The Salt Book of Younger Poets - now available

THE SALT BOOK OF YOUNGER POETS

edited by Roddy Lumsden & Eloise Stonborough
Salt Publishing, October 2011. Paperback, £10.99

The Salt Book of Younger Poets showcases a new generation of British poets born since the mid-80s. Many of these poets embrace new technologies such as blogs, social networking and webzines to meet, mentor, influence and publish their own work and others’. Some poets here were winners of the Foyle young poet awards when at school. Some have published pamphlets in series such as tall-lighthouse Pilot and Faber New Poets. All of them are working away on first collections. This is a chance to encounter the poets who will dominate UK poetry in years to come.

Rachael Allen | Daniel Barrow | Jack Belloli | Jay Bernard | James Brookes | Phil Brown | Niall Campbell | Kayo Chingonyi | Miranda Cichy | John Clegg | Nia Davies | Amy De’ath | Inua Ellams | Charlotte Geater | Tom Gilliver | Dai George | Emily Hasler | Oli Hazzard | Dan Hitchens | Sarah Howe | Andrew Jamison | Annie Katchinska | Andrew McMillan | Siofra McSherry | Ben Maier | Laura Marsh | Annabella Massey | James Midgley | Helen Mort | Charlotte Newman | Richard O’Brien | Richard Osmond | Vidyan Ravinthiran | Sophie Robinson | Charlotte Runcie | Ashna Sarkar | William Searle | Colette Sensier | Warsan Shire | Lavinia Singer | Adham Smart | Martha Sprackland | Eloise Stonborough | Emily Tesh | Jack Underwood | Ahren Warner | Ben Wilkinson | Sophie Yeo

RRP £10.99; currently available to buy from from Amazon for £7.54.

The Sparks

I'm chuffed that my first poetry pamphlet, The Sparks, is selling well thanks to the support of those who attended both the London launch of it alongside Emily Berry's excellent Stingray Fevers; the Sheffield launch with Matthew Clegg, Helen Mort and others; and those who've bought a copy through the tall-lighthouse website. The warm reception that myself and other Pilot poets received at this year's StAnza festival was also great; people chatting and buying copies of pamphlets in the series after the Pilot reading. Cheers.

If any readers of the Wasteland are yet to get a copy however, and are interested, I've some of my own which I'm more than happy to scribble in and send out, UK postage free (£4). Just drop me an email (on my profile page). They're also available from the tall-lighthouse website, along with new pamphlets in the Pilot series by Amy Key and Sarah Lowe, and the just-published Shiver, Alan Buckley's first pamphlet, awarded the Poetry Book Society's Pamphlet Choice for Spring 2009.

The Salt Book of Younger Poets

THE SALT BOOK OF YOUNGER POETS

edited by Roddy Lumsden & Eloise Stonborough

Salt Publishing, October 2011. Paperback, £10.99

The Salt Book of Younger Poets showcases a new generation of British poets born since the mid-80s. Many of these poets embrace new technologies such as blogs, social networking and webzines to meet, mentor, influence and publish their own work and others’. Some poets here were winners of the Foyle young poet awards when at school. Some have published pamphlets in series such as tall-lighthouse Pilot and Faber New Poets. All of them are working away on first collections. This is a chance to encounter the poets who will dominate UK poetry in years to come.

Rachael Allen | Daniel Barrow | Jack Belloli | Jay Bernard | James Brookes | Phil Brown | Niall Campbell | Kayo Chingonyi | Miranda Cichy | John Clegg | Nia Davies | Amy De’ath | Inua Ellams | Charlotte Geater | Tom Gilliver | Dai George | Emily Hasler | Oli Hazzard | Dan Hitchens | Sarah Howe | Andrew Jamison | Annie Katchinska | Andrew McMillan | Siofra McSherry | Ben Maier | Laura Marsh | Annabella Massey | James Midgley | Helen Mort | Charlotte Newman | Richard O’Brien | Richard Osmond | Vidyan Ravinthiran | Sophie Robinson | Charlotte Runcie | Ashna Sarkar | William Searle | Colette Sensier | Warsan Shire | Lavinia Singer | Adham Smart | Martha Sprackland | Eloise Stonborough | Emily Tesh | Jack Underwood | Ahren Warner | Ben Wilkinson | Sophie Yeo

Available to pre-order from Amazon.

Just One Book - Salt Publishing

As those of you who read other poetry & literary blogs and/or drop into UK poetry forums will know, the enterprising poetry publishers Salt have hit hard times. Partly due to discontinued grants from Arts Council England and the current economic downturn, this is particularly depressing as Salt have always been committed to building a poetry press eventually capable of sustaining itself, something it has worked towards by seeking out and publishing some of the most impressive new poets to emerge in the UK in recent years (Rob A Mackenzie, Julia Bird, Luke Kennard, Mark Waldron and Katy Evans-Bush, to name but a few) as well as more established writers including Jane Holland, Tim Dooley and Tobias Hill. It also has what promise to be strong first collections on the horizon from Abi Curtis, Tom Chivers and Tony Williams.


