published his Cafferty pamphlet in 2021 and his collection Weather on the Moon was published by Two Rivers Press in 2022. Robin also had a Flash Fiction Novella-Margot and the Strange Objects-published by Adhoc Publishing in 2022.
Never for the faint-hearted, Dunes of Cwm Rheidol sees John Barnie at the height of his powers, writing poetry that is heart-breaking and true.
A poetry collection exploring spirituality in the contemporary world.
Charting a life spent lost in numbers, is My Life in Receipts a memoir? Too fictionalised. A novella? Too close to the truth. All too recognisable? YES!From chanting times-tables and unlearning old money to discovering the sinking schoolroom 'Maths Feeling' that ends a child's ambitions to be a 'scientist'. From the promissory note of student days to the hard times of the dole giro. From the exuberance of the first wage packet to the pleasures and limits of being able to pay your way... My Life in Receipts plunges you into the world of bags full of threatening letters, intimidating bailiffs, bankruptcy, eviction-even imprisonment.Revealing the lives of people in a perpetual cost of living crisis, and the work of those who help them fight to reclaim their lives, this is a dark, original and tragi-comic exploration of the past, the future, money, debt: whether to flee, whether to fight. There are some victories, some routs-and, along the way, thoughts on electronic train tickets too.Andrew Dutton will make you laugh out loud, scream with righteous anger and, most of all, make you think.Andrew Dutton has been writing since the early 2000s and has previously self-published an e-book of short stories, A Mirror.His work frequently explores life at 'the bottom of the pile', reflecting a long career helping people in financial hardship and debt.Born in Newcastle-under-Lyme, he now lives in Derbyshire and draws inspiration and comfort from books, music, cats, and long country walks with his partner and their beloved Labrador.Andrew's debut novel, Nocturne: Wayman's Sky, and two other novels, The Crossword Solver, and The Beauty of Chell Street are also published by Cinnamon Press.
A fictional pot-pourri in prose and poetry, Say I am Merry explores love and loss and the way the stories of one generation are handed to the next. A poignant, ambitious and compelling debut.
"We need more writers with bite. We have lived in the flatlands too long," writes John Barnie in one of his 'observations' ('Art in the Flatlands'). And bite he delivers.Ranging across politics, history, culture, ecological disaster, the meaning of truth, poetry, what we mean by identity and more... Barnie shares a window onto the world that is both erudite and particular. Leaning towards pessimism in a darkening world, these observations are often provocative, not from any bullish desire to antagonise, but as the result of mining a rationalist line of thought with an honesty and consistency that is applied as much to the author as to his subjects. There is a clarity here that some may find uncomfortable, but the aim is always dialogue above agreement; intellectual engagement above cheap solutions and sentimentality.Barnie asks us to think, consider and dig deeper, but most of all he asks that we "...live richly among our secondary self-created meanings, while recognising them for what they are. To face without flinching the nullity of the great void." ('Varieties of Meaning')Tsunami Days is a vital collection of essays for those prepared to engage with its unflinching observations.John Barnie is a poet and essayist from Abergavenny, Gwent. John was the editor of Planet, The Welsh Internationalist from 1990-2006. His collections of essays, The King of Ashes, won a Welsh Arts Council Prize for Literature in 1990. His collection Trouble in Heaven was on the Wales Book of the Year 2008 Long List. His most recent collections are A Report to Alpha Centauri (Cinnamon Press), Afterlives (Leaf by Leaf) and the forthcoming Dunes of Cwm Rheidol (Cinnamon Press)..
Out in the Field immerses us deeply in a compulsion to be outside-here we draw inspiration from landscape, birds, weather; here we step outside ourselves, and allow our perspective to shift...Drawn into the fields through Patricia Helen Wooldridge's meticulous observation, our minds breathe alongside the poet's. Within the spell of these pages we find ourselves in a world with a different notion of time and change. We find ourselves in the moment.A maven of attention, Wooldridge's acute reflections make each seasonal shift fresh, each creature and plant precious and beautiful, each encounter with the natural environment unexpected. And, as we open ourselves to this world through these poems, our humanity and passion for this ailing and extraordinary planet can only be enlarged, compelling the reader in turn out into the field.Patricia Helen Wooldridge lives in Hampshire and is inspired by walking, bird watching and working on her allotment. She studied English Literature at London University and has a doctorate in creative writing. In the past she has taught English in schools and more recently creative writing to undergraduate students. Her work has been placed in a variety of poetry competitions and has appeared in poetry journals and competition anthologies. Her collection, Sea Poetics, won the Cinnamon Press Debut Poetry Collection Prize in 2017, and her pamphlet, Being, was published in 2021. Her poem, 'I Stop Wearing the Mini-skirt, 1972' was commended in the 2013 National Poetry prize and used to develop a workshop guide by poet, Jane Yeh, for the The Poetry Society.
