Press for the Press

The following is a list of our publications by Vane Women Press and other imprints. You can buy most of these direct from us. Click the box next to the book cover to select the number of your order. At the bottom of the page you can press to see your order displayed. You can pay by either cheque or credit/debit card.

Postage and packing costs for UK sales will be calculated automatically on your order form.
For most books this is £2.50 for the first book, plus £1 for each additional book. A few larger (and heavier) books have a higher postage charge as noted with their details.

Special offer: Claim a free copy (you only pay postage) with every order, from one of:
Rewriting the Map
Collecting Stones
Walking Through Glass
Just tick the box in the book description to claim.

Earlier publications, now out of print, are listed on our archive page.

Glorious Vane — Anthology

“For over thirty years the Vane Women collective has been writing, performing and publishing, taking their distinctive poetry across the North East and beyond. It is a remarkable achievement, an act of quiet, supportive and sustained resistance to the values of show-business and big business that disfigure so much of contemporary British poetry.
Although all these poets have different things to say, and different ways to say them, there is a shared vision in their work – wise, painterly, unclamorous and serious. They write about maps, rivers, birds and skies, about domestic interiors and landscapes of escape, imagining the ordinary and describing the extraordinary. A hugely enjoyable antidote to the embarrassing froth and hoopla of the UK poetry scene.” — Andy Croft

“Vane Women are part of the bedrock of the Northern poetry scene. Theirs is a consistently vital and carrying voice celebrating and promoting women writers, artists and photographers, creating an enduring core of excellence in a remarkable list which includes publishing a variety of wonderful poets, while also organising workshops, courses and events. As a woman poet I was so impressed by their publications and then, as I came to know them, by their open, generous support of poetry as a whole.
Vane Women Press published my pamphlet The Spar Box with meticulous editing and a beautiful specially-taken cover photograph. This cover is still my favourite of all my books! I received unstinting support and encouragement and I felt welcomed into the Vane Women network. I hope they won't mind me saying they are a great bunch of sparky, sharp, feisty, gifted and unusual women who have come together to create something truly remarkable. Long may Vane Women flourish.” — Pippa Little

Glorious Vane
£8.00 + £2.50 postage.
The postage for further copies of this or other books will be £1.00 per copy.

Safety Measures against the Sea by Katharine Goda

The pain of a frightened child is carried throughout life, like cracked glass distorting the view of the world. In her first book Safety Measures against the Sea, Katharine Goda is reaching for the buoy in the buffeting sea, ‘these old, old, waves’. She would leave if she could ‘but the doors are far away across a vast and polished, unmapped space’. Her poetry maps that space, the abiding menace in the presence of her father, ‘His hands his hands his hands’, and the questions she never asked her mother. Her poem Yes is composed entirely of Noes. Anger is passed on as ‘vital as sunshine’, the spiral of her descent becomes her ascent, her poetry healing herself in creative battles against blank forms of bureaucracy. While she is losing her words she is finding her words. This is the force of marvellous poetry, exciting, brilliant, highlighting the rocks below for safe passage.

Safety Measures against the Sea by Katharine Goda
£7.00 + £2.50 postage.
The postage for further copies of this or other books will be £1.00 per copy.

Inscape by Kathleen Bainbridge

Kathleen Bainbridge opens a private box in her first collection Inscape. Memories of loss, desire, entrapment and escape, feature as pivotal moments on a spiritual journey. Her poems, brilliantly executed, have a bravura of disenchantment like wise-cracking after disappointment. But life is more deeply heartfelt and romance is her counterweight. It is stronger, enduring, lays down its beauty in each line and each regret. It’s the pulse of her muse, the poet Lorca, who advises: ‘tu corazón caliente, nada más’ (your warm heart, nothing more).

“Her poems have an alluring, subtly charged music, a command of significant detail and an understanding that the poem’s task may be less to explain than to invoke.” — Sean O’Brien

“Reading these tender and compelling poems is a road trip through the heart’s wild places, where ‘losing goes on forever’… the passionate spirit of duende is gentled by reflection in the rear-view mirror of memory.” — Linda France

“Though they set out from loss, these are not poems ‘about' loss, they’re not grounded in sadness, they are celebratory, energising and profoundly moving – in this respect they are love poems. The skill and composure with which they have been created means they are truly redemptive.” — John Glenday

Inscape by Kathleen Bainbridge
£6.00 + £2.50 postage.
The postage for further copies of this or other books will be £1.00 per copy.

a girl in a blue dress by Rachel Burns

Just as Lowry paints scenes of working class life around him, Rachel Burns captures the very texture of life in Durham’s hinterland of ex-mining villages: scent of wild garlic in the woods, the rasp of the pheasant, chat of pigeon fanciers. She even echoes Lowry’s chalk-white skies. But her imagination is defiant. She’s a misfit, reading the TLS in the Library, and observer of her former self, a girl in a blue dress, who wanders off. Is she Okay?
Her poems risk bleakness but deliver a dark baroque humour and play with household tensions as child, wife, mother. She’s survived the hard way. It’s a triumph that the colour, drama and tenderness of her voice have survived with her. Her poetry is a brilliant interlacing of innocence and experience with a thread of disquiet always present.

“In her debut pamphlet, Burns shows her extraordinary range and clarity. Her poems lure me into an intimate, almost confessional space; and I step into their heartfelt territory willingly, before I am returned to myself after the characteristic bite of her closing lines.” — Elisabeth Sennitt Clough

a girl in a blue dress by Rachel Burns
£6.00 + £2.50 postage.
The postage for further copies of this or other books will be £1.00 per copy.

