Month: November 2021

Categories
Book reviews book shops Earlyworks Press Hastings Poetry Short stories Uncategorized

Back in the days of the desktop publishing explosion, this happened…

You are here.... front cover of the Earlyworks Press book of memoirs and journalism

Way back before I got involved in publishing, I had developed a fascination for small press books, glorious evidence they are of specialist endeavours that most people will probably never get to hear about. Someone commented once that there were probably more than a few books on my shelves that were the sole surviving copy of whatever it was.

Small press bookshelf
A random section of one of the ‘special’ bookshelves

I doubt that, but one of the reasons for my loyalty to small press is that I truly dread the success of the corporate world’s dream of everyone buying the same book, the same film, the same everything. It’s also why I loved producing the Earlyworks Press anthologies, collections of the best that had been offered up in our annual poetry and short story competitions. It was all brand new then: suddenly, desktop editing and publishing was within reach of the not-rich and not-leisured classes, and digital printing made small runs – not cheap perhaps, not exactly *easy*, if you wanted to do it well – but possible.

Every now and then, as well as the standard annual competitions, we’d branch out and call for different kinds of writing – and where the time, the inspiration and the print-fund allowed it, we’d produce anthologies of those, too.

Here are a couple that have earned their places on quite a few people’s bookshelves and, I can guarantee, will be on mine for life.

You are Here

Let’s try out some non-fiction, we said, and announced the Earlyworks Press Memoir & Journalism competition – and my goodness, it produced some unexpected wonders – and all true.

He’s a GI. She’s Pregnant. He’s recalled to New York… Her dad left home years ago: he wanted to be Robinson Crusoe – but now he’s back… From pork chop purloiner to community leader – who is best qualified to solve our problems…?

Dodging maths lessons, going to violin lessons; learning about love and life, war and death; dreadful accidents, extraordinary luck; growing up, changing your mind, changing your life; the stories came from all over the world, and some came with the most extraordinary photos – so the book is illustrated throughout, often with photos and artworks that had not been in print before – it’s a treasure.

Another time, we went off in the opposite direction…

Old Magic in a New Age

Standing stones and churches, trees and totems, fairy tale creatures: dragons, princes, gods, ghosts and elementals from Europe and beyond … We asked our writers and illustrators to find the mythic and magical figures that spoke to them, and show us why they have survived into the New Age.

Old Magic in a New Age: Earlyworks Press Myth & Legend

The result was a fabulous collection. Some of the motifs are familiar and faithful, others have evolved as the world has changed. So if modern life leaves you hungry, enter these pages and find out which eternal classics still speak to your personal magical language.

Pages from ‘Old Magic in a New Age’

According to poet and cover artist Cathy Edmunds, the search went something like this…

I need to find a druid

need to bind a long-beard be-robed figure of fun

to raise a smile

need

a poet a bard a hahaha-hazel be-twigged master

lurking in ash groves oak gown sites

of special scientific interest

need a druid

an onion

ten cloves of garlic

at least

Contact me to order either of these books or, if you’re in or near Hastings, have them delivered to your door, post free.

Categories
Book reviews book shops Earlyworks Press Short stories

Stories that travel with you

Barcelona to Bihar - front cover pic

This short story collection ducks and dives through time and space with the speed of a tap-happy social media surfer. In the opening story, ‘Reading Tolstoy in Barcelona’, a young merchant sailor gets to grips with the world via some extraordinary midnight shore-leave encounters, setting the scene for a series of tales of immigrants and migrants, of misfits and visitors from every corner of the world.

Opening time in a shop in India, and nemesis arrives in the shape of a genial stray dog. In Britain, sons and daughters of immigrants seek ways of being British, whilst the indigenous Brits find the familiar – from office party to lighthouse beam – is not what it ought to be.