From its tentative first word ('perhaps') to the final phrase, realising 'here is no journey / only attending to stones- / like a story told yet again / by an old friend', the reader is immersed in a woodland that is alive with quiet yet profound epiphanies-the way we live and die; the way we might weave narratives that change our stories. In this liminal place, which is both a real woodland and an internal space, we learn that 'What matters is the silence that encircles you...' And we find in that silence a liturgy of the natural world we too often forget we are part of.
Lucid, linguistically dextrous, and woven through with Welsh phrases, and words and passages in French, this exquisitely observed sequence of haiku and haibun was written during lockdown, though only refers to Covid elliptically. There is nothing obvious here-instead there are connections-with nature, with relationships, with what is lost and what is saved.
The willingness to take risks with form and to push the reader's expectations of what a poem might be make E A Griffiths' poetry immediately distinctive. Here we find lyrical poems that are tiny, elliptical, often heart-breaking and utterly located in a sense of place that is at once home and yet the terrain of struggle. Drawing on Welsh tradition and the complexity that spins from needing to learn your native language so that even when it becomes fluent it never becomes the language of dream, the collection also opens a dialogue with concrete poetry. It's a move that allows words to fragment, names to partially mirror themselves, breath to expand the possibilities of the poem on the page. The concrete poetry in this collection is as serious as a funeral, or electric shock therapy, yet it is also playful, generous and expansive. Moving between the concrete and the lyrical, Concrete Sea is a cohesive, tightly-written debut that invites us to feel into the experiences of the poems, emerging with the sense of another's heart-print.
It's winter, 1553. A small Italian hill town is under siege... In this narrative of uncommon endurance Alex Josephy inhabits place and people with lively precision. Told in the voices of women, including a chorus, a nearby mountain and the fortress herself, the uniting voice of the pamphlet is a 'girl', through whose eyes we see the minute details of life under immense stress and feel the nuances of loss, hunger and uncertainty. Again Behold the Stars is an intense immersion into a lockdown that challenges all the senses, one utterly different from the modern experience of lockdown during the Covid pandemic, yet also hauntingly resonant with it. Most vitally, the empathy evoked reaches us across almost five centuries, making us care in the present.
How do we come home in a strange land? Moving to a remote forest hamlet in a new country in the midst of a pandemic, the only way to connect is to take the time to linger, listen and observe-to be with the land that is becoming home. From this observations a series of haiku arise, following the Japanese system of 24 seasons divided into 72 micro-seasons and interspersed with eight lyric poems that travel around the Celtic wheel of the year. And so a forest garden and its surrounding Finistère woodland slowly reveals itself, weaving together the lunar and solar, melding the Celtic shape of the year with the increments of the Japanese solar terms, each one unveiling a new aspect of change. Charting a life unmoored from the familiar, but permeable to the new the poems find their place at 'the end of the world', as the Romans called Finistère, but also in Penn-ar-Bed, the Breton name which is both the end and start of the world. Most endings are also beginnings and here in these precise, exquisitely observed poems, we find ourselves both unsettled and settling, exploring what it means to hold together being adrift and belonging; cycles and transformation and how we find a beginning at the end of the world.
Two years after the events of The Standing Ground, the tiny outpost of Y Tir in North Wales becomes a refuge for those who want to live without implants-permanent links to government surveillance that are threatening to dominate people's lives again. But can Alys, Luke and Emrys thwart the growing threats of the new tech-giants whose offers of enhanced memories and virtual lives mask the erosion of privacy and even humanity? As new enemies threaten Y Tir's existence, and old enemies emerge to sew seeds of destruction, Alys' and Luke's lives are put under increasing pressure. But there are also allies, not least Alys' and Luke's daughter, Iris, who appears to have fallen out of the mists of Greek legend and into Celtic myth. Can Iris, more strange and powerful even than Myrddin Emrys, also known as Merlin, save the day for Y Tir?
