All our books are distributed worldwide by the Wales Books Council and are available here; or you can order below with free p. and p. for UK addresses.
Shouting in the Tunnel is a collection of explicitly political poems, written to bring us together, to express our anger at poverty and injustice, and to inspire us to action. Itis a vivid commentary on today’s world, but throughout it carries a message of hope.
'Airtins' means directions: in these poems, Hershaw re-imagines the moral guidance in Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching, applying a similar outlook to the modern problems of poverty, inequality and wars. Hershaw uses the vivid, demotic cadences of the Scots language to express a vision of a practical, green and spiritual socialism.
This the fourth book in a series of anthologies of radical poetry from contemporary Wales, protesting and grieving austerity at home and wars abroad. The poems point to the need for a sense of the common good, and solidarity and empathy, rather than neoliberal egoism and greed - we not me, us not I.
Young Roundhead Jared Amory relays the story of his childhood friend, Gideon Wade, who early in the English Revolution deserts the Royalist cause, which he had felt...
In a series of imaginative, insightful poems, many of them beautifully illustrated with woodcut drawings by Ignacia Ruiz, Fran Lock explores the developing love between Mary Magdalene and Jesus, its relationship to Jesus’ liberating call for personal and political transformation, and the way it continues to challenge, comfort and inspire us with the ‘love that is stronger than death’.
An Anthology in Solidarity with the People of Palestine, ISBN 978191270782
Since the start of the genocidal war by Israel against the Palestinian people, poems have flooded in to Culture Matters. We have published many of them online, to show our solidarity with the Palestinians and the huge numbers of people in Britain and across the world who have marched in protest against the murderous nature and horrifically disproportionate scale of the Israeli offensive. We have marched to the now familiar chant from which this book gets part of its title.
Now that there is a glimmer of hope that peace, however fragile and precarious, is beginning to break out, we have put together another kind of march of solidarity: an anthology of poems from 70 poets. Some are already on the site, but most of them are new poems. They vary in tone, style and message, but are all great examples of successful political poems – skilful and eloquent expressions of protest, anger, sadness, compassion and a burning desire for justice and peace. As Michael Rosen says:
This is poetry in the face of horror. It's a poetry that investigates how it is we live in a world in which there is a shocking contrast: the normality of living here and the beyond-cruel normality of the mass killing in Gaza. While others have stayed silent, it's a poetry that is not afraid to speak.
The book is available as a pdf, We Are All Palestinians. It is free to download, but you are invited to make a donation of £5 via our Support page. A printed book can also be ordered for £12 inc. p. and p. for UK addresses, or £12 plus £4 p. and p. for EU and worldwide addresses. Please pay via the Support page and email us at books@culturematters.org.uk with your address details.
After production costs have been met, all money received will be given to the Medical Aid for Palestinians charity, to help build an effective, sustainable and locally led healthcare system for Palestinians.
It's an unsettling poetic riff on the 1963 film The Haunting, and the book that inspired it, The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, McCann’s poems traffic in the uncanny and the unsaid, merging moments from across the house’s long and morbid history into a single, though unstable, present. Just as Jackson’s novel is a story of frustrated passions and repressed pain, McCann’s poems also deal in the missing, the buried, the deliberately obscured.
This book is now available as a pamphlet, ISBN 978-1-912710-58-4.
Farid Bitar's Testament / Sajél, as its title suggests, is a testament to our tempestuous times, taking in the seismic events and vicissitudes of the past few years, including the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020-22, and the Black Lives Matter movement in response to the death of George Floyd. But perhaps unsurprisingly, the current and agonisingly ongoing Israeli seige of Gaza, and mass displacement of Gazans, which some term the second Palestinian catastrophe or Nakba, dominates this collection.
On the 40th anniversary of the 1984/5 Miners’ Strike, William Hershaw has used the series of Christian images of the Stations of the Cross (Christ’s journey to his crucifixion) as a imaginative framework for a series of poems about the Strike, and particularly the Battle of Orgreave on the18th June, 1984.