Taking in letters from Africa, from the Solomon Islands and from previous centuries, witnessing potentially murderous mountaintop encounters with goats and even trolls; navigating a European tunnel, an English bell tower and a social divide wider than the Australian outback, the mind of the reader must twist and turn, encompassing many miles and many moods, before coming home with a view from another planet as to what it might mean to be human.

Having chosen the title – Barcelona to Bihar – and the strapline – stories that travel with you – I could not resist sending my own copy on a tour to visit the far-flung authors. Here’s the title page, signed on its arrivals in Barcelona and Bihar, and by me on its return, a full two years later!

This copy is not for sale but if you’d like a copy, you can

Buy Barelona to Bihar from Blackwells

Buy Barcelona to Bihar from Foyles

Or if you’re in or near Hastings, contact me to get your copy delivered to your door, post free.

Categories
activism Hastings media Politics

What is a safe country?

National Scot article - details in blog post

Our politicians are talking about safe countries. They say refugees need to claim asylum in the “first safe country” they reach. In today’s news, we’re told that the UK and the Netherlands have agreed that refugees arriving here need to be “returned” to the “first safe country.”

Screenshot of MSN article,, header pic shows beach-art message 'safe routes now'
link to article

Sounds logical doesn’t it? But who decides what is safe, and how? Or is the very idea of “first safe country” yet another convenient myth, some words to say in parliament? I think this is likely, firstly because the problems that are creating the tide of refugees across the world are enormous – wars created by the arms industry, climate crises created by a generation of destructive industries, and unstable, unsafe regimes created by lousy politicians, mostly propped up by the USA, who don’t like to see other countries running independently of US hegemony.

It could not be more obvious that we have no politicians in our own current government with the intention or the ability to solve problems that big, so jockeying with other countries to try and prove refugees should go somewhere other than here is likely to be the best they will attempt.

In fact, according to France, our politicians are so bad it’s not worth talking to them at all. Macron is apparently annoyed with Johnson for tweeting one thing when he’s just said another, and although it’s possible he’s making a fuss, all our experience of Johnson suggests that when Macron says there’s no point in trying to work with him, it’s likely to be true.

We need a proper government, managed by professionals.

Our Home Secretary is making the refugee situation a crime issue, and thinks the answer is “tackling the criminal gangs” who arrange channel crossings – an absolutely standard Tory response that amounts to treating the symptoms. No-one would be paying strangers to organise stupid little boats if there was an official, safe route available.

Our so-called opposition has at least managed to point out that there needs to be a safe passage.

Michael Rosen tweeted the other day about the masses and masses of displaced people who were on the move after the Second World War, about how the UK had refugee camps all over the country then about how, despite being broke and all but broken by the war, we assimilated many of those refugees and organised passage to places they could live for many more. When you have a proper government, you can do things like that. Like any other project a government runs, such an endeavour builds bonds, creates work, and generally becomes a part of the life of a healthy country.

My second reason for not believing in the “first safe country” idea is that I have seen a stark example of how this works in reality.

An example of a ‘first safe country’

I went to the FiLiA women’s conference in October and in one of the plenary sessions, we all joined a zoom with some women in a refugee camp in Kakuma. It was a devastatingly emotional experience. Most of the women we spoke to were lesbians, and had been put in a ‘special’ area in the camp, because they were in a place where LGBT people were seen as something strange, something to put ‘outside’ the ‘normal’ area. There had been attacks, there had been rapes, there had been tents set on fire. One woman’s baby had been killed.

The women were terrified, and tearful, and had no idea how they could get away from that camp to a place where they would actually be safe. Most of them had no money, and those who did found that traders would not take ‘dirty’ money from gay people. Some had tried to escape from the camp, only to be attacked by security forces and dragged back. They had run away from a country where LGBT people were not safe, and been trapped in a place that was as bad, if not worse.

When I realised what the zoom was about, I worried at first that this would be some terrible spectator drama, but it wasn’t. The women had wanted to do the link-up because of the way news and politics works, because people who are known, people who have names and faces and voices, people who are in communication with others around the world, are harder to kill. I’m writing this blog post because I saw those women, they spoke to me, and I will never forget them.

