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This new Pauline Plummer collection plays with form and free verse in a wide range of poems that are both personal and political. Plummer's poetry is at times lyrical, at times erotic, but also mordant and run through with a dark humour.

Some of the country's leading writers are captured in this unique anthology which celebrates the many and varied islands around our shores. Kathleen Jamie, Mervyn Peake, John Betjeman, Brendan Behan, Hugh MacDiarmid, Louis MacNeice, Geoffrey Grigson, W.B. Yeats, George Orwell, and Kathleen Raine are just a few of the 50 authors whose prose works evoke and record in a whole variety of ways, the culture, lives and essence of island life. The collection follows IRON's highly successful anthology – also edited by James Knox Whittet, 100 Island Poems, published in 2005.Praise for 100 Island Poems:"I cannot recommend this book too highly. The Foreword by the editor James Knox Whittet, who himself was born and brought in the Hebridean island of Islay, is deeply moving and thought provoking and contains many wise insights." — Ann Jones100 Island Poems, ISBN: 978-0-906228-97-5, £9.00James Knox Whittet is a poet who grew up on the Scottish island of Islay, and now lives in Norfolk. He previously edited for IRON Press the highly successful 100 Island Poems (2005). He has also published a pamphlet — Seven Poems for Engraved Fishermen.

North East poet Michael Wilkin, previously published in the Bloodaxe collection Ten North-East Poets: An Anthology (1980), is a regular visitor to Venice. Over the years he has penned these vivid haiku, 51 in total, seeing the watery city in a new light. The book is a distinctive A7 in size, beautifully produced on textured paper, with one haiku per page.Aboard a leaping Vaporetto – / The road to Venice / Splashes in our faces.Today the rain-pocked canals / Are a weeping grey – / Swept clean of gondolas.Michael Wilkin is a native Tynesider who has lived for the past thirty-five years in Cullercoats. He is a former trades union official at the Swan Hunter Shipyards and second-hand bookseller. The book is dedicated to the author's partner, Jean Thurston.

A beetle disguised as a water-drop? A cat that lives in the desert and never drinks? A frog poisonous enough to kill just by touching it? This beautiful book all about the animal kingdom features playful and engaging poems on more than 40 animals, birds and insects, including some of the world's most endangered species. You'll find everything from the panda to the bumble-bee, from the cave racer snake to the Madagascan robber moth, even something called a gastric brooding frog... Perfect for both children and their parents, the poems are accompanied by wonderfully eye-catching illustrations by Rose Sanderson, along with fun facts on the animals and their amazing behaviour in the wild. I am the colour of all that I see,the leaves changing colour also change me, and so when I rest, and then when I fly, I am the branches, I am the sky. ('Mirror Beetle') Liz Brownlee's work has appeared in over 60 children's poetry anthologies in the UK, including Read Me and Laugh (2005) and Space Poems (2006), both published by Macmillan.

Iron Press's latest haiku collection is also a teasing movie quiz, and a must for any film fan. Come along to the launch as part the of Whitley Bay Film Festival on 17th August 2013, receive a copy with your ticket and get it signed by the author!One Hundred Film Haiku: The Reel Thing features a hundred well-known films from the last 50 years, distilling each one into pocket-sized three-line haiku. The title of each film is printed upside down in small type at the bottom of the page for the ultimate movie trivia challenge. The book is the latest in the Iron Press haiku series – presented in the gift-sized A6 format and printed on high quality textured paper.

They tackled a shark,Bit off more than they could chew In a too-small boat.

Fleeing with the cash She opts to take a shower – It's curtains for her.

A little princess Shows she needs help. It can't be A solo effort.

Mick Haining was born in Moville, Co. Donegal. A playwright for schools, he also creates 'disposable' haikus, in the form of calendars, postcards, mousemats and much more besides. He now lives in North Yorkshire, and recently appeared at the 2013 Scarborough Literature Festival.

My poems are too easy - it's a shameI tell them they should try to raise their game:'Just be more circumspect – enigma's prized.Don't come across too soon, you'll be despised.'I'd hoped one day to see them bound in leatherbut they've never learned to keep their knees together.

IRON PRESS is excited to introduce a distinctive new voice in female poetry. Eileen Jones' first full collection The Pale Handbag of the Apocalypse is technically accomplished and full of intelligent wit, skewering the absurdities of modern life and work with a highly distinctive and sometimes satirical or surreal humour.

Eileen Jones previously edited The IRON Book of New Humorous Verse (October 2010). Her pamphlet Connecting Flight was published in 2013 by Red Squirrel Press. She is also a playwright. Her play Knives was chosen for production as part of the New Writing North Emerge project.

