The Mole

Over at her blog, should you fancy a look, Carrie Etter has kindly featured a poem from The Sparks, as part of a (very) brief tour of blogs I thought I'd do to promote the pamphlet.

The poem is 'The Mole' (hence the photo above), and was first published in the Times Literary Supplement early last year.

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Just One Book - Salt Publishing

As those of you who read other poetry & literary blogs and/or drop into UK poetry forums will know, the enterprising poetry publishers Salt have hit hard times. Partly due to discontinued grants from Arts Council England and the current economic downturn, this is particularly depressing as Salt have always been committed to building a poetry press eventually capable of sustaining itself, something it has worked towards by seeking out and publishing some of the most impressive new poets to emerge in the UK in recent years (Rob A Mackenzie, Julia Bird, Luke Kennard, Mark Waldron and Katy Evans-Bush, to name but a few) as well as more established writers including Jane Holland, Tim Dooley and Tobias Hill. It also has what promise to be strong first collections on the horizon from Abi Curtis, Tom Chivers and Tony Williams.


To help save Salt, then, please consider the following:

JUST ONE BOOK

1. Please buy just one book, right now. We don't mind from where, you can buy it from us or from Amazon, your local shop or megastore, online or offline. If you buy just one book now, you'll help to save Salt. Timing is absolutely everything here. We need cash now to stay afloat. If you love literature, help keep it alive. All it takes is just one book sale. Go to our online store and help us keep going.

2. Share this note on your profile. Tell your friends. If we can spread the word about our cash crisis, we can hopefully find more sales and save our literary publishing. Remember it's just one book, that's all it takes to save us. Please do it now.

With my best wishes to everyone
Chris
Director
Salt Publishing
http://www.saltpublishing.com

It would be a great loss to UK poetry if Salt were to fold. I've just ordered a copy of Tim Dooley's Keeping Time, and would urge anyone who reads and values contemporary poetry to buy a title or two from their list - I'd recommend Rob A Mackenzie's The Opposite of Cabbage and Mark Waldron's The Brand New Dark, my reviews of which are forthcoming in Magma and the TLS respectively.

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A Poem a Week

I just noticed on poet Carrie Etter's blog that Oxford Brookes have set up a weekly poem service as part of their Poetry Centre webpage.

If you sign up, you'll be emailed a poem each week by a poet published by one of the following presses: Anvil, Arc Publications, Cinnamon, Enitharmon, Heaventree, Landfill, O’Brien, Oversteps Books, Peterloo Poets, Salt Publishing, Seren Books, and tall-lighthouse.

Looks like an interesting initiative that'll be worth following.

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New Irish Poetry

Just a snippet of news in the form of my review of Barbara Smith's Kairos and Fred Johnston's The Oracle Room appearing on Eyewear.

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By Way Of An Update

A few things have appeared online and dropped through the letterbox of late.

The first is the new issue of Magma, No.40, which is edited by Roddy Lumsden and one of the strongest and most exciting to date. Its focus, quite accidentally down to the 'fine poems starting to appear from so many young writers' received in submission for the issue, is on young poets, featuring an interview with the likes of Foyles Young Poet of the Year winner Richard O'Brien and tall-lighthouse poet Jay Bernard, as well as poems from a wide range of impressive young writers, and more established talents such as Ros Barber, Claire Crowther and Sarah Wardle.

It's well worth a read, with particular highlights including Mark Waldron's 'I called the plumber...' (that rare beast: the successful funny poem) and Tony Williams's richly descriptive 'Argument About the Definition of Red'. And Eloise Stonborough, a young Oxford poet and blogger, has an excellent piece, 'Jet Lag', in deft rhyming couplets. There's also Nick Laird's poem-homage to Louis MacNeice, and book reviews by Rob Mackenzie and Katy Evans Bush.

In fact, I've a spare copy of the issue for a lucky reader, but there's a catch. I need a good, new poem to feature next month on the Facebook Poetry Group: the growing, global gathering for poets ranging from high school students to professional prize-winning writers, founded by Canadian London-based poet Todd Swift.

Group is here: http://shef.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2416793140

So if you're a poet with, say, a few magazine appearances or any prizes / other successes under your belt, send me a poem and bio info to my email address (on my profile page) and I'll post the issue out to you as payment for featuring the poem, if selected.

In other news, my critical perspective of Maurice Riordan's work, Faber poet and editor of Poetry London, is now up on the British Council's Contemporary Writers site.

