Author: oxfordbrookesuni

A Place Of Fine Ridges

~ oxfordbrookesuni

A place of fine ridges
Where light was flung up from the valleys
Where flags flew in the blond wind
Little snowy pockets and high mountain monasteries
So you knew you could get a blessing before leaving for the summit
And you did
And you watched yellow-ribboned flags fly against red
And this was a new impossible adventure
From which you would learn, grow
Develop from the magic and mystery
But you knew one day too
You would trace a tablecloth pattern of red, yellow and blue
Like the blond wind and the coloured flags
And there would be an ashtray nearby and somebody talking
And it would be as if the ridges, never before seen
And the special light from the soft contours
Had never been

by Elizabeth Ashworth

‘A Place Of Fine Ridges’ is copyright © Elizabeth Ashworth, 2008. It is reprinted from Flashes and Specks by permission of Cinnamon Press.

Notes from Cinnamon Press:

In Flashes and Specks Elizabeth Ashworth displays a carefully honed skill, acute powers of observation and an enviable range. Birds and light, shadow and dark, the questing spirit of Walt Whitman, impermanence and a refusal to take anything for granted coalesce in mature language that is threaded with humour and made precise by the artist’s eye at work. You can read more about the book at Cinnamon’s website here, where you can also sample further poems from the collection.

Elizabeth Ashworth is a short story writer, poet, and journalist. Liz was born in Buxton and has lived in north Wales for most of her. She has taught creative writing for many years to children and adults. Her Outposts poetry collection A New Confusion won the Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize, and she was second prizewinner in the HE Bates Short Story Competition.

Cinnamon Press is an independent publisher run by a family team and based in North Wales and the Midlands. We select books that we feel passionate about and concentrate on a list of poetry and fiction titles into which we put maximum effort at every stage of development. We also run regular writing courses and writing competitions, including major awards for poets, novelists and short story writers and a series of mini competitions. Find out more about the publisher and join their mailing list here. You can also find Cinnamon on Facebook and on Twitter.

Copyright information: please note that the copyrights of all the poems displayed on the website and sent out on the mailing list are held by the respective authors, translators or estates, and no work should be reproduced without first gaining permission from the individual publishers.

The Burning Room

~ oxfordbrookesuni

(aubade on a picture of spontaneous combustion)

When my lover returns
to his wife, his suburban apartment, the comfort
of a seasoned bed bearing
his beautiful weight

I say nothing.
I do not nod nor sigh nor breathe the light
starting to bleed into the room
the colour of saints

being martyred in portraits.
I walk the gallery of his absence, a tourist only
to this surfeit of space,
the erasure of lines

that is his gift to me.
It is enough, I think, to watch over the wide
territory of his need, to guard
the frontiers of desire

with my body and silence.
It is enough. And so I do not stir,
even when the flames bloom
fresh petals

from my unbrushed hair,
pursed eyelids. I disappear
into photographic retreat,
chemical shadow. So

when my lover returns
I am already the ash he wonders at
and brushes gently away
from the hood of his car.

by Alvin Pang

‘The Burning Room (aubade on a picture of spontaneous combustion)‘ is copyright © Alvin Pang, 2012. It is reprinted by permission of Arc Publications from When the Barbarians Arrive (Arc Publications 2012).

Notes from Arc Publications:

Alvin Pang (b. 1972, Singapore) is a poet, writer, editor, anthologist, and translator. His poetry has been translated into over fifteen languages, and he has appeared in major festivals and anthologies worldwide. When the Barbarians Arrive is a collection of new and selected works, with some poems taken from Alvin Pang’s previous three collections. You can hear Alvin Pang reading from another one of his poems here and watch him on the Arc website here, where you can also read more of his work.

Since it was founded in 1969, Arc Publications has adhered to its fundamental principles – to introduce the best of new talent to a UK readership, including voices from overseas that would otherwise remain unheard in this country, and to remain at the cutting edge of contemporary poetry. Arc also has a music imprint, Arc Music, for the publication of books about music and musicians. As well as its page on Facebook, you can find Arc on Twitter; search for @Arc_Poetry. Visit Arc’s website to join the publisher’s mailing list, and to find full details of all publications and writers. Arc offers a 10% discount on all books purchased from the website (except Collectors’ Corner titles). Postage and packing is free within the UK.

