Salt Modern Poets – serie

Radio Nostalgia examines the borders of war, social exile, and manufactured liberty expressed through corporate media. The poet's world is mediated through news anchors, oracles and heralds, where simulated events are historicised through narrative and consumed as product. Chris Emery's auditory imagination is lurid and comically compelling, with imagery the sets the reader reeling with the terrifying beauty and sinister power of it all."As palliative as a corpse in a junkyard, Radio Nostalgia doesn't relax you so much as it opens a way into wakefulness. With a stunning lexicon, short phrases stuffed with grit, petrol and spleen, Chris Emery orchestrates a complex, resistant music into one to three-beat lines as our 'countdown to armaments'." —Forrest Gander

Dr. Mephisto is in the form of a long sequence of poems. It traces Mephistopheles as he ranges freely through time and space, at times a laconic observer, at others a thuggish participant, but always a presence wherever there is conflict and suffering and whenever there is work to be done. Far from being oppressive, this is an exciting and highly original work, whose exhilarating pace is set by Emery’s innovative use of language and form, and whose acerbic political edge keeps the vision sharp and fresh. Compelling, hard-hitting, and grimly funny, Dr Mephisto will be remembered long after being read, and a significant new poetic voice will have been recognised.

PBS Recommendation. The school of forgery is a singular institution, whose principal teachings concern the volatile relationship between fakery and invention. Both you and I are its alumni, and so is the bandit boiled alive in a cauldron of oil. So are the perpetrators of hoaxes, the writers of pornographic dōjinshi, counterfeiters in love with their teachers and teens who dress up as birds to fight tyranny. Its professors proliferate. Its graduates excel in every field. Its campus is the world.This book, part prospectus and part fanzine, is made from stolen or borrowed parts – centos and collages, half-rhymes and homophonics, translations and travesties. Equally inspired by manga luminaries like Naoki Urasawa, animation and adventure stories as it is by earlier poets, the natural world and human history, School of Forgery postulates the poem as knock-off, as reclaimed scrap, and most of all as through-and-through fabrication.

Lyrical and at times unsettling, The Somnambulist Cookbook explores the quality of disappearance, slowly breaking down as the poems swing from rogue sonnets to fractured prose poems, reminiscent of Larkin, but if he had gone abroad and listened to Pavement rather than jazz. These are poems which haunt the margins of who and what we are, searching for something that has left only a trace on the barbed wire of our nerves.

Longlisted for The Polari First Book Prize 2020Death Magazine is a neutropian vision of our soundbite, snippet-obsessed, digital and print magazine culture. It employs the Dadaist technique of cut-up to produce poems that range from the blackly comic to the surreal, from the nonsensical to the prescient. Many of the poems confine themselves to the precise aesthetics of magazine columns, doing away with line breaks entirely to find new meaning in their Modernist forms. Added to the mix are a range of free verse poems more traditional in form. This monster hybrid of styles, of fact and fiction, aims to replicate the untrustworthy, hyperbolic stream of media that absorbs our lives every day. This radical work creates a futuristic landscape of human emotion as product – a pink, shattered diamond refracting our chaotic times.

Poetry Wales: Poetry Books of 2019Cracked Skull Cinema offers poems on culture and society, colonialism and its legacies, media and power. Set between these are homages and reflections on middle age, on life’s loves and losses.

In this collection, Peter Daniels looks at his life as an older gay man, his London neighbourhood, his furniture, other people’s gardens and London’s creatures. His distinctive voice ranges through tight rhyming to looser meditations and prose poems, always skilfully crafted as words to make some sense of the world.

Gardens, grotesqueries, historical landscapes, destruction and darkness, all collide in Tony Williams’ explosive new collectionTony Williams is roaming the earth. The poems in Hawthorn City record the tales we tell ourselves to make a home in the lives we find ourselves living. They are songs to family, to stone and outlawry and refusal, and to the fevered memory which reaches back beyond birth, past early modern witches and shepherds’ songs, past medieval chronicles and Icelandic sagas, to the ancient city-states, homely and hellish, which part of the modern imagination still inhabits. Travelling darker and deeper towards the state which is both origin and grave, this grotesque comedy of a book intensifies into a bizarre, baroque vision of the world and our place in it.