The Ship Owner’s House by Judi Sutherland

The Ship Owner’s House is built on sands of displacement. Judi Sutherland echoes the cry of the refugee, the exile, a stranger in a strange land. Home is something she leaves behind. Her poems have crossed several cultural borders to the North. ‘This is a foreign England’ and language rears up in ‘clints and grykes’. Memories move with her into the ‘terra incognita’ of Teesdale, question what we mean by locus, a place where we belong. Intelligent, imaginative, heartfelt, these are salutary poems for our times.

Published March 2018

Extract from London Grip review by James Roderick Burns

Sutherland achieves a remarkable meditation on the elusive, troubling nature of home. These are not sad poems, or despairing in any way. They simply note the small accretions of feeling with each new location (or perhaps dislocation) that takes place in the poet’s life – the north east, her Scottish roots, the Pennines, London. Images of rootedness lost, the struggle to identify with a new place or circumstance, and inevitable departure pile up page after page, lending the whole volume a rich, melancholy air.

The Ship Owner’s House is a disciplined, penetrating study of what it means to be caught up in the slipstream of life. After every move, each new phase and dislocation, we return to the last line of the book’s opening: “every time / what was left behind was love and settlement”. What more could we want from a tumbling, uncertain world than that?

Extract from the review in Opoi by Rennie Halstead

Judi Sutherland writes about her journeys, from south to north, from past to present using the perspective of the outsider. Whether mourning the loss of her grandfather’s possessions, or abandoning the red kites as she leaves the south for life in the north, Sutherland always seems to be outside.
The quality of the poetry leaps from the page. The poet manages to distil the essence of loneliness.

The Ship Owner’s House by Judi Sutherland
£6.00 + £2.50 postage.
The postage for further copies of this or other books will be £1.00 per copy.

NORTHbound anthology

This anthology celebrates the 25^th anniversary of Vane Women, founded in 1991 to support the development and recognition of women writers. NORTHbound contains Pat Maycroft’s wonderfully evocative images with responses by Vane Women and guest writers who live in the North East and have been associated with us as our published authors or tutors of masterclasses. It represents the hard graft of image-making, writing and publishing and honours the camaraderie of writers who live in this region. What binds us all is a strong sense of place, of the North, of a landscape both beautiful and harsh. In times of change and erosion, in the spirit of collective voices, we celebrate what endures and refires.

NORTHbound anthology
£10.00 + £3.00 postage.
The postage for further copies of this or other books will be £1.00 per copy.

Majuba Road by Julie Hogg

Julie Hogg has always lived in Redcar. East Cleveland is her homeland, Majuba Road her stunning first collection. The poems journey through the North East landscapes she inhabits. They chart urban and industrial decay, set against the constant ebb and pull of the sea – an edge ‘between lonely and alone’ to which the book keeps returning. The women who people this book know all about hard times. But they are strong survivors; their sense of humour sees them through. Her voice can be lyrical, startling, staccato and also exquisitely tender, urging us to ‘live like this’.

Majuba Road by Julie Hogg
£5.00 + £2.50 postage.
The postage for further copies of this or other books will be £1.00 per copy.

The eternally packed suitcase by Lisa Matthews

“Is life a minimalist drama? No it isn’t. There is always plenty to say. However we can reply with a simple defiant solution. Move on. Pack that suitcase. Lisa Matthews looks at the world of fragile relationships, shifting sex, encounters in taxis. This is brilliant poetry. There are depths in shallows and moments so eternal we never forget them. Compassion. Sensuality. Breathtaking language.” — S.J. Litherland

“Lisa Matthews’s new collection The eternally packed suitcase is a portmanteau of astonishing elegance and wit, each section illustrating miniature worlds for the reader to enter and savour. The poet creates an atmosphere, a perfume which pervades the room each poem inhabits. Adventurous in form, they are anchored in the domestic, transformed and eroticised, and at times shifted to the surreal.

Women find their way into many of these poems, giving us tantalising glimpses of their imagined lives, like ghosts made flesh. The characters have a convincing three dimensionality, vivid lives shine within the confines of each poem.

The perfume and thrill of this collection linger long after you have made yourself put the book down” — Jo Colley

The eternally packed suitcase by Lisa Matthews
£8.00 £4.00 + £2.50 postage.
The postage for further copies of this or other books will be £1.00 per copy.

Blue Horse by Joanna Boulter

Joanna Boulter has cleared every hurdle to take her poetry to a higher state before she leaves us, not departing from this world but into the shade of an illness which will close down portals: memory, cognisance and time itself.

Blue Horse is her farewell collection of poetry, brilliant, daring, fluent, modernist and to be read at one sitting it is so compelling. We may believe she has drunk the milk of Paradise and in a final poem ‘The Road to Xanadu’ we glimpse the journey. She warns that ‘art is dangerous’. Her poem ‘Water Notes’ vividly ends with a half formed merchild pleading for evolution, as the author attempts to stopper the bottle where wrecks lie. The conclusion may be that poetry is not to be denied, the blue horse takes on skycolour

and stands

      dreaming
of invisible
stars.

having soared he is lame to earth
favours a cracked fetlock     the cost of his courage

I want to go with him     I would pay that price

The poems soar above existence and pre-existence to innate forms and extinct species, snatches of history, including her own. The words often dance beyond punctuation to a new order. She is surely at one with the stars. Beauty, strength, vibrancy, in every poem, her intellect steadily shining. Vane Women are proud to present her valedictory masterpiece. S.J. Litherland

Blue Horse by Joanna Boulter
£8.00 £4.00 + £2.50 postage.
The postage for further copies of this or other books will be £1.00 per copy.