Copyright information: please note that the copyrights of all the poems displayed on the website and sent out on the mailing list are held by the respective authors, translators or estates, and no work should be reproduced without first gaining permission from the individual publishers.

On Speaking to One Another from Different Rooms

~ oxfordbrookesuni

Distorted and lingering, ‘Ant!, Dad!, Tats!’
grown interchangeable, explosive,
each sounding furious.
A search for keys in one room
nourishes fear of lateness in another.
From a kettle filled and boiling
to the weather, daily noise is damned
for drowning the needs of now!
My reply is weapon and filibuster,
deliberate sotto voce, below war level,
another trait of my father
I will never perfect:
I’m here, Can’t hear you, What is it?,
screaming inside ‘Who died?’
Because everything is not where we left it
history will revisit us tomorrow
at approximately the same time.
The door is almost closed
and we have not said our goodbyes yet.

by Anthony Wilson

‘One Speaking to One Another from Different Rooms’ is copyright © Anthony Wilson, 2012. It is reprinted from Riddance by permission of Worple Press.

Notes from Worple Press:

On Valentine’s Day, 2006, Anthony Wilson was formally diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer of the lymphatic system. ‘Beginning with what happened’, the poems in Riddance chart the progress of his treatment for this disease, from initial diagnosis to the uncertain territory of remission. Even more essentially, they recover and celebrate all that is most fundamental and affirming about the act of living.

Anthony Wilson is a poet, writing tutor and lecturer at the University of Exeter. His books of poetry are Riddance (Worple Press, 2012), Full Stretch: Poems 1996-2006 (Worple Press, 2006), Nowhere Better Than This (Worple Press, 2002) and How Far From Here is Home? (Stride, 1996). He is also the author of a prose memoir, Love for Now (Impress Books, 2012), detailing his experience of cancer. Anthony has held writing residencies at The Poetry Society, The Times Educational Supplement, The Poetry Trust and Tate Britain, and he works as a tutor for the Arvon Foundation. He is editor of Creativity in Primary Education (Learning Matters, 2009), and co-editor of Making Poetry Matter (Continuum, 2013), and The Poetry Book for Primary Schools (Poetry Society, 1998). Find out more at the poet’s website here.

Worple Press was founded by Peter and Amanda Carpenter in 1997. Since then they have published a wide range of authors, including Iain Sinclair, Joseph Woods, Elizabeth Cook, Beverley Bie Brahic, Clive Wilmer and Kevin Jackson. They published the selected poems of the acclaimed American nature poet Peter Kane Dufault for the first time in the UK (Looking in All Directions); this was followed in 2007 by Kane Dufault’s To be in the same world. Peter Robinson’s The Great Friend and Other Translated Poems was the Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation for Spring 2002. This impressive backlist was augmented in 2012 by three significant titles: Passio: Fourteen Poems by Janos Pilinszky from Clive Wilmer and George Gomori; Riddance by Anthony Wilson; and the republication of William Hayward’s cult novel from 1964, It Never Gets Dark All Night. Over 2013 and 2014 new titles include work from John Greening, Michael McKimm, Peter Robinson, Mary Woodward and Sally Flint.  More information can be found on Worple Press’s new website and Facebook page.

PS: Book of Eve

~ oxfordbrookesuni

about that snake: it was beautiful,
truly
        it was beautiful
coiled on the cheek
of rock in early sun.
A garden snake, harmless therefore.
Bronze, I recall, frieze
of diamonds or black
down its sides or back
like great-uncle Sandy’s
tartan socks.
One of life’s lords,
Granddad wrestled
topsoil on his acre
of paradise. Beyond cedars
ocean sparkled. Stairs
descended to the first bright
beach of the world. Tide rising
or falling. It glittered
its tongue at me
and I will never forget
how it took me in, then
sashayed off
into the rough
where the berries hung.

by Beverley Bie Brahic

‘PS: Book of Eve’ is copyright © Beverley Bie Brahic, 2012. It is reprinted from White Sheets by permission of CB editions.