In 21 pieces about a variety of urban and rural locations in England, Scotland and Wales, Charlie Hill takes us on a tour of post-industrial Britain. From escaping to the Highlands during the pandemic to a trip to a Soho boozer, from camping in a church in Herefordshire to playing football in inner-city Birmingham, from feeling twitchy in a Gwynedd resort town to a run-in with the builders of HS2, This Albion draws on the theories of the Situationists and the writing of Mark Fisher to create an original and accessible snapshot of a society divided and brought together by geography and class.
Charlie Hill has been longlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story prize 2024.
This Albion: Snapshots of a Compromised Land, by Charlie Hill, ISBN 9781912710744
The anthology is a selection of poems submitted for the sixth Bread and Roses Poetry Award 2024. It includes the five winners of the Award and the poems cover a variety of themes relevant to working-class life, experience, history and culture. What unites them is an often playful, yet deeply considered engagement with language, and a fresh focus on the particularities of working-class life. Above all else, the poems are bound together by a generous expression of solidarity with the most vulnerable amongst us.
The Role of the Artist under Late Capitalism: the Bread and Roses Poetry Award Anthology 2024, ISBN: 9781912710722
This is a trilogy of republished books by 2023 T. S. Eliot Prize-shortlisted poet Fran Lock, containing Muses and Bruises, Ruses and Fuses, and Raptures and Captures. With its new Introduction and refreshed introductions to all the books, it is an important retrospective collection by one of our most original poets, a rich, eloquent, dense and raging book that is vulnerable, fierce and wise.
In this compelling collection, Paul Brookes takes you to the ordinary spaces where lives intersect—shop floors, queues, fleeting conversations—and reveals the deep currents of humanity running beneath them. The poems, rooted in the disquiet of pandemic-era experience, are marked by a patient wisdom and tenderness: an understanding that truth often resides not in grand gestures, but in the smallest exchanges—a damaged loaf, a nervous question, a moment of distance or closeness.
ISBN: 978-1-918132-02-1, 82 pps., £10 inc. p. and p.
'Snollygosters' - shrewd, unprincipled persons like Trump, Starmer and Netanyahu - have dragged politics into the mire of illegal wars and genocide. Norris deploys scatological imagery and technical brilliance in metre and rhyme, illustrated by Martin Gollan's satirical cartoons. They forcefully make the point that the Labour Party is at the point of extinction without a radical return to socialism.
ISBN: 978-1-912710-38-6, 6 colour illustrations, 113 pps, £12 inc. p. and p.
From the Rhondda to the Black Country this exceptionally evocative poetry of two places reminds us of the working conditions our ancestors endured, of the industrial disasters that blighted lives, and the importance of kinship and community. Highly relevant and highly readable.
ISBN: 978-1-918132-04-5, 40pps., £10 inc. p. and p.
These poems confront a loss: the fading dream of a collective bright future that once sustained working-class life. They evoke quiet resilience and solidarity, lingering in the after-hours of a broken and beleagured country that still has the capacity to remake itself.
ISBN: 9781912710997, 68pps., 10 colour images, £12 inc. p. and p. for UK addresses, £12 plus £5 p. and p. for worldwide addresses.
In a series of deeply empathic, figurative vignettes, Price bears distant witness to some of the countless harrowing episodes in the genocide visited on Gaza by Israel's far right regime over the past two years.
ISBN 978-1-912710-98-0, 24pps, £8 inc. p. and p.
This is Mike Jenkins' latest collection of direct and visceral verse from the Valleys, with anguished poems of witness to the ongoing ethnic cleansing by Israel in Gaza; poems exploring history, protest and rebellion in Cymru, Ireland and across the world; and poems from the margins of society, from the broken, the downtrodden and dispossessed voices of modern times.
ISBN: 978-1-912710-88-1, 64 pps, £10 inc. p. and p.