In a Savage Country by Ann Graal

In a Savage Country is a land of mind-mountains familiar to Ann Graal. With grit and courage, and not without wit and humour, she begins a complicated ascent with her dying husband (once a mountaineer) through the lower slopes of consultants and hospitals, to the higher ground of resignation and loneliness. She takes with her memories of childhood, wonderfully observed, and other diversionary themes: dogs, flowers, frogspawn. She is matter-of-fact and lyrical, her powerful poetry full of funny asides and monologues which shift into cadences of heartbreak and celebratory tribute.

In a Savage Country by Ann Graal
£5.00 £2.50 + £2.50 postage.
The postage for further copies of this or other books will be £1.00 per copy.

No Random Loving by Dorothy Long

From Willington lass to Mayor of Darlington, Dorothy Long can reflect on a Northern life of public service. Her poetry, like the luminescent pearls in the opening poem, she has kept in a drawer. No Random Loving is her beautiful debut collection. Family, back terraces and woods, the former Willington slagheap, the Lake District peaks, family holidays in France, all forge strong links. At the centre is her sense of home, carried within, rooted in a happy marriage. Constancy is celebrated while seasons, tides and moods change. In the dales of Durham, Anglo Saxon words hang on and her poetry glints with kennings, fresh and sharp as the East Wind.

No Random Loving by Dorothy Long
£5.00 £2.50 + £2.50 postage.
The postage for further copies of this or other books will be £1.00 per copy.

Love in Vane anthology by Vane Women

'All hail this rattle-bag on love from Vane Women — which, forestalling preconception — starts with a conclusion and ends with Jacob Polley. Love in Vane knows the blues are cathartic, lets its categories bleed into each other and exchange bodily-fluids; contains work of all shapes and various positions — prose poems, ghazals, lists, Twiglets and Bryan Ferry; a bargain, it meets the devil at the crossroads and holds its own. Delve.' — MATTHEW CALEY

"Though the erotic, naturally, occurs, these states are widely interpreted, with an inventive grouping of subject matter what will stimulate and amuse...Loss lingers over sorrow, dips into regret, chills with thoughts of revenge in this varied assortment of verse." Pru Farrier, Darlington and Stockton Times

Love in Vane Vane Women anthology (hardback)
£9.50 £4.75 + £3.00 postage.
The postage for further copies of this or other books will be £1.00 per copy.

One Hand Waving Free by Sheila Binks

Sheila Binks has never lived more than 10 miles from the tiny Durham village of Mordon where she was born. Rooted in her practical Northern working class life, stacking shelves at Tesco and raising four sons, nevertheless she is a dreamer, one who is wild at heart. Her compass points West to the Great Plains and California, where there are ghosts of buffalo and Indians, and the San Andreas Fault is like a knife-edge to live on. All she has are maps on her knee but poets need only one hand waving free. This is a beautiful and intelligent collection drawn from her life on the ground and inspired by her head in the clouds. Sensitive, observant, her work never fails to impress with a spirit that sparkles. And if you have ever wondered what a Durham lasses' night out is like, read on.

“Whether roaming far in imagination or revisiting memories of a rural childhood, adolescent nights out in Durham or trips taken as an adult, Binks conjures up instant pictures in the mind's eye via crisp and rhythmic verse, inventive juxtapositions and bold metaphor. Overall this is a publication containing much to enjoy and reflect upon.” Pru Farrier, Darlington and Stockton Times

One Hand Waving Free by Sheila Binks
£5.00 £2.50 + £2.50 postage.
The postage for further copies of this or other books will be £1.00 per copy.

Stripping the Blackthorn by Lindsay Balderson

When Lindsay Balderson looks at High Force in spate she sees twin towers falling. This is a remarkable collection as it reminds us that terror and beauty live in the same world. While we are growing up parents can be planning their divorce in the next room. While we are boarding a train, another passenger can be led away in handcuffs. Stripping the Blackthorn opens our eyes to the shadows in our lives, none darker than the vaults in the minds of torturers. Love is celebrated as the fruit of the thorn, as it should be.

“...potent pieces...compelling metaphor......sharp in observation, ranging from the celebratory beauty of 'Autumn', redolent of the sights, sounds, smells of the season, to the darker poem used as the title for the book. In this, there is the knowledge that thorns are as much a part of life as fruit, seemingly beyond range, worth striving to reach.” Pru Farrier, Darlington and Stockton Times

Stripping the Blackthorn by Lindsay Balderson
£5.00 £2.50 + £2.50 postage.
The postage for further copies of this or other books will be £1.00 per copy.

Collecting Stones Anthology

You can claim a FREE copy of this book if you purchase any other of our books. You only pay the £1 postage. Just tick here and leave the number to the left at 0.

Collecting Stones is an anthology of poems and stories inspired by Harehope Quarry, Weardale, location of the famous Frosterley Marble.