Notes from CB editions:

Beverley Bie Brahic is a poet and translator who lives in Paris and Stanford, California. Her translations of selected poems by Francis Ponge (Unfinished Ode to Mud, 2008; shortlisted for the 2009 Popescu Prize for European poetry in translation) and by Apollinaire (The Little Auto, 2012) have also been published by CBe. About White Sheets – which was shortlisted for the 2012 Forward Prize – Eavan Boland has written: ‘This is a book of craft, music and a collected vision of life that provides pleasure on every page.’ See more details about the book, as well as Brahic’s other work, at this page on the CB editions website. On this page you can also read further selections from White Sheets – just click on the link to the pdf on the left-hand side of the page.

CB editions publishes no more than six books a year, mainly poetry and short fiction and including work in translation. Since 2008 its poetry titles have twice won the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and have twice been shortlisted for both the Forward Prize and the Forward First Collection Prize. In 2011 CBe put on Free Verse, a one-day book fair for poetry publishers to show their work and sell direct to the public; the event was repeated in September 2012 with over 50 publishers taking part. Find out more about the publisher from the website, where you can also sign up to the CB editions mailing list, or ‘like’ the publisher on Facebook to keep up-to-date with its activities.

Copyright information: please note that the copyrights of all the poems displayed on the website and sent out on the mailing list are held by the respective authors, translators or estates, and no work should be reproduced without first gaining permission from the individual publishers.

The Crane Dance

~ oxfordbrookesuni

The clew paying out through his fingers, a deftness
that would bring him back to her, its softness the softness
of skin, as if drawn from herself directly, the faint
labial smell, guiding him up and out, as some dampness
on the air might lead a stone-blind man to the light.

Asterios dead for sure, his crumpled horn, his muzzle
thick with blood . . . So at Delos they stopped,
Theseus and the young Athenians, and stepped
up to the altar of horns to dance a puzzle-
dance, its moves unreadable except to those who’d walked
the blank meanders of the labyrinth.
And this was midday: a fierce sun, the blaze
of their nakedness, the glitter of repetitions, a dazzle
rising off the sea, the scents of pine and hyacinth . . .

Well, things change: new passions, new threats, new fears.
New consequences, too. Nowadays, we don’t think much
about Theseus, the Minotaur, Ariadne on the beach
at Naxos, staring out at the coming years.
But people still dance that dance: just common folk,
those criss-cross steps that no one had to teach,
at weddings and wakes, in bars or parks,
as if hope and heart could meet, as if they might
even now, somehow, dance themselves out of the dark.

by David Harsent

‘The Crane Dance’ is copyright © David Harsent, 2012, and reprinted from the book In Secret: Versions of Yannis Ritsos, published by Enitharmon Books in 2012.

Notes from Enitharmon:

Yannis Ritsos (1909–1990) is one of Greece’s finest and most celebrated poets, and was nine times nominated for a Nobel Prize. Louis Aragon called him ‘the greatest poet of our age’. He wrote in the face of ill health, personal tragedy and the systematic persecution by successive hard-line, right-wing regimes that led to many years in prison, or in island detention camps. Despite this, his lifetime’s work amounted to 120 collections of poems, several novels, critical essays, and translations of Russian and Eastern European poetry. The 1960 setting, by Mikis Theodorakis, of Ritsos’s epic poem Epitaphios was said to have helped inspire a cultural revolution in Greece.

David Harsent‘s In Secret gives versions of Ritsos’s short lyric poems: brief, compressed narratives that are spare, though not scant. They possess an emotional resonance that is instinctively subversive: rooted in the quotidian but at the same time freighted with mystery. The poems are so pared-down, so distilled, that the story-fragments we are given – the scene-settings, the tiny psychodramas – have an irresistible potency. In Secret was the Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation for the Winter Quarter, 2012. You can find In Secret on the Enitharmon site here, and read a short article by David Harsent about Ritsos from The Guardian here.

Enitharmon Press takes its name from a William Blake character who represents spiritual beauty and poetic inspiration. Founded in 1967 with an emphasis on independence and quality, Enitharmon has been associated with such figures as Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter and Kathleen Raine. Enitharmon also commissions internationally renowned collaborations between artists, including Gilbert & George, and poets, including Seamus Heaney, under the Enitharmon Editions imprint. You can sign up to the publisher’s mailing list here to receive a newsletter with special offers, details of readings & events and new titles and Enitharmon’s Poem of the Month.