We know about those women, Ms Patel. We have heard about “first safe countries”, Mr Johnson. We don’t believe you, we don’t trust you, and we require that you participate in #safepassage arrangements for refugees.

If you would like to help the Kakuma women, please visit the FiLiA website here.

Joanna Cherry has written to Priti Patel – one of the outcomes of that zoom…

Header from Nationa Scot article "Joanna Cherry: Priti Patel must help the women from the nation her parents left
Cherry’s column in the National Scot

We need to make more contacts with refugees, whether they are here or in camps elsewhere, find out more about them, and the issues that drove them from home, and then we need to educate our government.

Categories
Book reviews book shops Earlyworks Press Short stories

The Several reasons why Finbar’s Father is unique

Castle Stairs - detail from cover image, from a paiting by Cathy Edmunds

There’s a story here I read about once a year. It’s unique, and it transports me every time.

This book is The Several Deaths of Finbar’s Father & other stories, published in 2014. It’s the anthology of the very best works that came to us through our international competitions the year before.

A moment contains an adventure-filled life, and a life is bargained for on a cliff-edge: one is glimpsed in the back row at a lunchtime concert, another smashed by a careless blink. In these stories, you will visit a sun-soaked castle, its towers in starry heavens, its basements deeper than the roots of trees. You will step into other worlds (minding the gap) and find new life in the everyday. These are stories of life as it is lived; life that can be snatched from mountain spirits or rewritten from the end backwards, blighted from the start or suffused with indelible blessings.

Magic moves in a music recital, the steps of a once-upon-a-time plains tribe and the boozy farewells of an urban evening class. Enjoy lives that were, lives that almost were and lives that might just be.

The authors whose work featured in this book are all worthy of attention but, I just have to tell you this: when I sent an email to the address Julian Holt had given us, to tell him he’d won our main competition with ‘The Several Deaths of Finbar’s Father’ and that I therefore wanted to name the next year’s anthology after his story, I didn’t get an answer for a while, and when I did, it came from a relative of his.

This story was Julian Holt’s one and only published work, and he died before he knew it had won a competition. It does not read like a first attempt. Rich, well crafted and complex, it is a story about a man who loved, briefly, and a boy who lived in books – it is a story about a life in a stolen moment and above all, it is a story to go back to again and again.

Well, having read it this afternoon, and told you about the book and its poignant uniqueness, I am now going to settle down to read some of the jewels that go under the title of ‘& other stories’ in this book.

The Several Deaths of Finbar's Father - cover pic

Buy The Several Deaths of Finbar’s Father from Foyles

Buy The Several Deaths of Finbar’s Father from Blackwells

As is so often the case with small press books from a year or so back, they say ‘not available’ but, if you ask, they can order it (that’s why it’s on their websites!) Our distributors *will* supply. Or….

If you’re in or near Hastings, and you’d like a copy of The Several Deaths of Finbar’s Father & other stories, please contact me to have one delivered to your door, post free.

Categories
Book reviews book shops Circaidy Gregory Press Corbyn Hastings Labour Politics

Left Books Forward

Hastings Momentum

Heads up – this looks like a political post, and it is – but mainly, it’s one of my ‘Books for Christmas’ soapbox posts…

We in Hastings were quite surprised when we heard that Momentum was an organisation for wild young Trots. We in Momentum Hastings thought we were a group of all sorts of people who had been looking for a better way of going on, and thought the new Labour Leader at the time, Jeremy Corbyn, might open the door to that.

It was clear that a lot of powerful people – many of them sitting behind big, shiny Labour Party desks – really did not want to let change happen. We invited Richard Seymour along one night to tell us about all that. He detailed for us a lot of the behind-the-scenes manouvrings that had gone on, and predicted a lot more: nasty, shameless, worrying things – all of which have since come to pass – and he told us that whilst he supported our efforts and hoped we’d win, he didn’t really think Jeremy Corbyn would be able to survive it all as Labour leader.