More about → By Way Of An Update

Orbis, the TLS, and Poems For Our Times

First things first: Happy New Year to all Wasteland readers. Having spent the festive period in my hometown in the Midlands, I returned to Sheffield on a cold and quite miserable day, mercifully avoiding the cancellations that affected a fair number of journeys. And though its always nice to come home, I was a tad disappointed to find that the Royal Mail had somehow lost the copy of Jay Bernard’s first book, your sign is cuckoo, girl, I ordered, which was sent to me by the publishers, Tall Lighthouse, some weeks ago. Lost, or it’s journeying to me via the most circuitous postal route imaginable. I suppose I shouldn’t have wishfully thought it would be here in the first place, and should just be thankful that I've plenty of other stuff to be reading in the meantime (Jamie McKendrick’s new collection Crocodiles and Obelisks, Pascale Petit’s The Zoo Father, and Terry Eagleton’s engaging prose work, After Theory).

What did turn up, however, was the latest issue of international literary journal, Orbis. It’s a good issue, too, containing, amongst other things, some excellent poems from John Moran, Tammy Ho Lai-ming, Sophie Logan, Desmond Graham, and an interesting review of Peter Abbs’s Selected Poems by Surroundings blogger and poet, Rob Mackenzie. Though what’s best about Orbis in general, and worth the subscription, is its Lines on Lines pages: comments and discussions provided by the mag’s readers and contributors, making for much more than a letters page and giving Orbis the feel of a welcoming forum on all things literary. It’s something other poetry magazines would do well to emulate. There’s even a sort of competition in each issue, whereby readers vote via post or email for their four favourite contributor pieces, and the poem or story receiving the most votes wins a prize of £50 (plus the encouraging knowledge that their work is not only being published and read, but also enjoyed). It might be a little self-defeatist given I’ve got a poem in the issue, but I think a few of the poems are particularly good, so I’ll make my votes in the near future.

Other news comes in the form of another poem appearing in the TLS in the near future, and a phonecall I got before Christmas from the Off the Shelf literary festival organisers, telling me I’d won their ‘Poems For Our Times’ competition. I’m particularly chuffed as it was judged by T.S. Eliot prize-winning poet George Szirtes, whose extensive and thoughtful blog (which puts my bit of wasteland to shame) can be found here.

More about → Orbis, the TLS, and Poems For Our Times

As Bad as a Mile

It's been a long time since I posted on Deconstructive Wasteland, and it's largely (if not entirely) to do with my complete lack of internet connection. But now I've started studying on the Writing MA at Sheffield Hallam I have access to their ample IT facilities, so I can do more than check emails while perched on a stool in a charging internet cafe. Hence this brief post.

If you're reading this, then, thanks for returning after a month of complete inactivity. This week, two things I've written have appeared online: first, a review of Tim Turnbull's collection, Stranded in Sub-Atomica, is up on Todd Swift's blog Eyewear, and second, my choice for poem of the month at the Philip Larkin Society's site is up, 'As Bad as a Mile'. Aside from that, I'm loving being back in Sheffield, and amid sorting out everything in my new place I've started writing critical perspectives of contemporary authors for the British Council, the first of which will be on Nick Laird, at their indispensible and comprehensive site, Contemporary Writers. Do check it out, as well as the stuff I mentioned above, if you get the chance. That way, if I've said anything that you find completely disagreeable, you can post a comment here and put me in my place. If you're the guy who sent that nonsense about Calvin Harris being a talented musician when I posted to the contrary a few months back, however, you might not want to bother.

In the meantime, I hope to post again soon. And catch up with what's happening on the other blogs I regularly read, most of which can be found in the sidebar. Happy writing.

More about → As Bad as a Mile

Deconstructive Wasteland is one!

I didn't notice until recently, but it turns out that I've been posting on Deconstructive Wasteland for a year now; a total of about fifty-something posts, I think, which obviously averages out to one a week. Not as shabby as I'd anticipated, anyway.

So thanks to all of you who regularly read the posts, and especially to those who post comments and spark off interesting discussions, as well as introducing me to writers and musicians I would perhaps otherwise never come across. Your comments and the hits that sitemeter logs spur me on in continuing to fill this corner of the internet with my thoughts on various things literary and musical. And if nothing else, exploring and being a small part of the blogosphere dispelled all concerns and negative media-fed preconceptions I had about the place - as with most things online, if you fish around enough, you find the good stuff sooner or later.

Here's to another year's blogging, then: who knows, I might even get my act together and post with increased regularity!

More about → Deconstructive Wasteland is one!