“The land around Harehope Quarry is bleak and beautiful, but the lives of the miners and their families could be brutal and short. Collecting Stones enters the spirit of both, with poems and stories that describe the rugged countryside and individual characters, written by about 20 contributors.
Pen and ink illustrations by the Darlington artist and cartoonist John Longstaff, who has family links with the area, are scattered throughout the pages, offering a visual description of the nature of the place to match the verbal text and enhancing the book's appeal.” Pru Farrier, Darlington and Stockton Times

Collecting Stones Anthology of poems and stories inspired by Harehope Quarry
£8.50 £4.25 + £3.00 postage.
The postage for further copies of this or other books will be £1.00 per copy.

The Laden Table by Celia McCulloch

Celia McCulloch has a strong American voice: wise, salty, the kind you expect to hear from a rocking chair on porches, no nonsense yet full of poetic instances. In another century she would have been a pioneer, sewing beautiful quilts, bottling fruits. It is sheer pleasure to read her poems, full of earthy energy and humour and skilled crafting, a laden table that is a delight, giving good advice on fungi and love in middle age and how to admonish yourself kindly.

“Curling up with this well presented collection is akin to a much needed holiday in a nature reserve after a lifetime in a noisy high-riser. . distinctive and wise voice.” Deborah Murray, Bee website

The Laden Table by Celia McCulloch
£4.00 £2.00 + £2.50 postage.
The postage for further copies of this or other books will be £1.00 per copy.

The Spar Box by Pippa Little

Pippa Little moves in territories where exile is ever present, where treasures are hoarded: the words of the mother tongue, a lost Jewish quarter, a father's library, the crystals of a mine; the poems memorialise the almost forgotten, even forsaken detritus on a beach. There's a sense of Middle European wandering between states, post-war dislocations: she's collected it all in her spar box of brilliant poetry.

“Little has a powerful voice which uses myth and metaphor with confidence and to great effect. . .These poems can be read over and over and still be startling, both profound and humble.”Raindog magazine.

“this is poetry that gets under your skin and remains there.” Deborah Murray, Bee website

POETRY BOOK SOCIETY PAMPHLET CHOICE

The Spar Box by Pippa Little
£4.00 £2.00 + £2.50 postage.
The postage for further copies of this or other books will be £1.00 per copy.

Burning the Blue Winged Boys by Chris Powell

Burning the Blue Winged Boys is Chris Powell's first collection of her award-winning stories. She captures the tensions and struggles of women asserting themselves, women operating in covert situations, whether the anorexic teenager and her pure relationship with her body and God, or the elderly exile and rampant folk singer keeping their cool under judgement of "un-cool". In the title story a dangerous game tests girls like warriors. These are feisty stories of frailty and power and the author's sharply nuanced poetic style skilfully portrays the feminine as well as the feminist.

'women. . . all vividly created with an understanding of what makes them who they are, people with pain and poetry in their souls.' Pru Farrier

Burning the Blue Winged Boys by Chris Powell
£4.00 £2.00 + £2.50 postage.
The postage for further copies of this or other books will be £1.00 per copy.

The Right Amount of Vinegar by Margaret Rule

It takes the right amount of vinegar to make the perfect mint sauce, and that goes for a life and a book. Margaret Rule's collection of poems and short stories, fond recollections of a Dales childhood, are delivered with deadpan Yorkshire humour, dry as stone walls. From the moment she's "ont hills" in her beloved Wensleydale we have the right mixture which sees her through a wartime upbringing as a dutiful daughter. The writing is warm, witty, never solemn. Through her eyes we learn of innocent rebellions, astute adulthood and how to skim a perfect stone. Such lives are treasures.

'Many of the poems capture nostalgically what it was like to grow up on a farm in the Dales.' Pru Farrier

'I can recommend a nice stocking-filler with a Wensleydale flavour . . . a book to dip into from time to time . . . either charming, humorous or nostalgic . . . well worth reading.' Nicholas Rhea

The Right Amount of Vinegar by Margaret Rule
£4.00 £2.00 + £2.50 postage.
The postage for further copies of this or other books will be £1.00 per copy.

Hunting the Air by Lesley Mountain

Lesley Mountain looks at the world as it is. These are not comfortable poems. She works through close observation and often there is shock in the viewpoint. The flashes of beauty are in the natural world, gestures of kindness, the rough reality of the Appleby Fair where travellers conduct an age old tradition of horse-dealing. The modern world brings in the ugliness of landfill, the louts on the last bus home, stains of racism. These are poems of alienation but fierce commitment to life.
The poet continues to hunt in the air for ideals beneath the surface.

Hunting the Air by Lesley Mountain
£4.00 £2.00 + £2.50 postage.
The postage for further copies of this or other books will be £1.00 per copy.

All Aboard the Moving Staircase by Pru Kitching

Pru Kitching has a theatrical instinct whether her backdrop is high Weardale where she lives or her foreign journeyings. Her voice is dramatic, intense, but played against glimpses of the absurd. Irony and passion are her comfortable companions.
She takes us with her, scattering her husband's ashes, seeking solace in strange lands, we're in a bizarre café: in Edinburgh or shocked by the intrusion of the foot and mouth disaster.

The poet writer switches tragic and comic masks with wit and perception.

"Fascinating insight into the random collision of worlds and their symbols" — Other Poetry

All Aboard the Moving Staircase by Pru Kitching
£4.00 £2.00 + £2.50 postage.
The postage for further copies of this or other books will be £1.00 per copy.

