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DIFFICULT SECOND ALBUM
Simon Turner
Simon Turner’s Difficult Second Album not only fulfils all the threats and promises of his debut, You Are Here (Heaventree, 2007), but also rightfully sees him take his place as a true troubadour of the surreal.
Featuring his most accomplished work to date, this second collection is not in fact difficult, but rather darkly precise, quick-witted and modestly bold. Turner has an eye for infectious and joyously offbeat lines, rendering both the incongruous and beautiful in his own version and voice.
Wherever Difficult Second Album may veer, between deftly lyrical but defiantly modernist poems on nature, acidic and satirical cut-ups on world politics, or in the quiet riots of notes to self, rejection slips and mislaid manifestos, Simon Turner remains confident and foot-sure in the strangeness and abundance of it all, of what poetry both intends and is capable of.
Praise for Simon Turner’s work:
“…descriptively tricksy and tenderly felt and clever all at the same time. An impressively neat manoeuvre by any standards.” - C.J. Allen, Litter.
“…a very accomplished and entertaining volume. Phrases are eloquently turned, and sometimes revisited to be turned inside out and upside down” - Sarah Law, Stride
“Turner seeks to arrest and repay the reader’s attention, his jagged language alternating with stretches of quieter meditation. He’s not afraid of form, either: the lyrical and the concrete both take their turn throughout” - Michael W. Thomas, Raw Edge
FROM THE BOAT
Myra Connell
“Are you waiting for the dawn?” Dawn may help. But I am waiting for the water. For the pool to fill and
slowly
for the boat – the walnut-shell, the matchstick mast and paper sail – to rise, float on.”
These poems From the Boat come from a time of waiting, of mourning, and of finding small consolations. They are, many of them, small poems, the opposite of heroic. Bare, spare in mood, and exploring a sense of dislocation and disorientation, they look coldly at what is left when almost everything is pared away.
And yet they rejoice in moments of revelation – the golden flash of carp in a pool, or a red jacket on a woman in a cafe; and the words, the language, the poems themselves, never feel doubtful or uncertain in their own power.
Myra Connell’s poetry is measured yet generous; experimental and adventurous; sharp, often angry, and yet tender.
FROM THE BOAT is a Nine Arches Press pamphlet
Launched: February 2010
Price: £5
THE NIGHT OF THE DAY
David Morley
The Night of the Day is remarkable for the skill and grace with which it travels through the difficult territories that map a journey from darkness towards light. In this movement from out of the shadows, it engages with tricks of the light, vanishings, illusions, magic and bitter realities, whilst using the terrain of language that each necessitates.
From the brutally austere language that depicts a child’s experience of violence that opens this short collection, the poems move thematically into the natural world and the darting, shifting vocabularies of memory, friendship and loss. The Night of the Day keeps a solid and determined pace, which ultimately brings us under the canvas of the big top and into the lives of the travelling circus people, in their own words, their own voices, an undertow of threat and prejudice forever shadowing their footsteps on the road.
Available as a standard edition (£5) and also a limited number of fifty, with special silver litho-print covers, which will be signed and numbered by David Morley. These are £7 and can be reserved, so please email us to order in advance.
Launched November 2009
ISBN: 978-0-9560559-7-2
The Night of the Day is a special-edition Nine Arches Press pamphlet.
AFTER THE GOLD RUSH
Peter Carpenter
'One year's the history
Of Europe, time runs barefoot on the cinder-track
At the White City'
- from 'Namings'
Peter Carpenter’s poetry is radiant with quiet surprises, important moments captured in the folds of an old document wallet, in back gardens or on winter sea-fronts, buried in the sand or hidden by the noise of a football crowd. Such moments take flight to uncover a distinctive take on both ‘the here and now’ and the echoes of public and private histories. After the Goldrush is thus of its time and about time, in the attentive, skilful hands of a poet truly hitting his stride.
Praise for Peter Carpenter:
'…a new voice, precise and distinct, and therefore, doubly welcome' George Szirtes
'In short, Peter Carpenter is a masterly portrait-painter' - Matthew Jarvis English
'always original and enjoyable poems…there’s something modestly dazzling about Peter Carpenter’s writing, but also something wonderfully spare and taut… it reminds me in places of the modern pastorals of R.F. Langley… the tone jinks and darts from the tender to the sardonic, the wry to the comic' - CJ Allen, Staple.
'Peter Carpenter has the ability to pull the rug from under your feet at the very moment when you think you’ve got his number.' - Jeremy Page, The Frogmore Papers
Launched 4th October 2009
ISBN: 978-0-9560559-4-1
After the Gold Rush is a Nine Arches Book
SOUNDS IN THE GRASS
Matt Nunn
‘...the scratching riff of despair fancying hope,
the 2-Tone glow through this, our longest epilogue,
the sound of rebuilding whilst structures are still collapsing,
a shot of short-term optimism stretched to ring forever.’
- from 'Coventry Calling'
Join Matt Nunn as he travels through the spaces that define us, taking in subjects as diverse as Mother Nature, the back catalogues of youth, breaking down at the greasy spoon and hitting the highways, all accompanied by generous and bittersweet helpings of food, sex and music.
Matt Nunn’s third collection, following on from Apocalyptic Bubblegum and Happy cos I’m Blue is his most complete yet.