This collection explores the world of the Costa Prize winning story Millie and Bird: a northern landscape of fragile lives bound by the invisible threads of place. The stories in this haunting collection have appeared in literary journals and on prize shortlists with Millie and Bird winning the 2012 Costa Short Story prize. A soldier flees the enemy, a woman buries a pig, a girl goes in search of her father - these are stories of northern lives, of what is lost and found, and of how we survive. A prize winning collection: these are the people who live in Paradise, their lives fragile, caught like sheep's wool on wire, each with its own unique story and secret heart.

The poems are inspired by the courageous, unconventional, pioneering and indomitable spirits of some remarkable Restoration and 18th century women. Their histories and accomplishments are mostly absent in the modern consciousness and were invariably ignored or belittled in their own time. The women are disparate with regard to class and personal circumstance, however they are united by their audacity in being unconventional, or even simply notable, at a time when this was the prerogative of men.

These poems are not works of historical fiction. Just as observations and reflections on contemporary life and experiences are harnessed as poetic material, so some impressionistic gleaning of the lives ahead provided the muse for this collection. And while many are necessarily flavoured with historical nuance, there is a universality in what the lives of these extraordinary women present to us: as individuals who know what it is to hope, love, struggle and survive.

In this sequel to the author’s much acclaimed previous collection of haiku from IRON Press, Our Sweet Little Time, Hamish Ironside once again travels through an entire year via the three line poetry form. Divided into 12 monthly sections, these 120 haiku reflect the seasons, mental states, domestic realities, children and the hi-tec realities of modern life, often with a disarming humour:for good measurethe cash machinedelivers an electric shockAt times the haiku are almost self-mocking about the author’s task:working weekend -the Oxford Spelling Dictionaryshouts asshole at meElsewhere, the description of the natural world blends with modern devices:hilltop puddle-starling flickerlike super 8The book once again comes in an attractive small page format ideal for the haiku form.

Odd Socks is the first collection of comic verse by John Robert Brown.

Enjoy a journey around Brown's special world as he considers the arrival of traffic roundabouts in Japan in 2013, contemplates the uniqueness of Nuneaton and in literate and carefully-crafted verses, muses on the correct spelling and pronunciation of 'aitch'. In these pages we also meet a Blemya, (the mythical man with no head), are invited to consider the atheist views of academic Dr. Richard Dawkins, whose habit is wearing the odd socks of the title. We learn also about the 'pullet surprise' of American jazzman Ornette Coleman, and are introduced to ingenious anagrams devised by another world-famous musician.

John Robert Brown also shares the delights of enduring an intrusive medical inspection by way of an endoscope, takes a look in Who's Who, and considers the experience of reading music at Oxford. Odd Socks is a welcome addition to that too small community of intelligent and witty poets.

The book is illustrated by Harry Venning, the creator of The Guardian's weekly Clare in the Community cartoon. Harry Venning is an award-winning cartoonist, illustrator and comedy writer. His work has also appeared in The Mail On Sunday, Sunday Telegraph, Independent, Sunday Times, The Stage and Radio Times. His Clare in the Community books are published by Penguin Random House.

At the pandemic’s start Peter Mortimer began writing a daily column for the Journal, Newcastle’s morning newspaper. Satirical, comic and sometimes absurdist these columns focus directly or indirectly on the Covid-19 phenomenon. The first 100 columns are collected here.

Rebirth is a collection of poems by a mother and daughter who are also writers. During the physical separation of lockdown, they began exploring their personal relationship; the light and dark. They spoke to each other through poetry; uncovering, holding and feeling all of the complexities that can come with mother-daughter relationships. In the sharing of their words, they hope that others too can feel the pleasure of discovery, insight and healing that they found on this journey.

Urbane but unsettling, these skillful random-rhyme sonnets are Peter Bennet's first publication since moving to the low-rise village of Shepherd's Quay, overlooking the Tyne estuary.

In 2021 Peter Mortimer brought out the book, Planet Corona – the First One Hundred Columns, collecting together the opening century of articles for The Journal, Newcastle. These began with and were informed throughout by the Corona Virus and its effect on our world. Dismal though those times were, and bleak though the daily news tended to be, the author found an unlikely humour and satire in the nation’s plight and our ability, or non-ability, to deal with it. The writing was personal and non-technical; it was one author’s individual response to extraordinary times.

Now comes a second collection, Beyond Planet Corona. The virus has receded (temporarily say many experts) but its impact lingers on and Peter Mortimer continues to observe from the sidelines. The book is a satirical look at how we as a nation, and sometimes as a planet, are coping with the aftermath of the corona devastation.

Seventy four haiku each from two of the UK's leading exponents of the short poetry form.