Rewriting the Map by Vane Women / Shore Women

You can claim a FREE copy of this book if you purchase any other of our books. You only pay the £1 postage. Just tick here and leave the number to the left at 0.

"Here are two groups of writers, Vane Women from the North, Shore Women from the South, visiting each other's landscapes, taking them in, reshaping them and giving them back . . . Rewriting the Map is a force field of energy. The enthusiasm, laughter and friendship that went into its making comes through the poems and shapes them too.
"I see not only an island in a new light but the land that is England being held up to it like a piece of glass, the axis of North and South running through it like a seam and the whole, with its many facets, being turned to the sun. So turn the pages. Enjoy."

You can claim a FREE copy of this book if you purchase any other of our books. You only pay the £1 postage. Just tick here and leave the number to the left at 0.

Rewriting the Map by Vane Women / Shore Women
£6.95 £3.50 + £2.50 postage.
The postage for further copies of this or other books will be £1.00 per copy.

Northern Grit by Pat Maycroft and Vane Women

Pat Maycroft’s photography has long been recognised as a stunning evocation of the Northern scene, particularly the lower fell landscape of South West Durham where industrial decay mixes with wild flowers and larksong. This selection ranges from Pat's home fell of Cockfield in County Durham, to memories of Middlesbrough where she was born. There is no doubt that Pat is a poet of the lens, she is also a poet on the page. She's joined by her fellow writers in the Vane Women collective who have contributed poems inspired by her work.

First Edition 2002 sold out. Second impression February 2004 now for sale.

"a little gem of a book" — Photo Art International

Northern Grit by Pat Maycroft
£7.50 £3.75 + £3.00 postage.
The postage for further copies of this or other books will be £1.00 per copy.

Nettle Beds by Irene Stacey

Irene Stacey's poems and stories hold nothing back. She's not one to flinch from life, whether passionate puritan or reluctant hedonist. Her arresting poems, with the wry toughness and astringent clear-sightedness of the American pioneer of her forebears, dance like a feather, sting like a nettle. Her remarkable stories look evil straight in the eye.

An exciting collection spine-stiffening and spine-chilling.

". . . a strong protest sensibility at work . . .feminist and man-faulting which is okay by me." — William Oxley

Nettle Beds by Irene Stacey
£3.00 £1.50 + £2.50 postage.
The postage for further copies of this or other books will be £1.00 per copy.

Under SURVEILLANCE by Diane Cockburn

Are we being watched? Death comes in various guises in Diane Cockburn's comic writing. A child of the Troubles, her quirky black humour takes nothing for granted! You never know where you are . . . In her cautionary tales moths appear as unsung heroes and a black pudding as a villain!

A fine first collection written for adults and children.

". . .compelling openings lead the reader into tales drawn from dark imagination tinged with grim humour . . . a fey and frightening perception of just about everything . . . a highly individual literary voice." — Darlington and Stockton Times

Under SURVEILLANCE by Diane Cockburn
£3.00 £1.50 + £2.50 postage.
The postage for further copies of this or other books will be £1.00 per copy.

Walking Through Glass by Vicki Thomas

You can claim a FREE copy of this book if you purchase any other of our books. You only pay the £1 postage. Just tick here and leave the number to the left at 0.

Vicki Thomas uses language much as a Viking on the field of battle. She gives no quarter. Sharp poems with deadly wordpower. She is mistress of a tradition that combines warrior and poet. Her language crackles with menace and rare lyric beauty.

This first collection covers personal dramas against a backcloth of larger forces, astrological and historical.

Walking Through Glass by Vicki Thomas
£3.00 £1.50 + £2.50 postage.
The postage for further copies of this or other books will be £1.00 per copy.

there was a maze by Joanna Boulter

Joanna Boulter is a marvellous poet. She shares with the late U.A. Fanthorpe a sense for the deep and often dark craft of poetry, for the mercilessness of memory, and for the truth of the poetic act. Her concerns are the music of language, the exaction of experience, and the poetry of place. The attack of her poetry can be tough, bracing, and direct. These are poems that stare out oblivion without fear or pleading, there was a maze is a wonderfully varied, valiant, and rewarding collection. — David Morley, winner of the Ted Hughes Award

there was a maze by Joanna Boulter and published by Epistemea
£8.00 + £2.50 postage.
The postage for further copies of this or other books will be £1.00 per copy.

Marginal Future by S.J. Litherland

Drought. Flood. Storms. Every year S.J. Litherland wonders if she will survive the winter to see the spring. The planet is under siege. The weather can no longer be trusted. The damage has already been done. Her Marginal Future is buffeted by childhood trauma, the collapse of the Durham coalfield and USSR, and a cold Brexit wind.

COVID comes as a reckoning of ills illuminating the past and not yet written future. In her long isolation her memory is full of wealth, a cinema with a stock of films. The book interweaves the approaching apocalypse with the lifetime already lived, the garden in its seasons, a warning and a bequest.

‘A triumph. Whether she is capturing details of the changing seasons, animating a painting, or reflecting upon the effects of history, there is an attentiveness, an intensity that grabs the reader. The collection draws upon a lifetime of observation and reflection, a lifetime of intellectual acuity and deep feeling. She is mistress of her craft, equally skilled in capturing the natural world in small momentary details and evoking the social impact of the loss of the coal industry to County Durham, her adopted home. The warmth with which her Birmingham family are brought to life contrasts with the bleak picture of post Brexit Britain. We are transported to adventures in late twentieth century Russia, and to her mother’s home in Mallorca. The poems are peopled by friends and family. We come to know the Warwickshire landscape of her childhood and the Durham landscape of today. There is humour and anger, an acknowledging of physical frailty, but above all a zest for life. The energy of these poems asserts that poetry matters – ‘poetry is as permanent as the grass, the life blades.’