Praise for Matt Nunn:
‘Nunn has the staccato, twisted, lyrical joy in language of an English Raymond Queneau and he brings it to bear on a beautiful, litter-strewn urban landscape where “civilisations intersect” in travestied platitudes, deep-dish riddles and a cavalcade of local detail all at about 100mph. If you’ve heard Nunn read out loud you’ll be familiar with this energy and the hallucinatory clarity of his imagery. He ploughs fearlessly straight into class, religion and education with frenzied, articulate wit matched by rage, which is not to overlook the genuine warmth and humanity beating underneath the surface. Sounds in the Grass realises the potential suggested by Nunn’s previous collections and then some.’
– Luke Kennard
'One moment he is like Hopkins on speed, the next like a latter-day Prufrock spilling the beans'
- Peter Carpenter
'Matt Nunn is multitudes'
- David Morley
Launched October 2009
ISBN: 978-0-9560559-5-8
Sounds in the Grass is a Nine Arches Book.
THE TITANIC CAFE CLOSES ITS DOORS AND HITS THE ROCKS
or
Knife, fork and bulldozer ultra modern retail outlet complex development scenario with flowers.
image © David Hart 2008
David Hart
Where the full main title of David Hart’s forthcoming special-edition pamphlet fantasises, the second title suggests the wider scene...
Originally probably an office and observation point for the canal company, on the Bristol Road in Selly Oak, Birmingham, the freestanding building that takes centre stage in this sequence was in recent memory the Knife and Fork café (Titanic café, unsinkable), a small business next door, and above them a huge advertising hoarding. After storm damage, the place became derelict and in 2007 was demolished.
The poem and notes are a mix of local history, surreal and playful language, and not a little anger at the proposed ‘development’ of the canalside area as a huge retail complex on what is poisoned ground sprouting something of a revelation – a wonderful crop of wild flowers.
Published by Nine Arches Press as part of their new mini-pamphlet series, The Titanic Café closes its doors and hits the rocks will also include a selection of colour photographs taken by David Hart on location to accompany the poem. This vivid and dynamic sequence is a fitting swansong to a city’s lost landmarks, the vanishing and shape-shifting human geographies of the heartlands.
Birmingham-based and the city’s Poet Laureate 1997-8, David Hart is known for other Birmingham poems, for hospital and other residencies, for university teaching and workshops, and by way of several books, the latest (Five Seasons Press 2007) being ‘Running Out, which Lyndon Jenkins in Poetry Wales said “is a joy”.
ISBN: 978-0-9560559-3-4
Price £8
THE TERRORS
image © Emma Robertson 2009
Tom Chivers
The first in a series of special edition pamphlets from Nine Arches Press; darkly-humoured e-dispatches of crime and punishment from over the walls and across centuries....
The Terrors is a sequence of imagined emails; poetic missives from the start of the 21st century to inmates at London's notorious Newgate Prison. The emails introduce a cast of 18th century villains and their gruesome crimes: 'Half-hanged Smith'; executioner-turned-murderer Jack Ketch;
the notorious Waltham Blacks.
Mimicking the tone of its primary source, The Newgate Calendar, The Terrors tacks from horror to humour, from moral disgust to the casual chit-chat of the digital generation, all the time delineating London's violent urban undercurrent in bold, energetic and sometimes shocking language.
Praise for The Terrors:
'Dark London history, dredged and interrogated, spits and fizzes with corrosive wit. Language-receipts sustain the necessary illusion. IT MATTERS. It matters: the weight and pace of delivery, the balance of breath. Tom Chivers understands the risks he risks, the play in a taught rope. 'I'll ghost-write, if you ask.'
Iain Sinclair
Further reviews can be found here at Gists and Piths and PolyOlbion
March 2009 - out now!
Price: £5
ISBN: 978-0-9560559-2-7
LADY GODIVA AND ME
Liam Guilar
Lady Godiva and Me is a sharp, attentive and candid sequence, and so much more than just the re-telling of the legend of a lady who dared to ride through the city unclothed…
Liam Guilar delves into the very nature of legend, discovering and giving voice to a woman who cut a unique and radical figure in collective and oral history. As well as the characters of Peeping Tom, Leofric and Godiva herself, the poems resound with the lives of Coventry people - from Anglo Saxon to modern times, overheard in conversation, in love, troubled and persistent, the city speaks.
It is a sequence as forceful and serious as it is sincere and heartfelt, startling and creative in its use of language and the way it reinterprets the power of history’s narratives. Lady Godiva and Me unveils a meticulously crafted and surefooted debut from Liam Guilar – a talent that should certainly be noted and watched.
Price: £5 ISBN: 978-0-9560559-1-0
Launched December 2008
Review of Lady Godiva and Me here at Horizon Review
ON WARWICK
Jane Holland
with foreword by David Morley
Our first publication at Nine Arches Press is a time-traveller's guidebook, a riveting encounter with Warwick Castle and its place at the very heart of history in the making.
On Warwick Castle, the poem that forms the centrepiece of this collection, explores the battlements, towers and some-time inhabitants of the castle with immense energy and sets up a daring juxtaposition of both the ancient and modern, creating a robust poem where Old English meets the 'txt' generation head on, with intriguing and engaging results.
On Warwick is the result of Jane Holland's year as Warwick poet laureate. The pamphlet also includes a selection of further poems she has written in response to the region, its places and people.
Launched October 2008
Price: £5 ISBN 978-0-9560559-0-3
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