Emma Press Picks - Böcker

A fascinating pamphlet of love poems all themed around the poet's single object of desire. In this beautifully illustrated collection, Richard O'Brien deploys every trick in the love poet's book, resulting in a irresistible mix of tender odes, introspective sonnets, exuberant free verse and anthems of sexual persuasion. The poems plunge from ecstasy into melancholy from couplet to couplet, and the book as a whole stands as a defiant sally against the pressures of long-distance relationships. Loosely inspired by the Roman poet Ovid's Amores.Lincolnshire poet Richard O'Brien studied English and French at Oxford University and hosted an English-language radio show on EU Radio Nantes after graduating in 2012. He is now studying Shakespeare and Creativity at the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon.His first pamphlet, your own devices, was published by tall-lighthouse press in 2011, as part of the Pilot series for British and Irish poets under 30. His work has since featured in Poetry London, the Erotic Review, The Salt Book of Younger Poets and The Best British Poetry 2013. His blog, The Scallop-Shell, is dedicated to the close reading of contemporary poetry and he recently performed his poems at the BBC Proms Lates. His second full pamphlet, A Bloody Mess, will be published by Ink Lines (an imprint of Valley Press) towards the end of 2013.

In an island kingdom, Don Armando dreams of a dragon-slaying adventure like heroes used to perform. And in a laboratory in a gleaming city, scientist Haplo Nous tinkers towards an atom bomb. Past, present and future collide in Andrew Wynn Owen’s rip-roaring tale, full of rhythmical fireworks and joyous anachronism. This is a clash between chivalric heroics and modern scientific enquiry, and a shaggy-dog story taking in farmers, fisherpeople, flying machines and general derring-do.

The voices of humans and animals, living and dead, clamour for the reader’s attention in Meat Songs. Headlice roam their strange habitat, a severed pig’s head questions an undergraduate’s choices, and packaged meat products are ignoring the future.

In Carol Rumens's Bezdelki, small things like the English meaning of her Russian title help to shore up the memory of a life. These elegies for a late partner, written in memory of Yuri Drobyshev, explore the principle that death, even for atheists, isn’t purely loss. Instead, a kind of conversation between two people can be continued through willed acts of memory, whether by rooting through incidental artefacts found in a toolbox ('defiant old metals, coupled/irrefutably and awkwardly for life') or by revisiting works of Russian literature that both members of the couple admired. In Rumens's pamphlet, translations and imitations of Osip Mandelstam share space with fragments of Egyptian mythology and 'a wardrobe of old sweat-shirts' to convey the powerful, and moving, impulse to 'live with your death unburied at my core'.

Written in memory of her mother, who died of motor neurone disease in 2012, the poems of Requiem roughly cover the timespan of an illness, death, and burial. The formal structure is based on the Catholic Requiem Mass as it has been set as a choral piece by Giuseppe Verdi, Gabriel Fauré, Maurice Duruflé, and many others. The poems quote from other classical and folk works about the underworld and the passage into death, juxtaposing the engagement with the old text with modern references.Winner of the Poetry Book Society Spring Pamphlet Choice.2. Kyrie Lord have mercy upon her Christ have mercy upon her Day have mercy upon her Night have mercy upon her Bed have mercy upon her Hoist have mercy upon her Catheter have mercy upon her Needle have mercy upon her Gastrostomy have mercy upon her Citalopram have mercy upon her Riluzole have mercy upon her Morphine have mercy upon her [...]

A sequence of poems set in an imagined city, examining the impact of post-industrialisation and the effect of toxic political leadership on the collapse of cities and communities. The poems offer perspectives from various characters living in the City, from the tour guide to the photographer to the hostess at Kissorama.

Call and Response is a sequence of sonnets from the perspective of a daughter, addressed to her mother during her mother's illness. Hard-edged yet tender, the poems explore the darker side of familial bonds and the strange ways suffering can heal old wounds.