Copyright information: please note that the copyrights of all the poems displayed on the website and sent out on the mailing list are held by the respective authors, translators or estates, and no work should be reproduced without first gaining permission from the individual publishers.

The Jeater and The Hometown

~ oxfordbrookesuni

The black I can work,
and work, manumitting troche and trait and spillikin from

the sable yield. And in the dark time shy as farwoods fungi,

right here where the forest is beginning to reclaim the field.

The Hometown

I’d been a boy
but could not barani or shin up to the crest of the Maiden Rock.

And I could barely march, not even out into the cold sea where

a saint’s kneecap and fingerbones bobbed in a tide-trapped cave.

by Roddy Lumsden

This will be the final Weekly Poem of the year, as the Poetry Centre will be taking a Christmas break until 7 January. Very many thanks for reading the 2012 selection of poems. May you have a thoroughly enjoyable Christmas and excellent start to 2013!

‘The Jeater’ and ‘The Hometown’ are copyright © Roddy Lumsden, 2012. They are reprinted by permission of Penned in the Margins from The Bells of Hope (Penned in the Margins, 2012).

Notes from Penned in the Margins:

Roddy Lumsden has six previous collections including Mischief Night: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe, 2004) and Terrific Melancholy (Bloodaxe, 2011). He edited the anthology Identity Parade: New British & Irish Poets (Bloodaxe, 2010), and co-edited The Salt Book of Younger Poets. Originally from Fife, he now lives in London and has also worked as a puzzle, quiz and popular reference writer. The Bells of Hope is a series of 51 poems, published as a limited edition hardback book. All the poems are written in a short form developed by Lumsden, the kernel poem, in which truth (the ‘kernel’) and metaphor swirl in one dimeter line and three equal, much longer lines. You can read another sample poem from the book at the Penned in the Margins site here.

Penned in the Margins is an independent publisher and live literature producer specialising in poetry and based in East London. Founded in 2004, the company has produced numerous literature and performance events, toured several successful live literature shows, published over twenty-five books, and continues to run innovative poetry, arts and performance projects in the capital and beyond. Their recent anthology, Adventures in Form, was awarded a Special Commendation by the Poetry Book Society and was chosen as one of 50 Best Summer Reads by The Independent. You can visit the Penned in the Margins website here to sign up to the mailing list, and follow the publisher on Facebook and Twitter.

Copyright information: please note that the copyrights of all the poems displayed on the website and sent out on the mailing list are held by the respective authors, translators or estates, and no work should be reproduced without first gaining permission from the individual publishers.

My Friend Mary Stone From Oxford Mississippi

~ oxfordbrookesuni

We know we ought to be enemies,
her voice perhaps,
thirty three years off the Delta and
still caked in mud or
my hair perhaps,
bushed for the warrior women of Dahomey,
we know we ought to be enemies, only
Oh Mr. Faulkner
to prevail is such an awe full responsibility
to “have a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and
       endurance”
is an awe full responsibility but
we know we have to try it and
we are both trying to try it
we
red as the clay hills and blacker than loam
friends.

by Lucille Clifton

‘My Friend Mary Stone From Oxford Mississippi’ is copyright © BOA Editions, 2012, and reprinted from The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010, published by BOA Editions in 2012.

Notes from BOA Editions:

Lucille Clifton (1936-2010) was the 2007 recipient of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, as well as the 2010 Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America. Her final poetry collection, Voices, was published by BOA in September 2008. She was an award-winning poet, fiction writer, and author of children’s books. Her poetry book, Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988-2000, won the 2000 National Book Award for Poetry. Two of Clifton‘s BOA poetry collections, Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980, and, Next: New Poems, were chosen as finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in 1988, the only author ever to have achieved this, while The Terrible Stories was a finalist for the 1996 National Book Award. Clifton received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts; an Emmy Award from the American Academy of Television Arts and Sciences; the Shelley Memorial Prize; and the Charity Randall Citation. She served as a Distinguished Professor of Humanities at St. Mary’s College in Maryland. She was appointed a Fellow of The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and elected as Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets in 1999. You can find out more about the recent Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010 here, where you can also read a further poem from the book. Watch a Lucille Clifton playlist, curated by BOA Editions, at this link.