Well, he was right. Momentum is something else altogether now, and so is the Labour Party. If you’re thinking ‘where do we go from here’, you could do a lot worse than read his book now, and think over what happened, and why…

Or you could spend Christmas immersed in these enlightening – and gripping – stories of one of humankind’s most extraordinary attempts at socialist revolution…

“…it is a success in its own terms, and is a place you can learn about the greatest revolution ever while enjoying an exciting tale.” – Richard Allday in Counterfire
Reviewed by Sheila McGregor in The Socialist Worker

These titles are available from good lefty bookshops, including Bookmarks in London and Bookbuster in Hastings.

Or, if you’re in or near Hastings, contact me to order, and have them delivered to your door, post free.

Categories
activism Hastings Politics prejudice

Christmas lights on the beach

Candles on the Stade for the drowned refugees

Dear Home Secretary,

Fairy lights are on the trees and the lamp posts in the town centre, and the coloured lights are appearing in the shops and the windows of everyone’s houses, but these lights are the ones people of Hastings took to the sea-front, as a farewell message to the families who drowned in the English Channel this week.

They drowned in the sea because France rejected them and Britain would not help them. It’s very clear that you, like the former Home Secretary, who was our Hastings MP, do not prioritize people whose families come to Britain seeking sanctuary, or a more bearable life, you prefer to prioritize ‘our own’ – but could I ask you to look at it like this?

How do you think the people of seaside towns like ours feel, looking out over that cold, dark sea at night, and thinking there may be families drowning in that cold, dark sea? How do you think we feel, knowing that you are asking our RNLI – volunteers, who do the work they do because they care deeply about people – you are asking them to turn their backs on those people, and you are asking our border forces to do a ‘push back’ which will lead to more drownings?

I don’t believe that you are unable to find a humane solution to this. I don’t believe you are trying. The people of Hastings have been going down to the waterline to help frozen, soaking wet, terrified refugees for a long old time now.. This Christmas, if you wake up in the night, never mind the little match girl, try to imagine a little girl drowning in that cold, dark sea. For as long as that is happening, our country is not civilised, and your party is not the party of ‘law and order’, or ‘family values’.

Yours sincerely,

One who stood on the Stade tonight, unable to stop imagining families drowning in that cold, dark sea.

People of Hastings stand vigil for the drowned refugees, November 2021.
Categories
Book reviews book shops Earlyworks Press Short stories

Cover Stories

Three books: Significant Spaces, Recognition and Loretta's Parrot.

One of the things I loved about working on our short story and poetry anthologies was figuring out how to put the covers together. The  contents would be of excellent quality – we published the very best from the shortlists of our annual, international short story competitions, so the quality was guaranteed – but their style and subject matter ranged across every genre and every topic you could imagine. Finding a title and a ‘look’ that worked for all the stories was always a challenge but sooner or later, something would emerge.

Here are three memorable examples:

Recognition

How do you know?

Ancestors linger in darkness, held by the attentions of the living. A monk prepares to answer the eternal question. An accident victim loses his memory, another loses something less tangible. One artist dreams of snow, another of the sea – but what do their artifacts dream of? The last performing tiger in the world meets the mob… and then there are the crocodiles…. In these shape-shifting stories murderers, sleuths, monks and marketing wonderboys all battle with their unique visions of the world but who wins, and how will they recognise victory when it comes?

24 stories to keep you awake

Complex roof tops and elevations of Manchester

But what to put on the cover? Himself and I had spent a memorable weekend exploring the architecture of central Manchester that year and in the end, we picked on a detail of a bull from one of the gargantuan city centre memorials…

Font cover: recognition

Significant spaces

Just how much can a missing character-card matter to a schoolboy? Can you recognise true love? What can be forgiven, what should remain hidden, and what will be revealed? Lance Hanson’s ‘Sleeping Jesus and the Green Goblin’ seemed to set the tone for this cascade of tales about things that are not where they should be, or not what people expect them to be. Can you fill the spaces?