Cynthia Fuller

Marginal Future
£7.99 + £2.50 postage.
The postage for further copies of this or other books will be £1.00 per copy.

Marginal Future by S.J. Litherland is published by Smokestack Books
Buy on-line at Smokestack or Inpress

Composition in White by S.J. Litherland

At the start of her ninth decade, S.J. Litherland traces the red threads running through her long life, back to a Warwickshire childhood spent in country lanes and air raid shelters, and before that the ghosts of the Levellers and Diggers, the 1848 ‘Springtime of the Nations’ and the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, whose frail free spirit was famously celebrated in Malevich’s Composition in White. Her seventh collection is also a secret book of England, cricket and Morris dancing, Brummie aunts and Bohemian artists, and the long shadow of the war years, a state of the nation archive of a life-long socialist. What seems essential is to keep the pages open, so what is lost, or on the verge of being lost, is not forgotten.

“I have no hesitation in stating that S.J. Litherland is one of the finest poets I have come across in recent years. I admired and loved this collection for its skilful detail and the sense of time and place which is endearing, evocative and enriching. Litherland engages the reader’s senses on every level through her vivid description and her passion for her material. At times the language is expansive and at other times it is economical, but each word feels carefully chosen to fit like a piece in a jigsaw puzzle. This book could serve as a masterclass in poetry.”

Graham Hardie, London Grip Poetry Review

“Springtime of the Nations is a poem which resonates off the page addressing the reader with clarity and leaving echoes of historical reconstruction which can be felt in our NOW. As Jo Colley states on the back cover of this fine collection of poems Litherland’s poet’s eye is ‘as diamond sharp and unsentimental as ever’.”

Ian Brinton, Tears in the Fence website

Composition in White by S.J. Litherland is published by Smokestack Books
£7.99
Buy on-line at Smokestack or Inpress

The Absolute Bonus of Rain by S.J. Litherland

The Absolute Bonus of Rain, S.J. Litherland's sixth poetry collection never lets us forget Feste's remark that "the rain it raineth every day" and the words of a Cole Porter song, "Into every life a little rain must fall". Her rain is the native weather of England that uses its pen to write the beautiful flowers of spring and trees of summer. Rain and cricket may not usually go together, but here they combine to form a backdrop of encouragement for life to go on, despite lost ideals and bereavement.

"The Absolute Bonus of Rain is a mesmerising book of poems. The sense of reflection on "the state of the nation" makes this a serious book in the best way. Delight in how language works, and the incantatory charm of an almost MacNeicean refrain, animate poems which tap straight into our folk memory. A rare thing in poetry — a collection of perfect pitch." — Siobhan Campbell

"Litherland displays true virtuosity of subject, tone and form. There are social issues and politics in partnership with the poetry here. Throughout the book's changes of subject and place, rain persists in all its sonic, visual and allusive properties. . .Love, sexuality, tenderness and, yes, cricket, are brought to the pages in rain-fresh glory." — Emily Hasler, Other Poetry

"As usual, she writes beautifully about rain and cricket and about her wartime Coventry childhood. . .But the core of the book is a series of magical poems about being a teenager in the Midlands in the 1950s "She wanted the nouvelle vague and Russian / cigarettes, black stockings and politics" when the word "Communist" was like a "perfect solitary jewel. . .pinned to her chest."" — Andy Croft, The Morning Star

The Absolute Bonus of Rain by S.J. Litherland was published by Flambard Press
£8.50 £4.25 + postage.
The postage for further copies of this or other books will be £1.00 per copy.

The Work of the Wind by S.J. Litherland

The Work of the Wind, S.J. Litherland’s fourth collection, charts the hurricane years she shared with fellow poet Barry MacSweeney. Allied with him in his struggles against alcoholism, she found herself swept into his failing bids for recovery. The challenge of her distress, resentment, love and grief illuminates the sense of ordinary life attempting to prevail over the Shelleyan storm. Greatly diverse in form and tone, ultimately these poems shape a journal of survival and a long learnt spirit of resistance, something that earned her MacSweeney's title of 'warrior queen'.

"The Work of the Wind is a wild storm of words, extreme emotions and wonderful poems." — Andy Croft, Morning Star

"The Work of the Wind is a great book, reminiscent in some ways of MacNeice's Autumn Journal in its charting of time with reference to events both personal and universal. She has harnessed the wind, rescued the tumbling memories from potential chaos, and allowed it to move her forward in a passionate burst of creative energy." — Jo Colley, Ek Zuban

"An excellent new collection The Work of the Wind from S.J. Litherland sits on top of my reading pile." — Kitty Fitzgerald, Scotland on Sunday: Shelf Life

The Work of the Wind by S.J. Litherland was published by Flambard Press
£8.50 £4.00 + £3.00 postage.
The postage for further copies of this or other books will be £1.00 per copy.