Dynamic first collection from this popular Scottish poet, The Night Jar lifts the lid on a fizzing range of personas, dramas and states of mind – presenting them for our delight: ‘I collect the materials of the small hours, / all that gorgeous paraphernalia.’ Peterkin explores the expectations and limits of being human with lashings of wit and sometimes a disquieting note of threat. Mad cap, extravagant, urban and questioning, this is a collection no one will forget.

Heat Wave is a form of poetic cabaret,‘What good is sitting, alone in your room?/ come hear the music play!’ If a cabaret is full of high jinks it can also land punches – truth can be masked by the burlesque and the grotesque: ‘Tell all the truth but tell it slant’.Luke Kennard has said of Stannard’s writing, ‘I know of few other poets who can write of cruelty, hysteria and disappointment with such levity and grace.’ Will Eaves speaks of a ‘comic vitality’. Heat Wave seeks to unsettle and wrong-foot; it refuses to adopt a sententious or holier than thou attitudes regarding the many crises which confront us. The poems subvert as well as entertain. Critics have noted ‘a tonal control and simultaneous considerations of matters mordant and gleeful.’ The reader might weep and laugh on the same page. The lyrical and the demotic might walk hand in hand.

If you can imagine William Blake playing Scrabble with Joni Mitchell, Catherine of Aragon booking into the Holiday Inn, or Cassius Clay meeting the apostle Paul on the road to Damascus, you’re ready for the dreamworld created by Aidan Semmens in The Jazz Age. After five books of intense – some would say difficult – poetry, he has produced something more accessible, surprising, and fun. In a series of prose vignettes he casts an array of historical figures into times and places other than their own, playing on anachronism and dislocation to surreal, witty, frequently comic, occasionally poignant or disturbing effect. Each brief episode is crystalline, the whole piece theatrical, enjoyably absurd. You might identify a questioning of belief systems, of social hierarchy, of human individuality and inter-relationship – but essentially this is, as it is billed, entertainment.

What is a city for? How long do the vibrations persist from an economic shock wave, or a guitar chord? Is anything really permanent? The ‘meanwhile site’ is a place where change becomes a design feature, and Pete Green’s remarkable debut collection commemorates the transient and the marginal – from the emergency housing made of shipping containers to crumbling coastal paths and sea stacks; from the villages left isolated by railway closures to the predicament of the new generations disenfranchised by the march of neoliberalism. With the temporary comes hope of renewal, though, and alternatives to a disrupted, rootless culture might emerge in a Neolithic stone circle, or a circle of friends. Keenly observed, deft and humane, these are poems for our age of precarity.

Formally-innovative, wildly-inventive, comic, surreal and poignant – Evans’s poetry is a restless delight as he tackles almost any subject from lost invoices, hearing aids, fruit flies, migration, bin lorries, bullet-pierced road signs, to love’s strains and pleasures. As entertaining as they are impressive, these poems are in and of the physical world, brimming with ideas and passion and sharing it all with real panache.

The Death Poems: Songs, Visons, Meditations explores death in a range of forms – celebratory, visionary and contemplatively, using subject matter as varied as the dust heaps of remains that accumulated in 19th century London to the environmentally toxic ship graveyards at Alang in India. Formally dazzling, Beirne’s complex and textured meditations are sobering, spiritual and, in the end, sustaining.

Sing Me Down From the Dark explores the highs and lows of a ten-year sojourn in Japan, two international marriages, a homecoming, and the struggles of cross-cultural relationships. It is full of light and dark, as if the writer herself has been ‘caught off guard’ in the making of these poems.

Addressing the loss of the poet’s mother – as well as themes of motherhood, birth, death, and the natural world – Scenes from Life on Earth explores how we grieve and remember those we love. Simmonds continues to write through the prism of her faith, offering insights and wisdom on the circuit of life, of life’s endings, and the promise of reconciliation.