Well, Earlyworks Press club member Cathy Edmunds came up with a jigsaw with some pieces missing. That seemed to fit the bill, but what to put in the spaces? I have no idea why, but after some rummaging around, a photo of mine of this extraordinary yew tree from Crowhurst, just outside Hastiings which also has some significant spaces, seemed to be the thing. Oh, and there was the title. Significant Spaces…

Detail of front cover: significant spaces

Loretta’s Parrot

An escaped parrot changes lives on the streets of Glasgow, an art historian finds a young lover too much to handle, a big-game hunter meets an unexpected nemesis – and that’s just the first three stories. The collection also offers a window into the lives of amnesty activists and kidnappers, soldiers and aid workers, jazzers, photographers, Irish dancers and taxi-drivers – through stories fizzing with love, laughter, fear and revenge, fairytales, dreams and nightmares.

But I had fallen in love with Loretta’s Parrot. And a mental image of him, flapping around in the tenements of the city throwing a bit of holy chaos into so many lives gave us the theme – but you know what? None of us had such an image in our photo collections so, as ever when that happened, our Cathy Edmunds picked up her brushes and paint, and got to work. Fantastic! There he is, Loretta’s Parrot…

Loretta's Parrot

You can order all these books from any decent independent bookstore but if you’re in Hastings, give me a shout and you can have a special Christmas offer – all three delivered to your door for £12. That’s three excellent Christmas presents nailed in one go.

Three books: Significant Spaces, Recognition and Loretta's Parrot.
Categories
Book reviews book shops Circaidy Gregory Press Earlyworks Press Poetry Uncategorized

The Astonishing Worlds of Mandy Pannett

Books by Mandy Pannett

How many years ago did I jump on a train to Arundel to have lunch with Mandy Pannett, and talk about organising a poetry collection competition? It happened before the Corbyn movement swept me away for several years of single-minded battle; it happened before the most urgent women’s campaign of my lifetime, and before COVID, and I am looking into a long-gone world to write this.

I ask myself how to make that long-ago world come alive again, the world of river and café and castle, all ancient stonework gleaming in cloistered sunshine – and the wondering leads me into Mandy Pannett territory. It’s more real than Monday, despite being as far away as last night’s dream.

‘Tell it slant’ is a phrase of Mandy’s that evokes the necessary skill – do I have that skill? The first work of Mandy’s that I read was The Onion Stone, which took me to Shakespeare’s days, and sparked off a million diamond-flash worlds because it evoked, involved and manifested an idea, but it WOULD NOT tell the reader what it was. I was captivated, haunted, for ages. She calls it ‘telling it slant’. You can read about how that works here.

The onion stone by Mandy Pannett - front cover
Who – or what? – was Shakespeare?

Mandy worked with Catherine Edmunds on that poetry collection competition, and two brilliant books came out of that. Firstly, one of my all-time favourite poetry collections, Georges Perec is my hero from our winner, Caron Freeborn.

Georges Perec is my hero book cover

Why Georges Perec?

How are we to speak of these ‘common things’, how to track them down rather, flush them out, wrest them from the dross in which they remain mired, how to give them meaning, a tongue, to let them, finally, speak of what is, of what we are.

– Georges Perec, ‘L’infre ordinaire’

The other book to come out of that poetry collection competition was Convergence – the meeting place of eight poets, edited by Catherine Edmunds and Mandy Pannett, and beautifully juxtaposing sets of poems by Andie Lewenstein, John Wilkes, Eilidh Thomas, Anthony Watts, June Wentland, Mick Evans, Rata Gordon and Angela Arnold – and of course, featuring Cathy Edmunds’ drawing of that most famous meeting place at St Pancras.

Convegence: the meeting place of eight poets - book cover

We lost Caron Freeborn too soon.