In the far future, after a nuclear war, the world is separated into two realms, each under the protection of the all-powerful Commission. In Ecologia mammoths, wolves and sabre cats roam the world of Stone Age people, while Economica is populated by modern people enjoying technological convenience, complete with robots that serve every need. In Ecologia the Commission is worshiped as a deity, but in Economica it is resented as an obstructive and unaccountable bureaucracy.When Peter finds a portal between these realms, he illicitly sets up a life for himself in both worlds, knowing that he is in danger.But like everyone else he has no idea what the Commission really is, and when Peter¿s friend, Simon, figures it out and is silenced by sinister forces, Peter¿s questions about his future only become more complicated. His quandary exacerbated by the imminent closure of the portal, Peter has to make a choice about where he belongs; a choice that will be the most important he¿s ever made.Raising questions about what we mean by ¿nature¿, ¿humanity¿ and life itself, Destiny of a Free Spirit is a compelling debut that will keep you guessing till the end.
Joan Hewitt's award winning poetry is subtle, deft, but always hits the spot. There is a sense here of the gaps in life, of words that frame the absences, the colouring around all that is missing, beautifully summed up in the title poem, but pervading the collection as it moves from Tyneside to Liverpool to Osterholz-Scharmbeck; from small domestic or intimate moments to understated, but none the less powerful, political observations. The language is sharp, layered with humour and intelligence.
Emily needs friends. Outwardly successful, about to get married, inside she is scared and grieving. When an accident reveals a relative she never knew existed, everything changes.Jim has buried his life in a mundane job at the Ministry of Information, writing manuals to help others and hiding the secrets that continue to haunt his family.Through their distinct voices, Emily speaking from 1993 and Jim from 1915, the link between two intriguing tales emerges. As their stories come together, will Emily finally escape the past to find a life of her own?How to Keep Well in Wartime is a compelling exploration of the human condition and the importance of creating a life worth living. "Exploring how we deal with loss, grief, relationships, and mental health, How to Keep Well in Wartime addresses issues that are central to all our lives, delivering a story that is not only finely crafted, but meaningful."Life ends not when you die, but when you stop living it, the narrative insists."A powerful novel with a universal sensibility that transcends time and place to speak to readers everywhere." - Tracey Iceton, author of The Celtic Colours trilogy & Rock God Complex: the Mickey Hunter Story
Honza Pernath¿s life is barren. The person he loves is gone and his friends, even his dreams, say she will not return.When a chance meeting sets him on a search for his lost love, the path is neither straight nor easy and Honza comes to doubt everything, including the one he searches for. A single image¿a star rising over the seäcalls him on, but that image is more than it seems and as Honza nears its source, his search reveals more than he could have imagined.A sequel to the mysterious and beautiful short story, ¿Marietta Merz¿ (now an illustrated chapbook), Child of the Black Sun is an exploration of the living symbols at the core of everyday life; a visionary evocation of the internal journey.
I¿m doing something I¿ve never done before. I¿m hanging upside down in a circus hoop suspended from the beams of a redundant church in Sheffield. I¿m not very far from the floor, but the way I feel I may as well be. What am I scared of? Fear just is. It¿s there in the muscle memory¿ Now, knees gripping the metal hoop I let go with my hands and see the world upside down.Upside Down in a Hoop is memoir about loss and letting go. What is it that keeps us going through the tough times? The joy of dancing as a child? The adventures we dare to take as adults? Through fear and holding on, to freedom.
A Little Switch sees Max Falkland on a new mission, this time posing as a maid of honour at the Queen¿s coronation. Out of her comfort zone with an assignment that reminds her she is the daughter of a viscount, and out of her depth with the silent men in her life, she takes refuge in an archeological expedition, but a chance meeting leads to a trip that will force Max to face the most frightening moments of her career while trying to protect those she loves. The final novel in this Cold War spy trilogy comes to an exciting conclusion to Max Falkland novels following on from Cold Crash and A Running Lie.
Thrust into a hostile world, and unable to comprehend the language, Heike, an immigrant and ¿enemy¿ child, struggles to understand the English islanders as she adjusts to the new identity demanded of her. Intent on escaping the traumas of growing up in fascist Germany and the horrors of its post-war desolation, Heike¿s mother will marry the charismatic English officer she met during the Allied occupation of Lüneburg. Her daughter, who will be known as ¿Susannä from now on, must be kept innocent of her mother¿s past and grow up to be English. As this memoir of displacement, national character, and misunderstandings unfolds, S M Saunders becomes the detective in her own story, searching for the truth that will reconcile her double identity and conflicting emotions. But this is far from a misery memoir. This is a tale of love¿the narrator¿s intense love for the extraordinary and eccentric English people whose positive influences not only shaped her and her mother, but also lent her the strength to come to terms with both her own identity and with her mother¿s complex, harrowing story. Susanna: the Making of an English Girl explores a childhood that is sad, beautiful, funny, rich in detail and marked, above all, by love.