In a radical departure in style and tone, Rob A. Mackenzie’s new collection, Woof! Woof! Woof!, offers biting satire and sweeping social commentary. From the murk of political engagement in an age of offence sensibility, to the bleached-out culture of munificent late-capitalism, Mackenzie’s experimental poems take the reader on an engaging and engaged descent into the sort of purgatory we may never choose to escape from, yet his impish wit offers us all a large dose of saving grace. Sardonic, at times morally exhausted, the poems offer a clear-sighted challenge to the risk of isolationism and powerless relativism.

Shortlisted for Best Collection in the 2023 Forward Prizes for PoetrySennitt Clough’s twisty fen-Gothic narratives are filled with macabre imagery and sexual violence. Imagine a monstrous fair that has arrived in deepest Cambridgeshire, only to discover that the inhabitants are far more frightening than the carnival. Rich in symbolism and mythology, it’s a thrilling read that will leave your mind as black as peat.

Departing from Virgil’s Eclogues, The Pastoraclasm is an urgent environmental address to humans, nature and vegetable gardens. During pandemic lockdowns, poet John Kinsella realised that he would have to garden not because he enjoys it but because his family, who live ‘in the bush, would need whatever he could grow. Fierce summers, fire danger, and only having access to rainwater tank water — refusing to drain the aquifer further by using one of the two bores at ‘Jam Tree Gully’, reinforced the realisation that gardening needs to be a careful negotiation with the limitations of time, place and conditions of presence. What developed was a set of dialogues with the garden, and with the endemic plants and animals that surrounded it. Searching for a decolonising antipastoral ‘eclogue’, the poet continues his decades-long practice of investigating the nature of ‘pastoral’ and its failure to translate into the Australian environment/s. Writing to a poet in Wales, Kinsella said: ‘We’re in regional lockdown here, and trying to grow veggies in drought conditions. Lot of silvereyes, thornbills and gerygones out there today – overcast, which is unusual at the moment (still very hot), and that has them vigorous with hope, I guess... but no rain predicted. On emergency water supplies now.’ In this cycle of eco-eclogues, a counter-pastoral of responsibility emerges – one that acknowledges the toxic impact of colonialism, and which seeks to address human rapacity through challenging consumerism and industrialism and offering an ‘alternative’ way of living. As garden and gardener, soul and self, all speak with each other, they are conscious of how close fire and other catastrophes are, and together they try to evoke a healing and a path through to justice for the biosphere. Known for his wide variety of poetic approaches and techniques, this collection is very much about utterance, place and a belief that there are no easy garden metaphors, that garden’s are also spaces of responsibility.

Emma Simon’s wide-ranging, work explores how strange and surreal the everyday can be and how real life and stories tend to bleed into one another. These poems – mysterious, mythic, magical – remain deeply accessible, while being witty and serious. An unforgettable debut collection.

Where Richard Skinner’s previous pamphlets, Invisible Sun and Dream into Play, were primarily concerned with the play of light and playfulness respectively, White Noise Machine is mainly concerned with sound. A white noise machine is a device that produces a noise that calms the listener, which in many cases sounds like a rushing waterfall or wind blowing through trees, and other serene or nature-like sounds and Skinner has used this idea to try to create this effect in many of the poems.

Written during a residency with The Polar Museum in Cambridge, Robbergirls reimagines The Snow Queen as a Sapphic rite of passage. Offered in seven sections that echo the fairy tale’s form, these hot, tender and generous poems search for a lost other who is by turns friend, brother, son, lover, but ultimately an aspect of a fragmented self. In her formally playful and linguistically rich third collection, Benyon suggests that the ache for contact can be tempered by nature, even with disordered seasons. In striking poems that refuse to deny environmental breakdown, the poet holds space for the indigenous people of the Arctic as she considers the devastating impacts of climate change on their landscapes and lives.

Longlisted for The Laurel Prize 2024Becky Varley-Winter’s striking debut explores themes of daring, danger and risk in poems that are packed with imagery from the natural world. Complex, hypnotic, memorable – this collection introduces a significant new voice.