The Apple Exchange by S.J. Litherland

The whole world has fallen out of love with itself. It is the end of the millennium, after Thatcher, Waco and the fall of Communism. On behalf of Love, the poet addresses various candidates for the post of lover. All refuse the Apple, but a daemon/demon figure flits through the scene: is it that original dissenting rebel, Lucifer? S.J. Litherland draws on myths and legends, pagan and Christian, in her quest for love in a landscape of the mind, travelling through space and time. But is the price too high on the Apple Exchange? Challenging, erotic, ironic and despairing by turns, these are poems after the Fall from an independent Eve.

"The urgency, the discipline, the mastery and the energy is terrific. Again and again the chameleon's tongue whips out and seizes its prey." — Lorna Tracy

The Apple Exchange by S.J. Litherland was published by Flambard Press
£6.95 £3.50 + £2.50 postage.
The postage for further copies of this or other books will be £1.00 per copy.

Long Held Notes by Felicity Manning

Felicity Manning’s love of Swaledale shines out in these pellucid and lyrical poems. With sensitive observation and a musician’s ear she draws us in to the landscape around her. She captures the moods of the rivers and of the hills, their fierceness and beauty, as we are led through the seasons. But far from being simply an observer, she shares the life of the Dale in all its toughness. She celebrates above all the constancy that underpins change.

This collection is published by Mudfog Press

Long Held Notes by Felicity Manning
£4.00 £2.00 + £2.50 postage.
The postage for further copies of this or other books will be £1.00 per copy.

Buy on-line at Mudfog Press

Skeins by Felicity Manning

Skeins is a bilingual collection published in France. Beginning in a garden anticipating Autumn, this collection travels through the seasons to the last day of a summer holiday by the sea. The poems shift between Brittany and Great Britain, from the Atlantic coast to the river Swale and from Breton stone circles to the Pennines’ Neolithic cup-marked stones.

Translated by Belem Julien. This collection is published (in France) by Editions Vagamundo

Skeins by Felicity Manning
£9.00 £4.50 + £2.50 postage.
The postage for further copies of this or other books will be £1.00 per copy.

Being Gemini by Marilyn Longstaff

Born under the star sign Gemini, thrust into an adult secular world from an unquestioning faith background, Marilyn Longstaff lives somewhere between the miraculous, the magical and the everyday. Being Gemini is a book about the two sides of everything – lockdowns, ageing, deafness, politics and bereavement – and learning to be ‘neither one thing nor the other.’

This collection is published by Smokestack Books

Being Gemini by Marilyn Longstaff
£7.99 + £2.50 postage.
The postage for further copies of this or other books will be £1.00 per copy.

Buy on-line at Smokestack or Inpress

The Museum of Spare Parts by Marilyn Longstaff

‘Slipping deftly between deadly serious and wildly anarchic, these poems move through clinical landscapes to the familiar and domestic with an ease that belies their complexity. They offer a cast of characters and situations, initially inspired by modern genomics, that will make you laugh out loud while simultaneously thinking some rather deep thoughts about the trajectory of our species; intimately connected, as we are, to everything around us, and everything we do – the essence of human experience mirrored in tiny “nanorobotic horses”.’

Lisa Matthews

This collection is published by Mudfog Press

The Museum of Spare Parts by Marilyn Longstaff
£5.00 + £2.00 postage.
The postage for further copies of this or other books will be £1.00 per copy.

Buy on-line at Mudfog Press

Raiment by Marilyn Longstaff

Raiment is a book about the ways in which we clothe our bodies and our spirits. It is a study in faith and disappointment, bras, knickers and the whole armour of God.

According to the popular Easter hymn, ‘Angels in bright raiment rolled the stone away, / Kept the folded grave clothes where thy body lay.’ For Marilyn Longstaff, the cerements in the vacant tomb are a symbol of spiritual mystery and an image of religious emptiness. She is a pilgrim, a stranger in a strange land, tempted by the guilty pleasures of the flesh and beset by a Puritan’s consciousness of sin and injustice.

These are poems about the flesh and the spirit, cheerfully balancing desire and loss, hope and failure and finding satisfaction in small pleasures in a world that contains no angels in bright raiment.

‘A poet with an immense talent to engage and amuse. Longstaff is also brave enough to turn a peeled eye to life's disturbing realities.’

Other Poetry

‘Marilyn Longstaff’s unique voice is resonant of the way English history swings between the puritan and the cavalier, the Bible and the feathered hat; with wit, honesty, intelligence, those good servants, she confronts her delicious sins of desiring sexy shoes and freedom. Her Raiment shines with truth and beauty.’

S.J Litherland

‘These poems take a look at clothed body and naked soul. Funny, tender, rueful or angry, they cast a keen light on the human condition.’

M.R Peacocke

This collection is published by Smokestack Books

Raiment by Marilyn Longstaff
£7.95 £4.00 + £2.50 postage.
The postage for further copies of this or other books will be £1.00 per copy.

Buy on-line at Smokestack Books

Articles of War by Marilyn Longstaff

When Marilyn Longstaff’s Salvation Army Officer parents dedicated her to God, they promised to keep her from jewellery, finery and other worldly pleasures. At the age of fourteen, she signed the Army’s ‘Articles of War’, vowing to reject ‘the values of the world’. Articles of War is a book about a jealous God, about belief and freedom and the small steps that pave the path to hell.

‘These poems keep you on your toes. They are both truthful and sly, seldom leading where you first expect. There’s a note of the surreal in the everyday, while a seam of comedy cracks plain things open. I found myself saying yes at almost every page, recognising things I hadn’t known or thought before.’