I last saw Caron when, back over Arundel way, I got lost in a visionary dream at the launch of Mandy’s The Wulf Enigma – an enigmatic evening if ever there was one, with music, poetry and plans – such plans! – alongside the River Arun.

The Wulf Enigma - front cover

Here’s the enigma

Mandy didn’t believe me about the hyperbolic plane (if you didn’t click the link above, you don’t know what I’m talking about) but you know, I stopped tippy-tappy typing just then, and started thinking about The Wulf Enigma again, and it led me off down yet another train of thought that hadn’t occurred before, so I maintain that it contains infinite folds of story, illuminating infinite worlds, and so you will never tire of being fascinated by it.

Thank you for all those worlds, Mandy Pannett.

Convergence, The Wulf enigma and Georges Perec: front covers

Buy The Wulf Enigma from Foyles or bookshop.org

Buy Georges Perec is my hero from Foyles

Or contact me to order either of those, or Convergence, and your books’ll be in the post directly.

Categories
Book reviews book shops Circaidy Gregory Press Earlyworks Press Hastings

Can you see us under all these bushels?

Woodcut with Luke text

I always thought it was something leafy and twiggy we were hidden under but it turns out it’s a kind of bowl.

Bushels (or in some translations, ‘vessels’)

“And no man, when he hath lighted a lamp, covereth it with a vessel, or putteth it under a bed; but putteth it on a stand, that they that enter in may see the light. For nothing is hid, that shall not be made manifest; nor [anything] secret, that shall not be known and come to light. Take heed therefore how ye hear: for whosoever hath, to him shall be given; and whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that which he thinketh he hath.”

— Luke 8:16-18

Hidden things

No, I haven’t gone all religious unless that really is the bit in the Bible where Jesus is telling everyone about how small presses work. It’s a huge task, bringing a new title to the public. It’s not just that you can’t afford the posters on the railway stations, the stand at the London Book Fair and all the rest of it – it’s also that distributors and corporate bookshops tell lies about you.

Yes, all our books are available through the standard supply chain as well as from our friends, the local indie bookshops but if you look in the big online bookstores, they tend to be labelled ‘unavailable’. They may even be missing the cover image. And if you go to closed-system shops like Waterstones and ask for one of our books, the staff may not even admit they exist.

The Titans

The reason for this is distributors. Big businesses don’t like ordering from little businesses, they like ordering in bulk from big distribution companies. We little presses do  supply the distributors, but if they don’t happen to have a pallet-load in the warehouse, their automated system punches out that word ‘unavailable’ – not true. My own little press is particularly bespoke here because we happen to be just a few miles  away from one of those gargantuan book warehouses so every week, our Jim bravely goes over there on the train, clutching a weeksworth of individual shop orders – sometimes even just one book – and weaves his way through the security gates, the articulated lorries, the pallets and the forklifts, and hands his little packet over to the giant, book-munching system. That means that even if the great big store labels one of our books ‘unavailable’, you can still order it, and you’ll probably get it within a week. Indie bookshops generally do this willingly. Even Waterstones do, if you can convince the innocent person behind the till that the stock list they are logged onto is not the be-all and end-all.

So why do they say ‘unavailable’? It’s because they’re all – knowingly or not – part of a big global plot to get everyone in the world reading the same hundred books. It’s so much easier to manage, if everyone’s reading the same hundred books. ‘Unavailable’ means ‘we’d have to make a small effort to order this so why not save us the bother and buy one of this week’s top sellers instead?’

The Good old days

What used to happen was that we’d go to all the local events and exhibitions, and do our own marketing.

Kay Green and Lesley Samms at Pure Arts Exhibition in Battle

Here I am with Lesley Samms at one of her amazing Pure Arts Festivals, with our Hastings Modern Art Beach Book, and What’s the Story?  – a beautifully illustrated account of some of the artists and printmakers at work in their studios in and around Hastings.

pages from 'What's the Story?' showing printmakers at work in their studios, and examples of their work
Pages from ‘What’s the Story?’

