SINCE by IAN PARKS

THE SECRETS OF THE SEA by Nicholas Murray

Both collections can be ordered using the Buy Now Button.

£5.00 each, delivery post free.

Praise for Black and Blue, by Cathy Galvin:

The novelist David Almond writes,


"...the book is wonderful. So beautiful and moving. I feel so many connections between your work and mine - family, grief, childhood, angels, birds, the language and structures of Catholicism. The impulse to make sense of our catholic heritage and our childhoods, to deal with them honestly, to make a language that can work as art, to turn our family stories into things of beauty. Black and Blue is a gorgeous sacramental thing... 



BLACK and BLUE: a sequence of sonnets

Cathy Galvin's emotionally stunning first collection of poems

Cathy Galvin has roots in Coventry, West Yorkshire and

Connemara: she now lives in London. A journalist, her work has appeared

in many national and international journals.

She co-founded the Sunday Times-EFG Short Story Award

and is an associate editor of the Warwick Review.

She edited Red, the Waterstone's anthology of new writing

and is director and founder of the UK's leading promoter

of short fiction writing, The Word Factory.

Praise for Black and Blue:

"A crown of sonnets seems at first an intractable

and even intimidating prospect. When a writer

confidently inhabits its space, its spaces within

spaces, the crown becomes an arena of grace.

Cathy Galvin's Black and Blue is such a performance.

Her sequence moves brilliantly through and over

those spaces with drama, immediacy and power."

    

David Morley

You can order for £5.00, post free, by selecting 'Black and Blue' on the BUY NOW button opposite

     

Voice of America

Very interesting and sensitive reading by Dennis Morton of some poems from Nicholas Murray's Of earth, water, air and fire on the US radio station KUSP in Santa Cruz. Here's the link: http://blogs.kusp.org/poetryshow/2014/01/22/selected-readings-and-recordings/

 Pelican

We know, and you know,

who's Boss and numero uno:

the guy who swaggers,

who Mick Jaggers.

Look at that bald coot.
hardly visible in the shoot;

hasn't a chance to shine,

to speak even one line,

pecking the dirt

in his black shirt,
while you just gloat

over that great pink throat,

and the enormous beak

which is the peak

attraction, igniting sparks

in the Royal Parks.

  

Like an 'S' hook
we follow the crook

of your distinctive shape

from webbed feet to nape

and that sexy tuft's

the sort of thing that Cruft's

would reward in a poodle.

You're a child's doodle.

This poem, Pelican, is from Nicholas Murray's new collection of funny, enchanting and moving poems about animals. Some were read at this year's Ledbury Poetry Festival to great acclaim.
Melos will be featuring the book and others at the Poetry Book Fair in September.
 
 


 

Acapulco: New and Selected Poems by Nicholas Murray


Nicholas Murray was born in Liverpool and now lives in
Wales and London. He has written critically acclaimed
biographies of Bruce Chatwin, Matthew Arnold,
Andrew Marvell, Aldous Huxley, and Franz Kafka.
He has also published two novels, A Short Book about Love, and Remembering Carmen, and books on Victorian travellers, Liverpool and Bloomsbury. He runs the poetry imprint Rack Press and is a Fellow of the Welsh Academy.
Acapulco contains nearly thirty new poems and work
drawn from the earlier collections, Plausible Fictions and The Narrators. It concludes with the full text of Get Real!
a powerful verse satire on the coalition Government
which was performed by the Iris Theatre Company
at St Paul's Covent Garden in 2011.

Praise for Nicholas Murray's poetry:

“From the opening lines of 'Landscapes' we are in the company of a voice that quietly but compellingly makes itself heard... Throughout these poems, shadows, absences,and possibilities stalk the tyranny of mere fact...”

David Wheatley, Thumbscrew

“Precise and rather mysterious poems”

John Fuller

“...his clear sense of internal rhythm and strong feeling for the well-honed phrase”

Sarah Crown, The Guardian

William Palmer's poems have appeared in many magazines but this is his first full-length collection. In 2006 it was awarded the Collection Prize at the Listowel Writers' Festival. A pamphlet of his work, An Instruction from Madame S, was published by Rack press in 2009.

He is the author of six novels, the most recent being The India House (Jonathan Cape, 2005). A new novel, The Devil is White, will be published by Cape early in 2013.

In 1997 he was awarded a Travelling Scholarship by the Society of Authors. Since 1998 he has taught creative writing at various institutions and has been a Writing Fellow at the Universities of Birmingham and Warwick, and King's College, London.

He reviews regularly for The Independent and Literary Review.


Praise for William Palmer's poetry

There is...a generosity of perception, language and melody (read him aloud), but he is also generous in his poems' precision and economy. William Palmer's poetry never excludes readers but it does challenge them at the same time as it charms them. he is one of our most interesting poets, and his work in The Island Rescue is a complete delight.

David Morley