USING A VARIETY OF POETIC TECHNIQUES including monologues, sonnets and rhyming couplets, John Price focuses on the individual’s will to survive. Along with the variety of techniques there is a mixture of mood and feeling – from the absurdities of the Greek gods' treatment of Tiresias and the Angel of the North's freedom fantasies to the stoicism of the cancer patient and the old man organising his 'leaving', there is humour, compassion, optimism, sadness and above all an appreciation of human courage and endurance. And then there is the image of the sea rocket blooming till doomsday ‘on whatever scraps of shore survive’. This is the second poetry pamphlet by John Price from IRON Press. We previously published Bye Bye Blackboard illustrated by Susan M Coles, 2016.

A LYRICAL AND, AT TIMES, CHALLENGING first collection that settles, in a satisfying stream of synchronicity, into a 3-4-5-6 pattern. There are three broad categories. Four of the poems are inspired by shapeshifting the poet’s shamanic world view and include a whirlwind tour of nations where shamanic practices and beliefs remain deeply baked into their underlying structures. Five poems are autobiographical in nature, predominantly about pain and death; and there are six flights of pure playfulness that dance, and freeze, and burn to the sounds of a digeridoo. Some of these works have previously appeared in October Hill Magazine, The Oldie, and on PoetsOnline.org.

John Fox’s poems offer an original response to both the world around him and that of his own imagination. Potato Prints When you slice a potato in half you often find a constellation or two, and frequently a waterfall tumbling.

Peter Mortimer’s new full-length play has its world premiere at The Exchange Theatre North Shields for the full week beginning Monday April 23rd 2018. Rainbird is based on the life of the North Shields artist Victor Noble Rainbird who before the First World War was seen as one of the most talented artists in the region and was the only northerner accepted for the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 1911, where he won various awards and prizes.Rainbird’s war experiences badly marked him and he ended up alcoholic, selling his paintings for liquor in North Shields hostelries. He died in poverty and obscurity at the age of 48 and for 80 years was buried in a pauper’s grave in Preston Cemetery North Shields.Recent interest in his work raised more than £6,000 for a proper headstone and The Old Low Light, North Shields has staged two recent exhibitions of Rainbird’s work. This book contains the full tex, rehearsal photos, cast list and a foreword by the author. The play its produced by the North Tyneside based Cloud Nine Theatre Company and directed by Neil Armstrong.

The small Northeast costal village of Cullercoats has always attracted artists and became known as Little Bohemia. In recent years it has also become home to a growing number of writers (as well as the home of IRON Press) and we asked six authors living in the village to create poetry or fiction inspired by their special domicile. The result is a wide mix of styes and subject matters, factual, mythological or fantastical. tragic, or darkly humorous, an amalgam of styles as a sextet of creative imaginations get to work.

This unique book offers four new short stories in two separate forms. Firstly as written by Peter Mortimer and secondly as graphically interpreted by the artist Pete Shaw, thus enabling the reader a direct comparison on how one creative artist responds to the work of another. The supernatural, the surreal, and the dystopian combine in this quartet of distinctive stories

IRON WOMEN brings eighteen new stories from eighteen new voices, an often disturbing collection run through with a strong thread of wisdom, optimism, and the power of imagination.The writers are Leland Bardwell, Jaq Bayles, Helen Dunmore, Daphne Glazer, Nicola Griffith, Anne Liddon, Anna McGrail, Devi Maharaj, Jan Maloney, C. Merriman, Liz Minnikin, Patricia Parris, Doreen Piano, Daphne Rock, Elizabeth Raintree, Sandi Russell, J.A. Tate and Wendy Wallace.

In the first English language anthology of Russian poets to emerge from the new era, thirty-five poets write against the backdrop of the newly liberalised climate. Well known names such as Yevtushenko, Voznesensky and Brodsky here rub shoulders with such experimental new poets as Druk and Rubinshtein. Women poets are strongly represented through Polina Ivanova, Yunna Moritz, Elena Shvarts, Ekaterina Shevelyova and others. The poems in this book have either been written in the glasnost era, or their publication made possible through it.

Rosemary Norman is not threatening or promising anything. It is human contact itself, between friends, lovers, poets, and enemies personal and political, that is 'full of threats and promises'. In this, her first poetry collection, she writes at the point where fact and feeling meet, often head on, and looks at complex issues through imagery that remains always memorable and clear.

A young shipyard worker is trapped in the steel skin of a Trident Submarine. Swollen in panic, he realises what he has become…'an epic poem, written and performed by Kevin Fegan, who 'won't apologise for poetry' and on this showing has no need - his verse is as tough, topical and streetwise as any disco rap

This collection of humorous, personal, sexual and political poems brings together two Tyneside poets with growing reputations. Kitty Fitzgerald is already well-known in the region as a writer for the stage, radio and screen, while Valerie Laws' work is increasingly seen in magazines; she is a prize winner in both the National and the Bloodaxe/Evening Chronicle poetry competitions.