Ten Poets – serie

In scenarios which recall the mid-20th century craze for atomic monsters and stop-motion titans – as well as the existential fears they continue to embody – these ten sprawling poems and lyrical tales turn on terrible confrontations in modern metropolitan centres. The poets behind them are fighters, guardians – their lines and stanzas weapons of resistance. And while the beasts themselves may be somewhat figurative, somewhat fantastical, the danger they represent is sometimes very real indeed ...

“One need not be a Chamber—to be Haunted—”When a poet turns to the subject of ghosts, it’s as much conjuration, or spectral evocation, as it is a story. We have gathered here ten in one slim book — ten possible summoning spells, primed to plant sounds and images deep in the ear and eye. Would you risk reading them aloud? Be careful — repetition is a kind of incantation. And the ghosts in these lyric tales are as angry as they are mournful as they are cold ...

Do poets make good detectives? Find out by following their feats of deduction, in this set of ten wildly varied accounts of mystery and murder. See them soften the tight lips of witnesses, squeeze the hearts of suspects, and wrestle with the muddledness of the inner life exposed. Watch for their subtle skill, but also for the all-too-human weaknesses and maddening contradictions that all honest poetry (and all good detective fiction) holds up, glintingly, to the light.

Poets are famous rakes, seductresses and time travellers, are they not? Cast all doubt from your mind by taking in these ten tantalising accounts of extremely inter-generational flirtation, whereby prominent persons from history are left weak-kneed and willing. But is that all there is to it? Or are our poets, as poets tend to be, up to much else besides mere dalliance? And will they change the past forever, or vanish into it?

Long before we went to the moon, we dreamt of going there, of what it would be like, in every medium from cinema to comic strip. Now, ten brave cosmonauts have resurrected that most rickety, most celestial of technologies – the lyric poem – as a means of reaching out as far as any of us has ever gone, in a space race from which some of them may never return. What will they find out there, amid the cold craters of the forbidding lunar crust?

"Behind the thin glass, the wind chanted not warnings but invitations... " They’re done with the land, its reckless rulers and its unjust laws! Now ten poets set sail under the bold black flag, as pirate queens, gentleman corsairs and salty dogs, to sing shanties most boisterously and comb for treasure. But what kind of treasure? And what varieties of creature await them in the deep? And what happens when the rum runs dry? Is the journey really what it seems to be? Did they ever, in fact, escape the shore?

Poets are, as a matter of fact, natural spies. Nondescript in appearance, they're quick, ever-watchful, and shifty in their skins. Practised at fleeing, and at giving pursuit. Likely to reach for a pen that fires a dart. Likely, too, to cross each other's paths in out-of-the-way places, and exchange some vital capsule of information. Most importantly, perhaps, they are experts at slipping the grip of a rival spymaster, who is their own dark double – for a time, at least. And when called out of retirement to do their bit – well, take any reticence with a pinch of salt...