To help save Salt, then, please consider the following:

JUST ONE BOOK

1. Please buy just one book, right now. We don't mind from where, you can buy it from us or from Amazon, your local shop or megastore, online or offline. If you buy just one book now, you'll help to save Salt. Timing is absolutely everything here. We need cash now to stay afloat. If you love literature, help keep it alive. All it takes is just one book sale. Go to our online store and help us keep going.

2. Share this note on your profile. Tell your friends. If we can spread the word about our cash crisis, we can hopefully find more sales and save our literary publishing. Remember it's just one book, that's all it takes to save us. Please do it now.

With my best wishes to everyone
Chris
Director
Salt Publishing
http://www.saltpublishing.com

It would be a great loss to UK poetry if Salt were to fold. I've just ordered a copy of Tim Dooley's Keeping Time, and would urge anyone who reads and values contemporary poetry to buy a title or two from their list - I'd recommend Rob A Mackenzie's The Opposite of Cabbage and Mark Waldron's The Brand New Dark, my reviews of which are forthcoming in Magma and the TLS respectively.

Poetry Feature: Carrie Etter's The Tethers

Blurb writers often describe debut poetry collections as "long-awaited", but I can honestly say that I've been looking forward to Carrie Etter's first collection for a good while, having enjoyed many of her poems in magazines, not least the TLS.

And now I happily find that Etter's first book, The Tethers, is to be published later this month by Seren. Having already attracted praise from the likes of Glyn Maxwell and Robert Crawford, it promises to be a highly distinctive and original collection of poems, partly given Etter's fertile imagination, but also her background as an American-born poet who has lived in the UK for many years, drawing on poetic traditions from both sides of the Atlantic.

I'm delighted, then, to feature The Tethers here on the Wasteland, and include a poem from its pages below. I hope the collection attracts the prize shortlistings it will no doubt deserve, and would encourage readers who enjoy witty, sophisticated and thought-provoking poetry to visit the Seren publishing website, Etter's own blog, and check out the collection on Amazon. Enjoy.



The Review

So at Starbuck’s you stood in line
behind The Review’s assistant managing editor?
A skinny cappuccino? Were you close enough
to detect her brand of shampoo?
There is no need to name The Review:
it is the one that, when mentioned, inclines all bystanders
toward its vocalization until they ascertain
the nature of the allusion and proceed accordingly.
If you are an author whose work appears in the current issue,
at least two well-scented women will brush your arm “inadvertently”
and one man will strive to prolong your stay in his presence
with a look of surpassing interest.
Publication in a past issue creates a circle
of brightened eyes, however nonchalant some try to act,
and a member of the opposite sex will ask
what you’re having and bring you another
whatever the volume in your present glass.
If The Review has never accepted your work
and you live in the same city as its offices,
once a month you will find yourself unaccountably
walking past the building’s reflective panels and steel yourself
to look only ahead until you reach the end of the street,
but alas! you glance in The Review’s direction to see
an image of yourself that seems disparagingly untrue.
Some neglected authors cannot stop thinking of The Review:
they can recount the highlights of senior editors’ résumés,
and a simple “Sorry” handwritten on the rejection slip
gives them days of delight, even though they suspect
a mere intern has so condescended. A mere intern!
No one at The Review is mere. The janitor may know
whose manuscript lingers on whose desk.
The Review’s aura has an impressive breadth.
Even I feel giddy from speaking so long of it.


poem by Carrie Etter
from The Tethers (Seren, 2009)
republished with permission of the author
first published in the Times Literary Supplement

New Poems by James Midgley

Following on from new poems by Charlotte Runcie, Andrew Bailey and Corinne Salisbury (see previous posts), the final featured poet on the Poetry Group for April 2008 is Mimesis editor James Midgley. His work has been previously published in various UK journals including Magma and The Rialto.

You can read four new poems of his here.

The Manchester Review

In certain quarters of the poetry world, there can be a certain snobbery surrounding publication online - one that maintains that print literary magazines are usually better than online journals. This argument is usually based on the idea that many (though certainly not all) established poets only send their work to print publications, and so the best quality work ends up being published in them, especially given the added incentive that the bigger players pay for poems: Poetry Review, The London Review of Books, the TLS and so on.

Though not entirely untrue, fortunately this is only part of the bigger picture, as a number of online poetry and literary magazines in the UK and further afield are growing in considerable authority. These include the likes of Salt Publishing's Horizon, edited by Jane Holland; Blackbox Manifold, edited by Adam Piette and Alex Houen at the University of Sheffield; the longstanding Jacket magazine, and those print journals which also publish much of the material from their issues online, most notably the American magazines AGNI and Poetry. A few UK print journals could learn a thing or two from the latter, and of the former UK online publications, work by Paul Muldoon, Michael Schmidt, George Szirtes, Fiona Sampson and Vona Groarke have featured in Horizon's and Blackbox Manifold's pages - some of the better poets writing in English today.

Another online magazine that's recently emerged in the UK is The Manchester Review, edited by the staff of Manchester University's creative writing course. The magazine published its second issue earlier this year, and has already featured new work from Sean O'Brien, Nick Laird and Conor O'Callaghan, among others. It looks like another strong addition to the best online publications around, and one which poets and novelists alike can publish their work in. Of particular interest to me were Nick Laird's poem 'Adeline' and Peter Armstrong's 'Breakfast at The Fisherman's Mission'. Check it out if you get chance.