BOA Editions, Ltd., a not-for-profit publisher of poetry and other literary works, fosters readership and appreciation of contemporary literature. By identifying, cultivating, and publishing both new and established poets and selecting authors of unique literary talent, BOA brings high quality literature to the public. Support for this effort comes from the sale of its publications, grant funding, and private donations. In 2011, BOA celebrated its thirty-fifth anniversary. To find out more about BOA Editions, click here. You can also sign up for the publisher’s newsletter here, find and like BOA on Facebook, and follow the publisher on Twitter by searching for @boaeditions.

Copyright information: please note that the copyrights of all the poems displayed on the website and sent out on the mailing list are held by the respective authors, translators or estates, and no work should be reproduced without first gaining permission from the individual publishers.

The Roaring Boys

~ oxfordbrookesuni

er cof Iwan Llwyd

Of all the poets I have known
it’s the Roaring Boys I remember
best; they roared through Canada
and the United States, they

roared through Germany and
France; they roared through England,
but best of all they roared through
Wales; they wrote on anything,

bits of paper, notebooks of a
special kind, the backs of their father’s
wills; they wrote even when they
reached the edge of the endless

sea; Death is unique, he has no mother
and God is afraid of him; when he
came for the Boys, Wait, one said,
I’ve an englyn to write; another

snatched him and kissed his beaky
lips; a last glass of cool white wine,
said a third; Death had visited Keats
and Jeffers, Wordsworth and Thomas

R.S., but the Roaring Boys, he said,
I will never forget; a disgrace to their
nation, and its glory, stumbling
through time like the road to a tavern

where the landlord has the glasses primed
because he knew they were coming
with a thirst and an appetite
as they burst through the sunlit doors.

by John Barnie

‘The Roaring Boys’ is copyright © John Barnie, 2012. It is reprinted from The Roaring Boys by permission of Cinnamon Press.

Notes from Cinnamon Press:

There is a sense of unburdening in The Roaring Boys – a confessional mode that is certainly present in previous volumes, but which here achieves a new plangency. It is all the more striking for butting up against the poet‘s characteristic tonalities – an unsentimental lyricism, sharp with dissecting irony. That unburdening is carried by form: each poem is a single sentence in which concept, argument and emotion are controlled by the sluice gates of semi-colons. Dramas unfold across clauses that bridge voices, tones and timescales. Find out more about the collection on Cinnamon’s site here.

John Barnie is a poet and essayist from Abergavenny, Gwent. He lived in Denmark from 1969-1982, and was the editor of Planet, The Welsh Internationalist from 1990-2006. Barnie has published several collections of poems, mixed poems and fiction, and two collections of essays, one of which, The King of Ashes, won a Welsh Arts Council Prize for Literature in 1990. His collection Trouble in Heaven (Gomer, 2007) was on the Wales Book of the Year 2008 Long List and his previous collection with Cinnamon Press is The Forest Under the Sea. John Barnie plays guitar in the bilingual blues and poetry group Llaeth Mwnci Madoc/Madoc’s Moonshine. He is a Fellow of Yr Academi.

Cinnamon Press is an independent publisher run by a family team and based in North Wales and the Midlands. We select books that we feel passionate about and concentrate on a list of poetry and fiction titles into which we put maximum effort at every stage of development. We also run regular writing courses and writing competitions, including major awards for poets, novelists and short story writers and a series of mini competitions. Find out more about the publisher and join their mailing list here. You can also find Cinnamon on Facebook and on Twitter.

Copyright information: please note that the copyrights of all the poems displayed on the website and sent out on the mailing list are held by the respective authors, translators or estates, and no work should be reproduced without first gaining permission from the individual publishers.

Appletreewick

~ oxfordbrookesuni

Everywhere the water’s height
surprises, a great smooth swelling
over weirs, a sheer glass welling
above the banks as skeins of light
wind around themselves in mauves
and greys, the bearded islets broken
from the shores by the red churn
chafed with the white of rock-cleaved waves,
as if it had transformed the soft
rise of the ground to liquid, the scuff
of pasture rippling on the bones
of rock like shot silk, while the rafts
of farms, roped to their mooring stones
by walls, ride on a tide of turf.

by Julian Turner

Appletreewick’ is copyright © Julian Turner, 2011. It is reprinted from Planet-Struck (2011) by permission of Anvil Press.