Freewheeling and sharp-witted short fiction that reminds us of Beckett less for the style but for the sheer insight. Brilliant writing.
In The Third Sister Speaks Liliana A Pasterska immerses us in the voice of Anne Brontë¿a frontierswoman and trailblazing writer of the mid 19th century who stepped out of ¿female¿ territory to expose the taboos of her age, including gender inequality, marital abuse, the terrible conditions in which many women teachers worked and the effects of alcohol and substance abuse. A woman at the margins of her time, Anne Brontë lived for only 29 years, yet left a wealth of acute observation and sharp insight in her writing, as well as poetry that witnesses to her personal, spiritual and literary intelligence. For all of this, her voice is the one not often heard amongst the extraordinary Brontë sisters. But here is a corrective to this. In lyrical poetry originally commissioned for a programme of music and words celebrating Anne Brontë¿s bicentenary, we enter Anne¿s world. In this careful and beautifully achieved debut pamphlet, the voice of the poet reaches into the voice of a young woman still calling to the modern reader across time: elegant, spare, leaving space for silence and allowing its questions to resonate long after reading:I am a teller of truth a seer¿can you hear me?
In the initial sequence of this pamphlet, and following short lyrics, the writer explores the experience of living with long-term, and severe mental states. There is no safe haven of medical ¿pathology¿ here, but an urgent rite of passage for the damaged and conflicted soul. A form of modern Purgatory¿escaping the grasping jaws of Inferno, to find itself stumbling towards a rarefied, yet earthy, Paradiso.Ian Marriott¿s marvellous poems inhabit rather than observe nature ¿ in fact they do both ¿ but are as much concerned with the human condition. They work in the area of what Hopkins called instress. The voice is calm, contained and precise, as when he watches a Pond Skater, ¿So perilous / this thin meniscus ¿ / six legs spread out¿. The poems too seem to tremble on the water of their vision.¿ George Szirtes
The manifestations and properties of water are excitingly explored in Edward Ragg¿s new collection. Here are living poems where narrative and lyric work together to contemplate the energies implicit in water. The intriguing emphases laid upon the meanings of the word ¿present¿ give a unique edge to the poems. Glass, tears, ice, rivers, wine, salinity, tides: all these elements are woven into the texture of this collection, where the illuminations and fluidities of language are beautifully captured.¿ Penelope Shuttle
Lynn Valentine is a distinctive new voice in Scottish poetry. With hints of fairytale and gothic, she writes precise and poignant poems embracing what is often overlooked or peripheral ¿ a father who drives the snowplough, a childless woman seeking consolation from a Sheela-na-gig. This collection is alive with horses, crows, deer, and as the title suggests, bees; all points north. ¿ Jay Whittaker Enhanced by her apt and confident use of Scots, which glimmers like gold leaf throughout, Lynn Valentine¿s poems weave the ethereal with the everyday, and reveal to us a glimpse of the natural and unnatural world we stride and stumble through. From council workers to prophetic aunts, Mills and Boon to the winter solstice, the poems here are full of making do and doing without, of childhood and childlessness, of the grief of loss and the grief of absence. This is a special collection, and a wonderful debut. ¿ Aoife Lyall Lynn Valentine is a fearless writer who tackles the great unspeakables head-on ¿ bereavement, loss, childlessness, exile; and yet it¿s not death that prevails in these poems, but rather the sovereignty of life and, with all its gifts and with all its heartbreaks, the obstinate beauty of the living world.¿ John Glenday
Justin, a popular Leeds professor, seeks redemption in the ashes of youthful idealism. Holding together his family is already a struggle as his son, Sanjay, is drawn into radical politics by his lover Farida, who joins a Kurdish Women's militia to fight ISIS. With nerves already frayed, Justin's wife, Harpreet, is devastated when revelations of his past as an urban bomber come to light, turning his life upside down. Can love and loyalty prevent this family from imploding? Jane Austin's second novel, Renegade is a compelling story of 70s rebellion, revolution in Rojava and a family in a tailspin; a tale that touches the beating heart of our times.
Exquisite and honed collection that finds the extraordinary in ordinary life.
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