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.
What makes people change their mind and their behaviour? It happens all the time, often in small but significant ways. In his first collection of short stories, Dermot Foster deftly brings out the variety and subtlety of the ‘turning points’ in our lives.
The stories are marked by vivid characterisation, fluent dialogue and mature psychological insights into the politics of personal relationships. We hope they raise awareness of turning points in your own life, and the lives of the people around you, and we hope they inspire you to making personal and political changes.
Turning Points by Dermot Foster, ISBN 9781912710607
Red in tooth and claw: that is one way of characterising nature, but by no means the only way. Dog eat dog: that is one way of characterising the culture of our conflicted species, but again not the only way.
The poems in Sapling & Wood explore aspects of nature and culture from the standpoint of the poet’s own experience, aided by relatives and friends, and by other authors, notably William Blake and Walt Whitman.
Illustrations from a variety of sources, including friends’ artwork, enliven the text, and a prose commentary by the poet preambles each of the four sections into which the book is divided, namely “Kith”, “Kin”, “Enmities & Reconciling”, and “Word Over All”.
Here is a sample poem from the collection:
Peter Raynard’s heroic crown of sonnets after William Hogarth’s (1697–1764) of A Harlot’s Progress (1731) and A Rake’s Progress (1733) runs the same gamut of moral and social concerns but bring a contemporary socialist sensibility to bear on the interconnected fates of Tom Rakewell and Moll Hackabout. Raynard uses the connected but very different downfalls of Tom and Moll to interrogate the complexities of ‘choice’, the notion of complicity and the limits of our sympathy. Do we pity Tom Rakewell, now become a Tom O’ Bedlam, repenting in a madhouse? Do we pity Moll, beating rope in Bridewell Prison? Or dead in ‘the cold dark ground where a pauper’s/ place may be found’? What seems telling is that Moll is bereft of even sincere mourners, punished, as Raynard writes for ‘a simple dream to simply exist’ with only her madam upset by her passing.
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.
Shooting to Kill, the second poetry collection by ex-con poet Nick Moss following the Koestler Award-winning poems of Swear Down (Smokestack Books, 2021), is a fine example of poetry as resistance. The book confronts state violence and terrorism in the UK, and in the Middle East, and gives vital voice to their victims. Poems depicting the gritty reality of domestic prison life are juxtaposed with devastatingly powerful poems of horrified document on the ongoing carnage in the carpet-bombed open prison that is the Gaza Strip (or what's left of it).
The more polemical poems are interspersed with excerpts from speeches and articles, the platitudes and icy rhetoric of politicians, that jostle for dominance of traumatic narrative. Shooting to Kill is political poetry at its most relevant, powerful and uncompromising.
Shooting to Kill, Poems by Nick Moss, ISBN9781912710713
In the summer of 2024, Culture Matters put out a call for poetry and artwork related to Donald Trump and Trumpism. Taking the title from WB Yeats’ ‘Second Coming’, the resulting anthology explores the havoc that a second term would unleash on the US and the wider world. With unjust policies, the demonisation of migrants and people of colour, and attacking anyone that tries to hold his feet to the fire, Trump and Trumpism are mistakes that the US cannot afford to make a second time round.
£14.00
£8.00
£10.00
£12.00