Shouting in the Tunnel is a collection of explicitly political poems, written to bring us together, to express our anger at poverty and injustice, and to inspire us to action. Itis a vivid commentary on today’s world, but throughout it carries a message of hope.
'Airtins' means directions: in these poems, Hershaw re-imagines the moral guidance in Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching, applying a similar outlook to the modern problems of poverty, inequality and wars. Hershaw uses the vivid, demotic cadences of the Scots language to express a vision of a practical, green and spiritual socialism.
This the fourth book in a series of anthologies of radical poetry from contemporary Wales, protesting and grieving austerity at home and wars abroad. The poems point to the need for a sense of the common good, and solidarity and empathy, rather than neoliberal egoism and greed - we not me, us not I.
This the fourth book in a series of anthologies of radical poetry from contemporary Wales, protesting and grieving austerity at home and wars abroad. The poems point to the need for a sense of the common good, and solidarity and empathy, rather than neoliberal egoism and greed - we not me, us not I.
Young Roundhead Jared Amory relays the story of his childhood friend, Gideon Wade, who early in the English Revolution deserts the Royalist cause, which he had felt...
Young Roundhead Jared Amory relays the story of his childhood friend, Gideon Wade, who early in the English Revolution deserts the Royalist cause, which he had felt...
In this new collection of poems and images, Sam Kemp vividly memorialises the struggles at 'Fortress Wapping' in 1986, when 5000 print and clerical workers went on strike against Murdoch's News International.
In this new collection of poems and images, Sam Kemp vividly memorialises the struggles at 'Fortress Wapping' in 1986, when 5000 print and clerical workers went on strike against Murdoch's News International.
A flash e-anthology of poems in opposition to the Pathways to Work Green Paper, featuring poems by Ruby Bartlett, Brian Beamish, Rachel Burns, Jack Clarke, Alan Dent, Peter Devonald, Owen Gallagher, Declan Geraghty, Oz Hardwick, Bruce Harris, Tom Kelly, Fran Lock, Rupert Loydell, Steve Mann, Sarah Mayo, Christopher Moncrieff, Alan Morrison, Nick Moss, James O’Brien, Robert Punton, Peter Raynard, Sally Richards, Ness Sadri, A.P. Staunton, Steven Taylor, Peter Thompson, Nuala Watt and Wendy Young.
A free download of the book is available HERE.
Release the Sausages! is an anthology of poems, with absolutely no poems in it. It is a celebration of the first twelve months of Keir Starmer’s government - a monument to the towering contribution to socialist thought of Sir Keir Starmer KCB QC, and his decisive, principled and unifying part in the proud history of the British Labour Movement. And it is a moving tribute to his moral integrity and irresistible charisma, warmth and wit.
Release the Sausages! is £5 inc. p. and p. for a printed copy, with 20 blank pages for you to write your own poems in praise of Sir Keir.
Release the Sausages! is an anthology of poems, with absolutely no poems in it. It is a celebration of the first twelve months of Keir Starmer’s government - a monument to the towering contribution to socialist thought of Sir Keir Starmer KCB QC, and his decisive, principled and unifying part in the proud history of the British Labour Movement. And it is a moving tribute to his moral integrity and irresistible charisma, warmth and wit.
WaitingfortheLight is a collection of short stories exploring the unex- pected moral and ethical uncertainties in almost every human endeav- our. They follow the tradition of the cautionary tale. A photographer renowned for his images of war can only attempt landscape pictures after one assignment. He believes his obsession with capturing the aftermath of a massacre meant he left a baby to die. She was still alive when he took her picture but he did nothing to save her.
These stories were written very occasionally and published at various times over the last several years. The last, ‘Poetic Justice’, was the first to be written, in the days when we still sent letters and used landlines. It shouldn’t be taken too seriously. People who write in hope to little magazines will know what it is about, but would a successful young male poet really behave like that? Surely not.
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