M.R. Peacocke

‘Marilyn Longstaff owes courage, tenacity, love of things right and fair to her strict Salvation Army upbringing and her humour, wry wit and light touch of sensuality to the rebel within. I see her in her coat of arms ready to combat injustice. The coat is pure cashmere. Articles of War is a true poet’s war cry, poems profound with compassion and irony. Succinct, deft arrows right on target.’

S.J. Litherland

This collection is published by Smokestack Books

Articles of War by Marilyn Longstaff
£7.99 £4.00 + £2.50 postage.
The postage for further copies of this or other books will be £1.00 per copy.

Buy on-line at Smokestack Books

Sitting Among the Hoppers by Marilyn Longstaff

A first full-length collection by one of the North East's most distinctive and original voices, Sitting Among the Hoppers moves effortlessly between the religious and the secular, between the domestic and the public, between preaching and entertaining. Marilyn Longstaff draws on the language of Non-Conformist tradition and Biblical narrative to write about a small-town landscape of wash-days and funerals, mothers and daughters, Sunday Schools and art galleries, wet holidays and winter sunshine. Like the paintings of Edward Hopper, she works in the bright colours of loneliness and grief to create a vision that is both plain and wild, bleak and exotic, hopeless but still full of Hope. Andy Croft.

This is her eagerly awaited new collection, from Arrowhead Press

Sitting Among the Hoppers by Marilyn Longstaff
£7.50 £3.75 + £2.50 postage.
The postage for further copies of this or other books will be £1.00 per copy.

Electric Mermaid by Diane Cockburn

In Diane Cockburn’s surreal world there is a snare of wild wicked wit.
Our first kiss was shocking
in a squidgy way
something to be worked at
but not by us.

Another love affair is conducted with lurid flu symptoms.
I know those buttock ulcers need a poultice,
but where to find organic bread at such an hour?

Mr Perriam searches for new slippers lured by siren penguins flying past his window. In sand dunes a potential fling is doomed by the wrong sandwich filling.

Girls who like ham go all the way,
(Kevin thinks).

Electric Mermaid will make you laugh aloud. Some poems will suddenly turn serious or menacing, others mock all attempts to tie down the wriggling narrative. In the great British nonsense tradition her magical poetry joins the work of Lear and Carroll, underneath the absurdist laughter there is a wistful echo struggling to get out.

S J LITHERLAND

Electric Mermaid by Diane Cockburn
£10.99 £5.50 + £3.00 postage.
The postage for further copies of this or other books will be £1.00 per copy.

Dangerous Pursuit of Yellow by Annie Wright

Ochre, Saffron, Gamboge, Indian Yellow, Orpiment, Cadmium. Yellow is the colour of summer and the colour of money. It’s the colour of New York taxis, TNT, sunflowers, cowardice, fire, yellow-stars and the earliest pigments found in Palaeolithic cave-art. Dangerous Pursuit of Yellow explores the contradictory associations of yellow and its highly volatile nature. It is a book about nature and art, kitchens and bedrooms, about yellow-fingered munitions-workers in the Second World War, a tenth-century Chinese poet, Frida Kahlo, Dana Schutz, and about the bright, volatile, fading colours of family memory.

“Annie Wright’s new collection is lit by the bright energy of the colour that inspired it. A full and generous book.” — Tamar Yoseloff

“A vivid, original collection of poems.” — Gillian Clarke

Dangerous Pursuit of Yellow by Annie Wright is published by Smokestack Books
£7.99
Buy on-line at Smokestack or Inpress Books

Redemption Songs by Annie Wright

Annie Wright's Redemption Songs is a long-awaited event among the fraternity of poetry readers and workshop loyalists . . . Her subjects range from Akhmatova to Kerouac to Walcott and from memory to sensory stimuli. Her poems can be formal in tone as in the string of sonnets, haiku, quatrains and tercets found here, but she is never afraid to let her hair down . . . In fact much of the work is unabashedly erotic, paeans to the flesh and desire if not outright lust . . . the book is a testament to poetry as discovery and surprise.
She makes it hard for her reader to look away.
Fred D'Aguiar

"She writes with a marvellous control over language, and can seemingly tackle a wide variety of subjects effortlessly. This is not to say that her work is without craft, but the surface spontaneity that Yeats insisted was a requisite for good poetry is maintained throughout." —Poetry Scotland Review.

"Wright confronts her feelings more openly and more 'poetically' — consider 'gold chrysanthemums arching / between stippled breasts'; or with more feminine wonder in a poem like 'Sweetheart', a poem about valentine cards in which she manages not to get sloppy. One respects the feeling — that is her strength." — William Oxley, Orbis.

Annie Wright's first full collection is published by Arrowhead Press

Redemption Songs by Annie Wright
£6.95 £3.50 + £2.50 postage.
The postage for further copies of this or other books will be £1.00 per copy.

Including Sex by Annie Wright

Annie Wright works with teachers and pupils on creative writing in schools throughout North Yorkshire, and presents self-awareness and personal growth courses for adults. Her poetry has been published in a variety of magazines and anthologies including Braquemard, Headlock, The Poetry Business, Sunk Island Review, Writing Women, Tees Valley Writer and Soundings East (USA). She is a founder member of Vane Women, the successful writing/performing group based at Darlington Arts Centre. This, her first pamphlet collection, was published by The Bay Press in 1995.

Including Sex by Annie Wright
£2.50 £1.25 + £2.50 postage.