Notes from Anvil Press:

Much of the material in Julian Turner‘s third collection works under malign influence, which comes most often from the hand of Man, but is also haunted by elements, spirits and other forces that seem beyond our control. This compelling book also celebrates human ingenuity and heroism in the face of such weighty opponents and laments our inclination to blame others for our misfortune and unhappiness.

Time and memory, the transitory nature of human remains from the earliest man-made monuments, how nature suffers from man-made depredations, the strange states of mind that arise from extreme experience – all of these contribute to this book’s rich and multi-layered insight into the human condition. You can learn more about his work from his own website.

Julian Turner’s previous books are Crossing the Outskirts – a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and shortlisted for the Forward Prize best first collection in 2002 – and Orphan Sites (2006). Planet-Struck was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for 2011. Julian Turner was born in Cheadle Hulme, near Manchester, in 1955 and was educated at New College, Oxford and Goldsmith’s, London. He lives with his partner in Otley, West Yorkshire.

Anvil Press, founded in 1968, is based in Greenwich, south-east London, in a building off Royal Hill that has been used at various points in its 150-year history as a dance-hall and a printing works. Anvil grew out of a poetry magazine which Peter Jay ran as a student in Oxford and retains its small company ethos. Visit Anvil’s website here, where you can sign up to their mailing list to find out about new publications and events.

Copyright information: please note that the copyrights of all the poems displayed on the website and sent out on the mailing list are held by the respective authors, translators or estates, and no work should be reproduced without first gaining permission from the individual publishers.

Naked

~ oxfordbrookesuni

More than I’d seen before, more
than a rabbit, skinned by the sleight
of a butcher’s hands, much more than

the deft red of his wrists. More than
a plucked bird on a hook like a capital
ess in a copperplate book and more

than a grandmother’s mouth stripped
of its keyboard, its click and grin, more
than the gloss of her chopperless gums.

More than his startled skin, its gooseflesh
and quiver, the gristle that made him boy,
more than his ears without their pink wires,

more than all that, lacking their circles
of glass, the blur and fuzz of their squint
looking back at me, more naked than Adam
after the apple: the boy in the bathroom’s eyes.

by Susan Utting

‘Naked’ is copyright © Susan Utting, 2012. It is reprinted from Fair’s Fair by permission of Two Rivers Press.

Notes from Two Rivers Press:

Fair’s Fair, the third full poetry collection from Susan Utting, has been described as ‘joyous, heartbreaking, ramm’d with life’. In these poems dead creatures (a stuffed bird, a taxidermist’s zebra) and people (a lovable, garrulous old man, a strange, moon-faced woman) come back to life. The graveyard dead join in the partying and after-hours drinking in the village pub; a lament becomes a celebration of life. Jane Draycott has described the poems in this book as ‘[e]legiac and sensuous, pressing and haunting in their almost hallucinatory narrative detail’. The founder of Reading’s acclaimed Poets’ Café, Susan Utting has won a number of awards, including a Poetry Business Prize for the pamphlet Something Small is Missing and the Peterloo Poetry Prize for Under the Blue Ball. She has been shortlisted for the Arvon Poetry Prize on two occasions, runs poetry workshops, and taught Poetry and Creative Writing at Reading University. You can read another poem from the collection at the Two Rivers site here, and find out more about the poet from her website here.

Two Rivers Press was founded in Reading in 1994 by Peter Hay (1951–2003), an artist and enthusiast for the town and its two rivers, the Kennet and the Thames. In nearly two decades of publishing and with over seventy titles since its inception, it has been described as ‘one of the most characterful small presses in the country’. It focuses on local poets and a significant part of its work explores and celebrates local history and environment. Bold illustration and striking design are important elements of its work, used to great effect in new editions of classic poems, especially ones with some Reading connection: for example, Oscar Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol, and in collections of contemporary poetry from local poets such as Reading Poetry: an anthology edited by Peter Robinson. It has recently published A Mutual Friend: Poems for Charles Dickens, an anthology with a very distinguished list of contributors, also edited by Peter Robinson. The Press is strongly rooted in the local community and has close links with the University, Poets’ Café, RISC, Museum of English Rural Life and other local groups. Its contribution to Reading’s culture won for it a Pride of Reading award in 2008. You can find more information at the press’s website, and on its Facebook page.