Unfortunately, recession came along, closely followed by COVID and Brexit and – how long ago did I last do a real world book event? They are starting to happen again now. They’re few and far between, though and in the meantime, we really need to tell you that we are NOT UNAVAILABLE!

Here I am at FantasyCon – oh, feels like decades ago! With the glass-twiddler from George Street, Kate O’Hearn, Terry Pratchett and er… the Green Knight.

At Fantasy con with Kate O'Hearn and Terry Pratchett

The world is beginning to open up again. I’ve recently seen authors Chris Tennent and Simon Edge announcing their presence out in the world…

Simon Edge's book display featuring 'The End of the World is Flat'
CrisTennent setting up her Horace Burp display

All being well, Earlyworks Press and Circaidy Gregory Press will be out there again in due course. It’s vital, because once people have actually seen and handled a book, maybe had a chat with the author, it becomes familiar and once the book is familiar, people will go into shops and order it. If the distributors get orders for a book regularly enough, they will actually stop pretending they’re ‘unavailable’, take in some stock and admit they’re ready to take orders. That’s how small press titles ‘break through’ to the level where even Waterstones will admit they exist.

Meantime, I tend to put Foyles links in blog posts, for people to buy their books because Foyles are the best known of the stores that are pretty good at ordering small press books without making a fuss – or else I put local indie shop links such as Printed Matter and Bookbuster in Hastings. If you’re not in Hastings, the chances are, the indie shops where you are will be just as good so please ignore those ‘unavailable’ tags. They are telling Porkies.

Buy The Hastings Modern Art Beach Book at Foyles

Buy What’s the Story? from Pure Arts

Or if you’re in Hastings, drop in to Printed Matter or Bookbuster or contact me for free home delivery.

Categories
Book reviews book shops Circaidy Gregory Press Poetry Uncategorized

Women writing poetry – scary?

Into the Yell by Sarah James, wormwood earth and honey by Catherine Edmunds, and red silk slippers by Marilyn Francis

Ask a poet for a bit of text to for the back jacket, to encourage readers to open her book, and you get this….

Wormwood, earth and honey

Selected poems by Catherine Edmunds

teasel scratches, bramble catches

deep inside my den of mischief

mud pies splatter, cracked plates clatter

if you dare to enter here

insects bite you, ferrets fight you

creepers catch you, magpies snatch you

hidden dangers trap all strangers

don’t you try it, don’t you dare

I will chuckle, smirk and giggle

deep inside my den of mischief

faith is forfeit, friendship fickle

if you dare to enter here

So all I can say is read Catherine Edmunds’ poetry collection if you dare. It’s very good.

There’s a gentler welcome to Marilyn Francis’s ‘red silk slippers’ but don’t be fooled – she doesn’t miss a trick. Here’s the title piece …

red silk slippers

Yesterday we celebrated all the Christmases

we’d missed since you left and this morning there’s sunshine

and a light frost and I have red silk slippers from Thailand.

Outside, blackbirds peck for worms

on the square of turf where the old cat is buried

and I have bright wooden birds from Singapore to dangle

lifelike from the branches of the lilac tree.

The heating pipes grumble, wind lullabies

through the chimney and I have a lucky Chinese cat

whose silvered paw waves back and forth

tick-tocking the seconds

between yesterday and tomorrow.

This morning there’s sunshine and a light frost

and I have red silk slippers from Thailand.

Or you could read

Into the Yell,

Sarah James’s most excellent collection – but I can’t guarantee she won’t yell at you.

Into the Yell by Sarah James, wormwood earth and honey by Catherine Edmunds, and red silk slippers by Marilyn Francis

Buy wormwood, earth and honey from Foyles

Buy red silk slippers from Foyles

Buy Into the Yell from Foyles

Or if you’re in or near Hastings, contact me to take up our Christmas offer of all three books, delivered to your door for £16