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.

Price: £5  ISBN 978-0-9560559-0-3

THE TERRORS

Tom Chivers

The first in a series of special mini-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.

Publication: March 2009

more details to follow soon. 

THE TITANIC CAFE CLOSES ITS DOORS AND HITS THE ROCKS

or

Knife, fork and bulldozer ultra modern retail outlet complex development scenario with flowers.

David Hart

Where the full main title of David Hart’s forthcoming special mini-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”.