Julian Stannard has been described as the poet of cabaret. His poems sing and weep in equal measure; a poetry of wretchedness and hilarity, of discombobulation and the bizarre. In his new collection a dead brother returns on a white horse, a musical stag slips off to New York, the Kray Twins reappear, a summer pudding is carried across a heath, a pair of buttocks escapes their owner, a couple makes love on a rain-soaked stoop, the Mongols catapult concubines over the parapets, a dead friend walks out of his grave like a twenty-first century Lazarus, a blind boy breaks into the Kelvingrove Gallery and makes off with Salvador Dali’s crucifixion, Ezra Pound – half fish, half man – rises to the surface of the Venetian lagoon, and after ten years in the Cicada Lunatic Asylum the narrator finds peace in the Umbrian town of Bastardo.Please Don’t Bomb the Ghost of my Brother is international in scope and tirelessly ludic. The poems engage with the Covid pandemic, the war in Ukraine and personal loss. Stannard’s poems sing and weep in equal measure: a poetry of wretchedness and hilarity, of discombobulation and the bizarre, mindful of lacerating loss and the redemptive power of strangeness, a special type of humour. They supply a feast of stories.

Peter Daniels has long demonstrated his skill as a poet who can write about being a gay man, and he now applies this to the experience of becoming older, finding new love and looking back on how he has reached this point. He recasts the story of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza into a sequence exploring confusion and sanity in a relationship. The poems play with the texture of language, in a stimulating range of forms.

David Briggs’ new collection offers a midlife counterpart to the Oedipus complex exploring themes of family ties, nostalgia and retreat, ageing and mortality, acts of memorial and the impulse towards hospitality.

Ken Evans’s collection is structured in three inter-locking and overlapping sequences: Family; Masculinity; and America. Subjects range from the personal sacrifice and meaning of an organ donation; the loss of a child in still-birth; the death of a friend through drink, as well as bigger themes of our constant wars and forebodings of climate collapse. But these poems also experience hope, humour and optimism shining through – and often co-existing with the darker themes, thus poems on the small vagaries and mishaps of our digital lives, of the money-anxieties of car maintenance, or of negotiating airport security with a replacement hip.

New And Selected Poems brings together a quarter of a century of exceptional writing.Julian Stannard started his career as a writer in the Italian port city of Genoa. He has written at length about Liguria and Italy in general. His work has been translated into Italian and he finds his place in a rich Anglo-Ligurian tradition. This gathering of poems from many collections infuses his love of Italy with a clear-eyed view of modern Britain.These are poems which can wrong foot and amaze. His satirical appetite draws on Rabelais, Gogol, Swift, and Lear. Stannard ultimately creates an unmistakable voice – the commonplace is made strange and yet even stranger still.2010 Winner of the International Troubadour Prize2024 – Awarded the Lerici Shelley Prize

Poems within Everything is Present have won The Ledbury Competition, The Wigtown Prize, and were featured in The Forward Book of Poems of the Year.‘As brave, as bravura, a performance as the ill-advised, little-known acts it celebrates, this is both a lament and a defiant affirmation of an individual’s life.’ Phillip Gross, Ledbury Prize‘A stark and timely reminder of how there is always some level of choice when it comes to traditions and symbols, and the significant role this choice has in harming or healing our collective and individual relationships with the past.’ Roseanne Watt, Wigtown PrizeEverything is Present is a mid-life coming of age tale. The back to front narrative is divided into three sections, End, Middle and Beginning. Poems explore the effect of grief and ageing and the ability of these two to alter the past as well as the present. The title comes from a Buddhist meditation referring to the non-linear nature of time as well as its gift.The first section End contains award-winning elegies for a mother who died on a locked-down ward during the pandemic and a grandfather who escaped from Nazi-occupied Lwów (then in Poland, now the Ukraine). There is also a Ledbury-winning poem describing a Jerry Lee Lewis- loving father’s visit to A&E. The second section Middle negotiates the shifting ground of middle age exploring women’s bodies, work, therapy and the consolations of love and spirituality in poems featuring amusement arcades, train derailments and Allen Jones’ controversial women as furniture sculptures. Beginning revisits youthful sex, running away from home and Happy Shopper before embracing middle aged sex and then returning in a (never) ending to the mother.